IKONOS is a commercial earth observation satellite, and was the first to collect publicly available high-resolution imagery at 1-meter and 4-meter resolution. It offers multispectral (MS) and panchromatic (PAN) imagery.

IKONOS imagery began being sold on January 1, 2000. 

It derived its name from the Greek term eikōn for image.

It is operated by GeoEye.

GeoEye Inc. (formerly Orbital Imaging Corporation or ORBIMAGE) is a commercial satellite imagery company based in Herndon, Virginia, USA.

GeoEye operates its own fleet of Earth observation satellites, which provide visible and near-infrared images of land and sea at resolutions below 1 m.

GeoEye provides 253,000,000 square kilometres of satellite map images to Microsoft and Yahoo! search engines. Google has exclusive online mapping use of the new GeoEye-1 satellite. It is a major supplier to the USA National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

GeoEye's headquarters are in Herndon, Virginia. Satellite Operations are conducted in Herndon, Virginia and in Thornton, Colorado. The location in Saint Louis, Missouri provides additional image processing. There are multiple ground stations located worldwide.
GeoEye's primary competitors are DigitalGlobe and Spot Image.

The company was founded in 1992 as a division of Orbital Sciences Corporation in the wake of the 1992 Land Remote Sensing Policy Act which permitted private companies to enter the satellite imaging business. The division was spun off in 1997. It changed its name to GeoEye in 2006 after acquiring Denver, Colorado-based Space Imaging. Space Imaging was founded and controlled by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Its principal asset was the IKONOS satellite.

IRS-P3 is an Indian experimental Earth Observation mission, considered to be pre-operational and serving in parallel for technology evaluation and scientific methodology studies.

It was launched by PSLV-D3 on March 21, 1996 from SHAR Centre, Sriharikota, India. IRS-P3 carries two remote sensing payloads - Wide Field Sensor (WiFS) similar to that of IRS-1C, with an additional Short Wave Infrared Band (SWIR) and a Modular Opto-electronic Scanner (MOS). It also carries an X-ray astronomy payload and a C-band transponder for radar calibration. 

Mission completed during January 2006 after serving 9 years and 10 months. 

The X-ray Astronomy Experiment (IXAE) is a payload which was launched aboard the Indian Remote Sensing Satellite-P3 (IRS-P3) using a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) on 1996 March 21.

(see article IXAE observations of the X-ray pulsar XTE J1946+274 )

The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, commonly known by its abbreviation PSLV, is an expendable launch system developed and operated by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It was developed to allow India to launch its Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellites into Sun synchronous orbits, a service that was, until the advent of the PSLV, commercially viable only from Russia. PSLV can also launch small size satellites into geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). The PSLV has launched 52 satellites (26 Indian satellites and 26 foreign satellites) into a variety of orbits to date (May 2012).

Astrosat is India's first dedicated astronomy satellite and is scheduled to launch on board the PSLV in 2012. After the success of the satellite-borne Indian X-ray Astronomy Experiment (IXAE), which was launched in 1996, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has approved further development for a full fledged astronomy satellite - Astrosat.
A large number of leading astronomy research institutions in India and abroad are jointly building various instruments for the satellite. Important areas requiring broad band coverage include studies of astrophysical objects ranging from the nearby solar system objects to distant stars, to objects at cosmological distances; timing studies of variables ranging from pulsations of the hot white dwarfs to active galactic nuclei (AGN) with time scales ranging from milliseconds to few hours to days.
Astrosat is currently proposed as a multi-wavelength astronomy mission on an IRS-class satellite into a near-Earth, equatorial orbit by the PSLV. The 5 instruments on-board cover the visible (320-530 nm), near UV(180-300 nm), far UV(130-180 nm), soft X-ray (0.3-8 keV and 2-10 keV) and hard X-ray (3-80 keV and 10-150 keV) regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Mission
Astrosat will be a proposal-driven general purpose observatory, with main scientific focus on:

• Simultaneous multi-wavelength monitoring of intensity variations in a broad range of cosmic sources
• Monitoring the X-ray sky for new transients
• Sky surveys in the hard X-ray and UV bands
• Broadband spectroscopic studies of X-ray binaries, AGN, SNRs, clusters of galaxies and stellar coronae
• Studies of periodic and non-periodic variability of X-ray sources

Bigelow Aerospace is a North American space technology company that is pioneering work on expandable space station modules.

Bigelow is pioneering a new market in a flexible and configurable set of space habitats.

AEROSTUDI, a certified company with integration of all necessary skills, from requirements definition to full production, with savings in terms of cost and time, keeping the highest quality standards.

Since 1989 AEROSTUDI has been developing and manufacturing mechanical systems and sub-systems as well as high performance light metallic and composite structures in the aerospace field.

Avanti Communications sells satellite data communications services to telecoms companies which use them to supply enterprise, institutional and consumer users.

Avanti's first satellite, called HYLAS 1, launched on 26th November 2010 and was a superfast Ka band satellite launched in Europe. Avanti's second satellite, called HYLAS 2, will launch on 2nd August 2012. It will extend Avanti's coverage to Africa, the Caucuses and the Middle East. HYLAS 3 will also serve Africa in 2015.

XIPS is a com-mercial electron bom-bardment thruster (also known as an electrostatic ion thruster) – a form ion propulsion – that is a product of Hughes Space and Communications Company, which, in 2000, became part of Boeing Satellite Systems.

XIPS (pronounced "zips") employs the heavy inert gas xenon as a propellant. It was first used operationally aboard the PAS-5 (PanAmSat-5) communications satellite in 1997 and has since been fitted to many other geosynchronous satellites for use primarily in station-keeping. In a XIPS, xenon atoms are injected into an ionization chamber and ionized by electron bombardment. The propellant is then electrostatically accelerated through a series of biased grids.  Ions, ejected by XIPS, travel in a stream at a speed of 30 km/s (62,900 mph), nearly 10 times that of a conventional chemical thruster. The high efficiency of the system leads to a reduction in propellant mass of up to 90% for a satellite designed for 12–15 years operation.

For example on a XIPS equipped Boeing 702 satellite, four 25-cm thrusters provide economical station keeping, needing only 5 kg of fuel per year. Boeing asserts that this is "a fraction of what bipropellant or arcjet systems consume". Boeing further asserts, that a XIPS can be used for final orbit insertion and has orders ( source: Wikipedia, Boeing_702 )  for spacecraft utilizing only ion thrusters. This conserves even more payload mass, as compared to using an on-board liquid apogee engine.