GeoEye-1 Earth-Imaging Satellite Launch Preps

10 July 2008, 6:53pm

DULLES, Va., July 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- GeoEye, Inc. (NASDAQ: GEOY), a premier provider of satellite, aerial and geospatial information, announced today that its GeoEye-1 satellite safely arrived at Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB), California, in preparation for its scheduled launch on Aug. 22, 2008.
The 4,300-pound satellite was transported by GeoEye's prime contractor, General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems from its manufacturing facility in Gilbert, Ariz. to VAFB.

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Bill Schuster, GeoEye's chief operating officer said, "Our launch next month marks the culmination of a great deal of dedication by an extraordinarily talented team. We will soon be able to make available to the U.S. Government and others worldwide the best quality commercial imagery on the market.
GeoEye-1, once launched and operational, will further demonstrate the viability of the commercial imagery industry and our ability to provide our key customers the imagery needed to meet critical mission requirements."

"Our Gilbert team has worked diligently with GeoEye to prepare GeoEye-1 for service, and it is rewarding to see these efforts coming to fruition," said David Shingledecker, vice president and general manager of Integrated Space Systems, General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems. "We look forward to leveraging the successful capabilities of this system in future developments for GeoEye and other government customers."

GeoEye-1 will have the highest resolution of any commercial imaging system -- 0.41-meters or 16 inches for panchromatic (black and white) imagery and multispectral (color) imagery at 1.65-meter resolution. However, due to U.S. Government licensing restrictions, commercial customers will have access to imagery at half-meter ground resolution. The satellite is designed to offer three-meter accuracy, which means that end users can map natural and man-made features to within three meters of their actual locations on the surface of the Earth without ground control points. GeoEye-1 was financed in part by GeoEye's approximate $500-million contract with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).

"The three specifications the NGA desires most are spatial resolution, geolocation accuracy and large-area coverage," said Cyndi Wright, NGA's NextView program manager. "As a mission partner, we believe GeoEye-1 will fulfill these requirements for NGA by providing highly accurate, extremely detailed Earth imagery for broad area coverage and updating geospatial
foundational layers and mapping databases."

The main command and control facility for GeoEye-1 is at the company's headquarters in Dulles, Virginia. A back-up command and control site is located at the company's operations site in Thornton, Colorado near Denver.

Three other ground stations will be operated or leased by GeoEye in Alaska, Norway and Antarctica for a total of four key ground stations. GeoEye will need multiple sources for primary data reception since the combined daily collection capacity for both the IKONOS and GeoEye-1 satellites will be nearly one million square kilometers. This also allows GeoEye-1 to be in contact with a station about 40 times each day to receive commands and offload the imagery collected on previous orbits.

For more information about the launch of the GeoEye-1 satellite on August 22,
2008, please visit:

http://launch.geoeye.com/.

To receive timely, ongoing details about the development of GeoEye-1 products and services, sign up at

http://launch.geoeye.com/LaunchSite/news/signup.aspx.

GeoEye-1 Launch Information

GeoEye, Inc.

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