Commercial satellite imagery has evolved from a tightly controlled national-security capability into a foundational layer of the modern U.S. geospatial intelligence architecture. This historical overview traces that transformation from Landsat, EOSAT, Eagle Vision, and the early commercialization experiments through ClearView, NextView, EnhancedView, EOCL, and today’s expanding commercial sensing ecosystem of optical imagery, SAR, hyperspectral, radio frequency, AI, and analytics. It also examines the policymakers, intelligence leaders, scientists, companies, and acquisition strategies that helped build the government-commercial partnership—and the emerging 2026 debate over access, managed distribution, national security, and how the United States governs an increasingly global and commercially driven GEOINT environment.