In disasters like the 7.8 magnitude earthquake and 7.5-magnitude aftershock that struck Syria and Turkey on February 6, 2023, international cooperation on satellite imaging plays a crucial role in the rescue and recovery efforts.

Such data enables humanitarian aid to better deliver water and food by mapping the condition of roads, bridges, buildings, and – most crucially – identifying populations trying to escape potential aftershocks by gathering in stadiums or other open spaces.

To quickly turn the eyes of satellites toward the affected areas, the Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) requested the activation of the international charter on “Space and Major Disasters” at 7:04 a.m. local time. The United Nations did so for Syria at 11:29 local time.

In the meantime, 11 space agencies got ready to operate the most appropriate optical and radar satellites. For France, these are the optical satellites Spot, Pléaides and Pléiades Neo (medium, high and very high resolution), which will provide the first images as they pass over the area. Radar satellites will complement the optical information, as they also operate at night and through clouds, and can image landslides and even very small changes in altitude.

Every year, millions of people around the world are affected by disasters, whether natural (cyclone, tornado, typhoon, earthquake, landslide, volcanic eruption, tsunami, flood, forest fire, etc.) or man-made (oil pollution, industrial explosions, and more). Unfortunately, the intensity and frequency of these disasters are increasing with climate change, creating more and more victims, damaged homes, and devastated landscapes.

Anatomy of a disaster

The international charter on “Space and Major Disasters” defines a disaster as a large-scale, sudden, unique and uncontrolled event, resulting in loss of life or damage to property and the environment, and requiring urgent action to acquire and provide data.

The charter was created by the National Space Research Centre and the European Space Agency in 1999, soon joined by the Canadian Space Agency. Today, 17 member space agencies have joined forces to provide free satellite imagery as quickly as possible over the disaster area. Since 2000, the charter has been activated 797 times in more than 154 countries. It has since been complemented by similar initiatives from Europe (Copernicus Emergency) and Asia (Sentinel Asia).

Almost three quarters of the activations of the charter are due to weather phenomena: storms, hurricanes and especially floods, which alone account for half of the activations. In these sometimes unforeseen crisis situations, when the ground is damaged or flooded and roads are impassable, land-based resources are not always able to analyse the extent of the disaster and organise relief and humanitarian aid in the best possible way. By capturing the situation from space, with very high resolution, satellites provide crucial information quickly.

In some cases, the charter cannot be activated. This can be because the subject matter is outside the scope of the charter (wars and armed conflicts) or because space imagery is sometimes of little interest (in the case of heat waves and epidemics), or because the phenomenon evolves slowly and over a long time span (droughts).

Satellite data in response to crises around the world

As soon as a disaster occurs, satellites are programmed to quickly acquire images over the affected areas. More than 60 satellites, optical or radar, can be mobilised at any given time.

Depending on the type of disaster, different satellites will be mobilised, based on pre-established crisis plans – among them: TerraSAR-X/Tandem-X, QuickBird-2, Radarsat, Landsat-7/8, SPOT, Pleiades, Sentinel-2 among others.

Optical images are similar to photos seen from space, but radar images can be more difficult to interpret by non-experts. So following the disaster, satellite information is reworked to make it easier to understand. For example, the images are transformed into impact or change maps for rescue workers, flood alert maps for the public, and mapping of burnt or flooded areas with damage estimates for decision-makers.

Collaborative work between field users and satellite operators is essential. Progress has been made thanks to innovations in Earth observation technologies (notably the performance of optical resolutions – from 50 to 20 metres and now 30 centimetres) and 3D data processing software, but also thanks to the development of digital tools that can couple satellite and in situ data. The needs of the field have also contributed to the evolution of the charter’s intervention processes in terms of delivery time and quality of the products delivered.

Reconstruction after disasters

Emergency management is of course essential, but it is equally vital for all affected countries to consider reconstruction and the future. Indeed, the “risk cycle” posits that reconstruction, resilience and risk prevention all play an important role in the return to normality. While disasters cannot be predicted, they can be better prepared for, especially in countries where they are recurrent. For example, residents could benefit from earthquake-resistant construction, the creation of safe gathering places or relocating to living areas to safe locations. Learning survival skills is also crucial.

