Two cameras on the Russian part of the International Space Station — named Theia and Iris — are available to hire for “space-based video surveillance.”
The space station is generally viewed as a benign, multinational floating science lab: US astronaut Scott Kelly has been helping grow zinnias during his year-long stay and he conducted an interview with US entertainer Stephen Colbert this month.
However, there is more to the station than spacemen picking flowers.
E-mail traffic released by the European Commission revealed that a Canadian company pitched an idea to the EU’s beleaguered border agency to use Theia and Iris for border surveillance.
The company, called UrtheCast (pronounced “earth cast”), has a deal with the space station’s top Russian contractor and operates the two cameras with the help of the Russian space agency.
The UrtheCast solicitation was among a number of business proposals made to the EU’s border agency, Frontex, since 2013, aimed at helping Europe assess its increasingly porous borders. The proposals ranged from the mundane to the outlandish. Businesses offered drones, zeppelins, tethered balloons and a floating contraption tied to a truck with a rope.
Airbus, a giant military contractor, contacted Frontex last year about what it called a “floating frontier surveillance platform” that could be used to monitor “inland waterways and estuaries, lakes.”
A Massachusetts company wanted to sell “a field-deployable Rapid DNA Analysis System” to generate DNA profiles “in 84 minutes.”
A third company said it could create “algorithms to predict border crossings.”
However, the most otherworldly idea belonged to UrtheCast.
Its cameras, one for video and the other for still images, could be used for the “detection of borders activities,” UrtheCast said in an e-mail to Frontex.
UrtheCast said its cameras offered “an unprecedented capability for an integrated persistent space surveillance,” as well as what it called “extraction of situation awareness at certain regions, facilities or events.”
The space station was set up “for peaceful purposes” in 1998 by the US, Russia, Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency. Is there a spy satellite lurking in its rafters?
The UrtheCast solicitation said that the cameras could “help to provide reliable evidences on certain events without intruding” on neighboring countries’ air space with airplanes or drones.
UrtheCast is hardly alone. More than 30 companies have been involved in commercial projects with the station, but those are generally research. Merck has studied antibodies, for example, and a subsidiary of Puma has tested coatings for golf clubs.
A spokesman for Frontex said that the agency did not accept UrtheCast’s offer, which was made in 2013, the year the cameras were launched into space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Cosmonauts installed them the January after, though neither was fully operational for some time.
While it has been reported that the Russian space agency keeps all of the images taken of Russia, an UrtheCast executive, Jeff Rath, would not confirm or deny that in an interview. Nor would he provide details about his clients.
“We don’t talk about our customers,” Rath said.
“We’ll sell to governments, and we’ll sell to businesses,” he said, as well as to non-governmental organizations.
Pepsi and Heineken have used video from UrtheCast in commercials and the company has signed a five-year, US$65 million contract with an unnamed customer, according to Canadian securities filings.
One of its most recent filings said that “many government customers” needed satellite imagery “to supervise and manage, among other things, resources, animal migrations and national borders.”
A variety of customers used UrtheCast services “to track environmental changes, natural disasters and human conflicts,” the filing said.
“We’ve got very strong support from our ISS partners, NASA and Roscosmos,” Rath said, referring to the US and Russian space agencies. “Our support has been unwavering from both.”
Daniel Huot, a NASA spokesman, said in an e-mail that “NASA did not have any involvement with the UrtheCast payload — it was pitched to and flown by our Russian colleagues — so I would have to direct you back to UrtheCast or Roscosmos.”
Roscosmos did not respond to requests for comment.
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