Eye on Iraq: local firm captures satellite images of war.

• Author: Schwab, Robert

Mike Martinez, standing in the darkened flight operations room of Space Imaging, has the physique of the special ops soldiers you see nowadays in Iraq. He's introduced as the man on whose shoulders rests the future of his company.

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"I manage a group of satellite engineers who are responsible for maintaining the health and safety of the satellite," Martinez says. Unmarried and just turned 40, Martinez says, "I call her 'My little girl." His little girl is a 6-foot-tall, 1,600-pound IKONOS satellite that circles the earth every 98 minutes at 17,000 miles per hour, 423 miles high. It is Space Imaging's sole collector of high-resolution satellite images, the company's premier product, and it is the camera that has produced most of the satellite pictures that Americans have seen on television during the Iraq war. Those images are not, however, likely to be used by the military, although they could be.

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Space Imaging's product is purely commercial. It's for sale to most businesses and government agencies around the world, although it is subject to restrictions that prevent U.S. companies from exporting products to certain banned governments and individuals.

Based in Thornton, in north metro Denver, Space Imaging is less than a full decade old--it was spun off from Lockheed Martin in 1994--yet it is a company that regularly fields inquiries from the world press and steps up to the world stage when catastrophic events are at hand: the disintegration of space shuttle Columbia, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Iraq war, statewide wildfires and regional drought.

That's because Martinez's little girl is able to take pictures from on high with a resolution of one meter, meaning it can distinguish objects on the ground as small as three feet high or wide.

Space Imaging and Longmont-based Digital Globe are the only commercial high-resolution, remote-sensing companies in the nation, and two of the three in the world, although Space Imaging spokesman Gary Napier said a third U.S. company out of Virginia will soon join the nascent industry.

Early last month, while a battle for Baghdad loomed, Space Imaging released a series of spectacular shots of the city that showed bomb- and missile-damaged presidential palaces, broken bridges and burning oil trenches, a stage set for the end of Saddam Hussein's brutal regime. After tracking the debris field of the shuttle Columbia in February...