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An ICEYE remote sensing image reveals multiple submarines are identifiable at a submarine base in Russia, including three Delta-IV class SSBNs and an Akula-class SSN.
AURORA, Colorado—The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is bringing additional remote sensing providers into a flexible contracting mechanism meant to help the intelligence agency quickly award contracts to a range of commercial vendors on a flexible timeline.
The agency has onboarded EarthDaily, Iceye and Pixxel to its nascent Strategic Commercial Enhancements Commercial Solutions Opening effort, representing a focus on electro-optical, radio frequency and hyperspectral imaging, respectively.
The acquisition model was stood up as a rolling five-year proposal window, so that startups and nontraditional vendors can get involved without fixed deadlines, the agency said in a May 4 release. Along with the above phenomenologies, the NRO is looking to integrate commercial technologies related to radar and light detection and ranging, or Lidar. The agency did not reveal funding amounts.
“These partnerships accelerate the delivery of operational capabilities to the NRO and its interagency partners, ensuring resilience and adaptability in a rapidly evolving global landscape,” the NRO said in the release. It describes the Commercial Solutions Offering as an “acquisition alternative” to traditional broad agency announcements that can be used to acquire technologies, items or services.
The agency is eager to onboard those three companies to move through modeling and simulation, and then take advantage of each company’s on-orbit capabilities and the data they provide, Pete Muend, the agency’s director of the NRO’s Commercial Systems Program Office, said in a May 4 presentation at the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s geospatial intelligence (Geoint) Symposium here.
The NRO announced the first contract commercial services offering (CSO) awards on Feb. 10, to Sydney-based provider HEO for non-Earth imagery, London-based SatVu for medium-wave infrared imagery, and U.S. supplier Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) for radio frequency (RF) capabilities.
Muend noted at the symposium that one of those three vendors has since left the program as it moved in another business direction. His presentation slide referenced HEO and SNC as the two current CSO contract awardees.
The NRO expects to announce additional awards later this calendar year, budget permitting, the release said.
Meanwhile, the agency has spent about 50% of its budget for the Electro-Optical Commercial Layer (EOCL) subscription program, Muend said at the symposium. The NRO announced the multibillion-dollar, 10-year contract in 2022, tapping Vantor—then Maxar Technologies—Planet Labs and BlackSky Technologies as industry partners.
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