Addressing Budget Constraints with Innovation and Creativity

At last week’s National Space Symposium, I had the opportunity to speak with many of our industry’s leaders and government customers about the current and future climate for space-based expenditures. It is clear that there are emerging threats as well as declining budgets that must be balanced as we move through 2013 and beyond.

“We’ve got a tremendous amount of work to do, but we’ve got to start now,” said Gen. William Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command. “The status quo just can’t drive us.”  Shelton said military space programs must find the confluence between capability, affordability and resilience, “We’ve got to find a way ahead that gives us the capabilities that we need which will be affordable and much more resilient”.

Space programs will continue to work to provide lower-cost, more agile and capable solutions.  Ground data processing, analysis, fusion, and exploitation will need to follow suit.

It is clear to NV5 (formerly Exelis VIS) and to other industry partners, such as Esri, that the time is now for government intelligence agencies to take advantage of commercial software capabilities to support lower-cost geospatial data exploitation, and support the value-added product creation that helps save lives for those contending with everything from planning and observing threats, to natural disaster response, to battle preparation and damage assessment.

Today’s combination of image processing with ENVI in the context of spatial and temporal domains via GIS give these users answers to critical problems in a fraction of the time and cost required in traditional government program development efforts. Events like NSS allow government official and business leaders to address challenges, embrace innovation, and help work toward solving critical problems. How do you see similar events positively impacting innovation?