Seeking Alpha and The Space Review respond to the recent BASIC announcement.
Says Seeking Alpha,“I think that it?s obvious from where I stand that the government doesn?t need to launch two of their own satellites to compete with what is already available. …
As far as we are concerned as stockholders,even if this program is approved next year and satellites are launched by early 2013,it does not affect our current investment thesis with shares of GeoEye,especially now that GeoEye-1 has successfully launched,and is almost ready to start taking usable imagery.”
The Space Review says we hoped for more from commercial imagery companies. “There was never any real possibility that,by the end of this decade,dozens of privately-owned spy satellites would be orbiting the Earth selling their pictures commercially while exposing human rights violations and helping to send polluters and other environmental criminals to jail.
Instead,we have a modest number of highly sophisticated spacecraft and a slightly larger number of relatively simple ones,mostly devoted to governmental purposes,above all military.”