Prof. Gottfried Konecny received his PhD in photogrammetry at the Ohio State University in 1958. Then, he spent a summer internship at the NASA Johnson Space Center where he became aware of the potential for space systems to advance mapping and remote sensing, and made contacts that would prove useful later. He started his first academic position at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Canada, where he became Professor of Photogrammetry and eventually the Chairman of what is now the Department of Geomatics Engineering. In 1971 he returned to Germany to become Chairman of Institute of Photogrammetry and GeoInformation at Hannover Technical University.