Landsat

node

The longest continuous record of the Earth's land surface from space, beginning with the launch of ERTS-1 — later renamed Landsat 1 — on 23 July 1972 and continuing through successive spacecraft to Landsat 9, launched in September 2021. Its economic importance rests on a policy decision rather than a technical one. For decades the data was sold, at times through a commercialised distributor, and usage was correspondingly modest. In 2008 the United States Geological Survey opened the entire archive at no charge over the internet, and the annual volume of scenes distributed rose by orders of magnitude within a few years. The episode is the clearest natural experiment in the space economy on what happens when a public dataset stops being priced: an enormous downstream analytic activity appeared that had never been visible while the data cost money, and the measured revenue of the imagery business itself fell to nothing. Which of those two outcomes counts as economic value depends entirely on where the accounting boundary is drawn.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.