ABSTRACT

The power of the distant perspective on the planet has been proven over and over again since the first photographs of the Earth from space were taken and spread across the globe. With the advent of satellite remote sensing the possibilities of layered and detailed information about the Earth increased, and nations and organizations strived to access both the technology and the subsequent data. These endeavours were in no way without interest in the resources, which in this way could be discovered and developed. On the contrary, some were explicitly aimed at making extraction possible. In other cases, the resource interest was more entangled, stressing the monitoring side of the practise in order to plan for crops or to avoid draughts or other catastrophes.

This chapter takes the remote sensing system SPOT – a French–Swedish–Belgian collaboration with the first launch in 1986 – to illustrate how resource interests were grouped and sorted through the means of this planetary technology.