Several initiatives, called “reconstruction observatories”, have been carried out after major disasters – two examples are Haiti in 2021 and in Beirut after the 2019 port explosion. The aim is to coordinate satellite images to enable a detailed and dynamic assessment of damage to buildings, roads, farms, forests and more in the most affected areas, to monitor reconstruction planning, to reduce risks and to monitor changes over a three- to four-year time horizon.

Emilie Bronner, Représentante CNES au Secrétariat Exécutif de la Charte Internationale Espace et Catastrophes Majeures, Centre national d’études spatiales (CNES)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I’m senior correspondent Golnaz Esfandiari. Here’s what I’ve been following and what I’m watching out for in the days ahead.

The Big Issue

( RFE/RL ) – Russia successfully launched an Iranian satellite into space on August 9, in a move that has raised concerns in the West. U.S. officials fear that the satellite could be used by Moscow to boost its intelligence capabilities in Ukraine, which it invaded in February. There are also worries that the satellite will provide Iran “unprecedented capabilities” to monitor potential military targets in Israel, its archenemy, and other countries in the wider Middle East region.

Tehran has rejected those claims, saying Iran will have full control and operation over the satellite “from day one.” Iran has said the remote-sensing satellite will only be used for civilian purposes, including monitoring border areas, surveying water resources, and managing natural disasters.

Why It Matters: The satellite launch is the latest sign of the deepening ties between Iran and Russia. It came just weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Tehran, where he and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei pledged to work together against the West.

Both countries have been hit by Western sanctions and international isolation. Yuri Borisov, head of Russia’s state space corporation Roskosmos, hailed the launch as an “important landmark” in cooperation between Moscow and Tehran. Iran’s Telecommunications Minister Issa Zarepour, who attended the launch in Kazakhstan, praised it as “historic” and “a turning point” in space cooperation between the countries.

The satellite launch has also put a spotlight on Iran’s space program. In recent years, Tehran has launched several satellites into low Earth orbit and announced plans to send astronauts into space. But Iran has also seen a succession of accidents and failed satellite launches in recent years.

John Krzyzaniak, a research analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said in June that Iranian satellites do not have advanced capabilities, but they represent “stepping stones to more sophisticated satellites that will be more useful and remain in orbit for longer periods.”

What’s Next: Russia’s successful launch of the Khayyam satellite, named after the 11th-century Persian poet and philosopher Omar Khayyam, could worsen tensions with the United States. Just last month, Washington claimed that Tehran was preparing to deliver hundreds of combat drones to Russia for use in the war in Ukraine.

“Russia deepening an alliance with Iran is something that the whole world should look at and see as a profound threat,” a State Department spokesperson was quoted as saying on August 9.

The United States has long expressed concerns over Iran’s space program, which has both a civilian and military component. The United States fears that Tehran could use the program to enhance its ballistic-missile capabilities.

Via RFE/RL

Copyright (c)2020 RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

From the very start, the giant retailer’s business strategy has relied on dodging taxes and pocketing public subsidies.

By Scott Klinger | –

( Inequality.org ) – Shortly after emerging from his 10-minute space flight last week, Jeff Bezos thanked Amazon customers and employees for their primary role in paying for his Blue Origin joyride to the edge of space.

The Amazon founder’s comments quickly elicited scorn from many employees who toil in extreme working conditions for little pay and with bathroom breaks half as long as Bezos’s short rocket ride.

But American taxpayers should be just as roiled for not being mentioned by Bezos at all. Commentators pointed to Bezos’s Blue Origin and Sir Richard Branson’s earlier trip on Virgin Galactic’s Unity spacecraft as being privately funded, but in Bezos’s case that is far from the truth.

Dodging taxes and winning public subsidies have been core to Amazon’s business strategy from the start, when its e-commerce sales eluded state and local sales taxes. Later as the retailer expanded its distribution network, Amazon aggressively demanded passes on paying local property taxes in exchange for the promise of bringing jobs to a community.

