The world’s highest resolution commercial satellite, the GeoEye-1 recently went live and the image above is the first image snapped shortly after opening it’s Eye in space.

The project which is partly sponsored by Google, will not only provide images to Google it will also provide images to the “National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), a U.S. government agency that analyzes imagery in support of national security.”

Now before we rush off and call this a “US spy satellite” according to the vice president of communications and marketing at GeoEye Mark Brender, “This is the opposite of a spy satellite, Spies don’t put info on the internet and sell imagery. We’re an Earth-imaging satellite, and we can sell our imagery to customers around the world who have a need to map and measure and monitor things on the ground.” This basically means they can sell images to anyone who can afford the rates.

Sadly though as usual there is always a catch and this time the catch is that “While the GeoEye-1 will provide imagery to the NGA at the maximum resolution of 43 centimeters, Google” and anyone else for that matter who can afford images “will only receive images at a 50-centimeter resolution because of a government restriction.”

The only good news is that luckily the NGA is not the only agency on earth who can afford the images and I can’t wait to see images in higher resolution on Google Earth

Tags: GeoEye, GeoEye-1, Google, Google earth, googleearth, image, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, NGA, Spy