Google was ten years old last week, born on September 7, 1998 with the need to deposit an angel investor’s check made out to the then non-existent company for $100,000. The company actually
celebrates its birthday on a different day every year – when it is convenient for the majority – at The Googleplex in Mountain View, CA.
The name Google is a derivative of the word googol, coined by Milton Sirotta. Milton was a nephew of
Edward Kasner, a famed mathematician, and googol refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes, 10
99 in our engineering terms.
The search utility that Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed in their Stanford dorm was originally called BackRub (looking at back-links on web sites) and it was somewhat amazing that they were able to collaborate with one another. Larry was a graduate of the University of Michigan, and Sergey had been instructed to show him around the Stanford campus during a visit. They apparently disagreed and argued with one another on multiple issues. Even after the development was completed, they hadn’t wanted to form their own company, but none of the existing portals was interested in buying or using what they had achieved… No doubt there are still a lot of what-ifs being spoken by some of those corporate executives.
Almost to the day of the anniversary, on September 6, 2008, the founding pair were at Vandenberg Air Force Base to witness the launch of a satellite with a large Google logo prominently on it.
It isn’t Google’s satellite, but there is a certain exclusivity to it.
GeoEye contracted the satellite from a division of General Dynamics with
ITT providing the imaging systems. The satellite was launched on a
Delta II rocket, and early telemetry from a station in Norway confirmed both separation and successful communications.
GeoEye-1 will operate from 423 miles (677 km) above the Earth’s surface, traveling at a speed of about 16,200 mph (4.5 miles per second: 26,000 km/hr). With the latest in stabilizing platforms the images are, of course, military property first and foremost. We don’t know – and certainly we are not going to be told – what the best military space imagers can achieve, but for $502 M (the highly-classified
US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency provided a bunch of that money) GeoEye-1 will offer the US Government monochrome images with a resolution of 0.41 m (16 inches) and, simultaneously, color images with a resolution of 1.65 m (5.5 feet). Those fit in well with current government rules that say commercial images cannot be made public with better than 0.5 m (19.5 inches) of resolution.
Testing and calibration of the bird should take place in a few weeks and the first higher resolution images should start to appear on Google Earth within 3 months. With the NGA screening the images, however, you can be sure that sensitive areas of the globe – like the Green Zone in Baghdad – will appear really fuzzy.
Anyone can buy the GeoEye images, but commercial exploitation on the web is contractually limited to Google. Even after 10 years, Google manages to find another way to stick it to Microsoft and Yahoo. And why the heck not? Some people just keep asking for it…
