Seeking Satellite Imagery Providers?

Imagery is expensive to capture and produce, which effectively limits its production to commercial entities and governments. Most of the commercial satellites don't carry consistent global coverage and generate income by selling access to scenes, including their resale to the providers you listed. That leaves government options in the free category: perhaps the best remains the Landsat 7 products, which are about 30 meter resolution in most channels and 15 meter in the IR. A number of areas have aerial flyovers which are freely available, such as those used in World Wind.

The global satellites page on Wikipedia is a helpful list, and there is a new Landsat platform launching next year which will continue that platforms provisioning of global, consistent and free imagery. GLCF remains a good source for the existing free data, as are the NASA Landsat mosaics.

The OpenAerialMap project was abandoned, but has recently been restarted. It will be an amalgamation of free datasets from different areas of the planet, with global datasets for areas with nothing more detailed. The global datasets used are i-cubed, and the NASA imagery. The current list of datasources used by the projects can be found here. The source code for the server software is also on GitHub.

However the server is currently offline, so this is probably only something to keep an eye on at the moment, rather than an option for a live system.

For the second part of your question, you can use OpenLayers which covers the "geoJSON data imports, mouse and keyboard gestures, etc." - it also allows you to bring in data from any of Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. so you can keep the data and API components separate.

If you are prepared to pay there are a couple more options:

• Digital Globe offer a wms service that could be linked with OpenLayers.
• The ESRI Javascript API has global satellite data at varying resolution.