The United States opens the Landsat archive at no charge
The US Geological Survey ended charging for Landsat scenes and made the full archive freely downloadable. Distribution volumes rose by orders of magnitude within a few years, and analytic uses appeared — deforestation monitoring, crop assessment, water management, global land-cover mapping — that had simply not been affordable when each scene carried a price. It remains the strongest available evidence on how satellite data creates value, and it points away from selling the data.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Landsat · spaceflight programme · not located
- Earth observation · industry sector · not located
- Upstream and downstream in space accounting · concept · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
USGS Landsat programme records and archive access policy
Supports the Landsat launch chronology from 1972 and the 2008 decision to distribute the full archive at no charge, together with the subsequent increase in scene distribution. V55 verification basis: usgs.gov was not retrievable in this session; the distribution increase is given as orders of magnitude rather than a number.
United States Geological Survey · Partly verified
US Geological Survey, Landsat programme mission records and the 2008 open-archive data policy
Recorded on Landsat
- ERTS-1, later Landsat 1, begins the civil land-imaging record
- Selective Availability is switched off
- The United States opens the Landsat archive at no charge
- Sentinel-1A launches and Copernicus data becomes free and open
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.