Sustainable land imaging (SLI) business model study - landsat satellites and associated U.S. Government ground processing, distribution, and archiving systems have acquired and made available…

Sustainable land imaging (SLI) business model study - landsat satellites and associated U.S. Government ground processing, distribution, and archiving systems have acquired and made available global, moderate-resolution (15-120M), multispectral measurements of land and coastal regions, providing humankind s longest record of our planet from space. NASA and the U.S. Geological survey (USGS) of the department of the interior (DOI) fully recognize that this information is a national asset, providing an important and unique capability that benefits a broad community, including federal, state, and local governments; global change science, academia, and the private sector. Landsat data provide a consistent and reliable foundation for research on land use change, forest health, and carbon inventories, and changes to our environment, climate, and natural resources. Additionally landsat data is free and openly available to users both inside and outside of the government. The USGS currently operates two government-owned satellites, landsats-7 and -8, both developed by NASA for USGS. To further inform agencies as to the potential future implementations within the SLI program, a study contract with multiple potential awards will be issued to investigate potential business models for system acquisition. The NASA sustainable land imaging (SLI) office is investigating the potential use of innovative business models to reduce the costs of future land imaging missions. The 2014 architecture study by the SLI architecture study team (AST) provided some aggregated evidence that satellites developed for commercial enterprises and satellites developed under NASA contracts tended to have comparable overall reliability. The study also provided some evidence that comparable commercial satellites tended to be lower in cost than government sponsored satellites. This study is motivated by these preliminary findings to explore their veracity and consider the implications for SLI space system development. This study focuses primarily on the development/acquisition of spacecraft buses and related services; some aspects of the study also involve consideration of observatory integration and test, launch, ground systems, and mission operations. For this study, IT is presumed that the government will acquire science payload instruments independently from acquisition of the spacecraft bus, either via direct contract to industry or by in-house development at a NASA center, and then provide them to the spacecraft bus developer for integration onto the observatory; instrument development/acquisition is not a focus of this study.