And when Amazon finally turned profitable, the company used various tax reduction schemes, including paying executives with stock options and running transactions through off-shore tax havens. This enabled Amazon to become one of a number of highly profitable companies that have contributed next to nothing to the costs of the federal government.

Early on, Amazon located its shipping centers in states without sales taxes. It successfully argued that the transaction occurred where the package left its distribution center, not once it was left at the customer’s front door. This tactic saved Amazon customers billions of dollars, and gave Amazon an enormous competitive advantage over brick-and-mortar stores that had to collect sales taxes.

As Amazon evolved, fast delivery became more important, leading the company to rapidly expand its vast distribution network closer to its customers. Recognizing that this would challenge the underpinnings of its sales tax dodging strategy, Amazon began to demand – and most often receive – lucrative tax breaks and other cash subsidies from communities where Amazon opened facilities and created jobs.

Over the years, Amazon has collected nearly $3.3 billion in 200 different tax subsidy deals with state and local governments, according to Good Jobs First’s Subsidy Tracker database. In many cases, that means when an ambulance is dispatched to an Amazon warehouse to tend to a worker overcome by heat, Amazon has left the cost of such services to other taxpayers to pay. Or when Amazon hires an educated worker, it does so knowing that it often contributed little to pay for local government’s investments in schools.

In the three years between 2018 and 2020, Amazon reported $44.7 billion in U.S. pre-tax profits, but paid just $1.9 billion in U.S. corporate income taxes, according to a 2021 analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). These paltry payments gave Amazon an effective tax rate of just 4.3 percent, a fraction of the tax rate paid by typical middle income U.S. families, and only a fifth of the 21 percent statutory U.S. corporate income tax rate.

Bezos claims to have invested $7.5 billion in Blue Origin. U.S. taxpayers have invested many times that amount in Amazon through sales tax loopholes, property tax subsidies, and federal tax avoidance schemes.

If Amazon had paid the full 21 percent corporate tax rate over the last three years, the company would have paid $7.2 billion more in federal taxes, money that could have been used to invest in basic research, education, national security, and COVID aid for struggling families and small businesses.

Bezos’s New Shepherd suborbital flight recreated the historic 1961 flight of America’s first astronaut Alan Shepherd. Back then the U.S. corporate tax rate was 48 percent. If Amazon had paid that same rate on its income in the last three years, the company would have paid an additional $19.5 billion in U.S. income taxes.

Amazon is not alone in not paying its fair share in federal taxes. Back in 1961, corporate income taxes comprised 22.1 percent of the federal government’s revenue. Last year, corporations paid just 6.6 percent of Uncle Sam’s bills, despite U.S. corporations being far more profitable than when Alan Shepherd flew aboard Freedom 7.

Bezos claims to have invested about $7.5 billion in Blue Origin to date. U.S. taxpayers have invested many times that amount in Amazon through sales tax loopholes, property tax subsidies, and federal tax avoidance schemes. It is we, the American taxpayers, along with Amazon’s hard-working, underpaid workers, that made this billionaire’s 10-minute thrill ride possible.

Scott Klinger is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Via Inequality.org

Content licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

The Hill: “Bernie Sanders CALLS OUT Jeff Bezos and Amazon for not paying taxes”

As a child, I thrilled to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars series starring John Carter. It wasn’t really science fiction, more of a Western in a strange place. Carter just imagined himself to Mars in a blink of an eye. I even liked the 2012 film, the script of which was co-authored by Michael Chabon (of Kavalier and Clay fame). That film grossed nearly $300 million and would have been a success if Disney had not foolishly spent $400 mn. to make and market it. That was just bad management. The film did what it needed to do.

Then there were Ray Bradbury’s Mars stories. At the end of one of them, the human children colonists want to see the Martians, so their parents have them look at their own reflections in a pool. And as an adult I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, in which the author explored the ethics of terraforming another planet (i.e. engineering it to be like earth).

Those themes, of who we are when we travel far from home, and whether we can take home with us– themes of alienation and self-discovery and loss, resonated with me, I think, in part because I grew up in an Army family and went to 12 schools in twelve years growing up, spending much of my childhood and youth in Europe and Africa.

