SATELLITE IMAGING of the EARTH in the 90-ties

Hi,
I used to be involved with satellite imaging of the Earth, or more precisely with satellite imaging applications. My travel to this fascinating area of expertise begun, when I met Roman Pryjomko, PADCO: Planning and Development Collaborative International (Washington based) company, in 1993 year.

http://afghanistan.usaid.gov/en/Partner.7.aspx

I was at this time Plenipotentiary of the Mayor of Gdansk for EUROCITIES and together with my close friend Jan Szczygielski, Surveyor of the City of Gdansk, we have started to implement Land Information System of the City of Gdansk.

We had a problem of finding exact and recent information source to update inventory of land and buildings of the City and it could only be either aerial or satellite photo of the City. We wanted to take aerial photos of the City by Belgian EUROSENSE company, but the Department of the Civil Aviation of our Ministry rejected our request for permission for flight for EUROSENSE airplain - you know we were still under Russian "ocupation", at least their military forces were stationing in Poland in lot of places - and our "quasi government" had nothing to say about it - because it was not independent at this time.
Therefore - we didn't get the approval for flight of the foreign aiplane over our territory (Orwell's World by the way...)
Then Roman Pryjomko proposed, that we buy satellite image of Gdansk directly from Russian Military Intelligence archives (!!!) since PADCO just have formed JV (Joint Venture) with Russian company called KIBERSO and they were jointly willing to promote and sell former Russian spy satellite photos throuout the world !
Sounded really like a hype, initially, but imagine, how did we feel, flying to Moscow, after a short phone conversation, permission of our Mayor, Franciszek Jamroz, and with 10 000 $ in our pockets !
It all have been the truth. We came back from Moscow with QIC-80 Jumbo Streamer tape, with 485 MB TIFF file, having 2 meters resolution (Very High Resolution) satellite image of Gdansk taken from Russian COSMOS KVR-1000 military surveillance satellite. Image on this photo was of fantastic quality. Through these contacts I have learned on formation of SPACE IMAGING company, in 1994. SPACE IMAGING worked on construction of first, commercial very high resolution satellite, which could distribute 1 meter resolution satellite photos of the Earth, available so far only to Russian and American Military Intelligence !
This is how my journey to Very High Resolution expertise begun.