Prospecting the World: Landsat and the Search for Minerals in Space Age Globalization

Extract

In 1977 an American satellite, Landsat 2, helped Chevron Oil Company discover a vast petroleum reserve and set the stage for the first onshore oil well in Sudan. A joint venture of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Landsat program provided a planetary view of the earth and its natural resources. These satellites floated freely across national borders because of international agreements that allowed space-based objects to orbit in the upper atmosphere. Nations under surveillance could purchase Landsat program images from the U.S. government, often through the U.S. Agency for International Development (Usaid). Private companies, such as Chevron, could also purchase images, and did so. Chevron acquired images of Sudan as part of exploratory efforts that led to the discovery of 120,000 square miles of petroleum-rich land. The wells drilled in that area produced upward of 12,300 barrels per day for the oil company and helped catalyze a “black gold” rush in Sudan. In nations across the so-called Third World, similar economic and ecological transformations were underway, as U.S. government officials and private companies used Landsat images to identify untapped minerals and other natural resources under the auspices of international development. Third World leaders, in turn, debated the technology, with some offering support for the Landsat program and others charging that it constituted an “infringement on their own sovereign slice of earth.”¹