The Ingenuity helicopter is a technical wonder– the first such aircraft that humans have launched on another planet. Mars has a very thin atmosphere, 100th that of earth, but it only has a third of our gravity (Burroughs knew enough science to know that John Carter would be able to jump very high and would be very strong there). To get enough lift for the helicopter, the scientists and engineers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab had to arrange for its carbon-fiber rotors to make 2,500 revolutions per minute, compared to the 400 to 500 rpm typical of earth helicopters. The helicopter’s inverter also had to be engineered to withstand Mars’s very cold surface temperature.

NASA: “This is the first color image of the Martian surface taken by an aerial vehicle while it was aloft.”

A large team was behind this success, and there is no “I” in “team.” It contained many of the people that the Trump administration tried to exclude from the US, and to demean, including Indian-Americans and Arab-Americans.

One of the team members was Loay Elbasyouni, whose family hailed from Beit Hanoun in Occupied Palestinian Gaza. As Ahmad Abu Shammalh explains at We are not Numbers, Elbasyouni is “the electrical and power electronics lead for the Mars helicopter that the Perseverence carried inside.”

Channel 4 News: “How this NASA engineer went from Gaza to Mars”

Elbasyouni’s parents had gone to Germany, where his father studied medicine, and Loay was born there. The family returned to Gaza, where Loay grew up and where his father worked as a physician. He had to be home-schooled when the first Palestinian uprising (Intifada) broke out in 1986 and his school, managed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, closed.

Some 70% of the 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza belong to families who were expelled from what is now southern Israel by Zionist militias in 1948. They were deprived of their lands and homes and property and made penniless, living in tents or hastily erected ramshackle structures. Since 1967 they have been occupied by Israel, which imposed an economically debilitating blockade on the civilian population in 2007 that continues to this day. Because the fundamentalist party-militia Hamas was allowed by Israel and the US to run in the 2006 elections and won, it still governs the Gaza Strip. The US and Israel have declared it a terrorist organization and the Palestinians of Gaza in general suffer from demonization. Some 50% of them are children, and I think we may safely conclude that they are not terrorists.

Loay studied computer and electronics engineering at the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville. One year, 2001, Shammalh explains, Loay had to drop out and work long hours to save up enough to continue his education.

He and his team-mates successfully solved the technological challenges, and Ingenuity has already flown a couple of times, with two more short flights planned.

When Loay posed with Ingenuity on social media, word got out in Gaza and the Middle East, and he was widely interviewed as a Palestinian and Arab success story.

But that sense of alienation and exile that always attends spaceflight, and which Ray Bradbury was most attentive to, also haunts Elbasyouni as a Palestinian.

Middle East Monitor writes,

‘Palestinian from Gaza Loay Elbasyouni has helped American space agency NASA successfully fly a small helicopter on Mars.

Ingenuity Mars Helicopter flew over the red planet two days ago, in a feat which NASA says represents the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another planet.

Elbasyouni, who was . . . raised in Gaza, left the Strip in 2000 “before the Second Intifada” when he was 20 to complete his studies in the US after he won a scholarship.

“For me as a kid I was almost dreaming to become an aerospace engineer, but I decided that it was not a thing for me because I figured Palestine doesn’t have a space programme, so it wasn’t an easy journey,” he told Channel 4 News.

He likened his journey from Gaza to the US to “Mission Impossible”.

Elbasyouni has not returned to his family since he left them in 2000, he said:

It’s really hard to get into Gaza without putting my career at risk. If I go in there, I might get stuck.

“With the Mars situation it’s science that determines things, with science we can calculate everything and predict everything as much as we can, and we stick to our hopes and beliefs and our mathematical proof. But when it comes to situations of politics involving politics it depends on people’s opinions and that’s unpredictable,” he added.’

Bradbury didn’t have to take us all the way to Mars to explore exile and alienation. The Palestinians know all about it.

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Al Jazeera English: “Loay Elbasyouni talk to Aljazeera English about helicopter first flight on Mars”