While BlackSky Technology [BKSY] said that it is to make its Generation-3 Earth imaging satellites widely available this year, the company is offering “early access” to a select group of “multiple international defense sector customers,” BlackSky said on Tuesday.
“The customers will now be able to integrate very high-resolution, 35-centimeter imagery into daily intelligence operations,” the company said.
In February, BlackSky said that it won a “multimillion dollar” contract from the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to manage and operate one of the company’s Gen-3 satellites for the Tactical GEOINT (TACGEO) program (Defense Daily, Feb. 25).
The December 2024 contract builds on an award BlackSky announced in September 2020 with DIU that included a preliminary design review of the Gen-3 satellite for the U.S. Army TACGEO prototype program. On Feb. 18, Rocket Lab USA [RKLB] launched the first spacecraft for BlackSky’s planned Gen-3 constellation.
That first Gen-3 satellite “produced imagery within five days [of launch] and AI-enabled analytics within three weeks of launch” and has completed commissioning, the company said last week.
The TACGEO program began as a research, development, and technology effort to leverage a Gen-3 satellite for responsive tactical intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) from space. The U.S. government has provided input into developing Gen-3 since 2020 as part of a broader effort to develop space-based tactical ISR capabilities, a company spokesperson said.
The electro-optic Gen-3 satellites will eventually include new low-latency intersatellite communication links. The future constellation will also offer automatic detection, identification, and classification of more vehicles, aircraft, vessels, and other items of interest, and the ability to image through smoke and haze with short-wave infrared bands.
In addition to the TACGEO awards, BlackSky has other government research and development contracts to develop space-based tactical GEOINT capabilities, including work with the Air Force Research laboratory for ground moving target indication, and a Navy research contract to explore optical intersatellite links.
BlackSky CEO Brian O’Toole said in the company’s Tuesday statement that the Gen-3 early access agreements “demonstrate confidence in the quality and reliability of our imagery products and will give these customers transformative capabilities that BlackSky uniquely delivers through our proven end-to-end, next-generation artificial intelligence [AI]-enabled commercial architecture.”
“The subscription-based contracts provide access to the BlackSky Spectra tasking and analytics platform, through which customers will be able to order high-cadence, time-diverse dawn-to-dusk Gen-2 and Gen-3 imagery and AI-enabled analytics,” the company said. “These initial contracts are designed to scale in size and volume as the company increases available Gen-3 capacity over time.”
BlackSky said that its clients task and receive “thousands of high-resolution images and analytics over priority areas of interest every month, gaining visibility and insight into border crossings, nuclear and port facilities, and other critical national security and economic infrastructure at massive scale.”