ABSTRACT
The United States again had access to denied territory, providing insight and an ultimate advantage over our adversaries. In 1995, Vice President Gore stated the CORONA satellites, recorded much more than the landscape of the Cold War. In the process of acquiring this priceless data, people recorded for future generations the environmental history of the Earth at least a decade before any country on this Earth launched any Earth resource satellites. Over the course of the next 50 years, there was a halting and gradual shift of that capability from the government to the commercial sector. Dr Josef Koller, a global security and space science programme expert, believes, “technology trends are accelerating and there are indications that a sixth wave of innovation is coming”. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also being used to protect and improve the environment in the form of monitoring endangered species, tracking diseases and optimizing crops.
