Landsat free-access — 53 scenes/day → 5,700/day; $25.6B/yr economic value

The Landsat satellite program distributed Earth observation imagery for decades with limited public value: before the 2008 open-access policy, a maximum of 53 scenes were downloaded per day. After the policy change, downloads reached 5,700 scenes per day, and the program's estimated economic value reached $25.6 billion per year by 2023 (S-0112).

The data and the satellites were identical before and after. The access change alone unlocked the value.

The case is the cleanest available natural experiment in the open-data multiplier. The same physical infrastructure, same data quality, same scientific content — and a 100x increase in usage and a step-function increase in measurable economic value, achieved entirely through changing the access policy.

The implication for C-0032: when preserved data can be opened, the marginal value of opening it is potentially much larger than the marginal cost of preserving it. Tier 3 deployment that includes an open-access default for non-sensitive data captures both halves of the asymmetry — preservation and reuse.