A Comparative Legal Analysis of US and EU Data Access Policies for Earth Remote Sensing

One of the primary purposes of remote sensing is to gather information about our planet by monitoring environmental and meteorological changes. This information is useful for land development purposes, monitoring changes in sea levels, weather forecasting, disaster management and mitigation, and various other scientific and commercial purposes. Following the arrival of Sputnik I and the progressive appreciation for satellite applications in the 1960s, international negotiations developed alongside the space law treaty process, with a particular concern for the international implications of Earth remote sensing by satellites. In practice, remote sensing by Earth observation satellites began with the US Landsat program in the early 1970s. Since then numerous regional and national agencies have been created and commissioned with the task to obtain, maintain, and disseminate the accumulated data and imagery, for a variety of purposes. As a result, bilateral and multilateral agreements emerged and national remote sensing and policies evolved to deal with the budding issue of data dissemination and information exchange.