KISSIMMEE, Fla.—The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) on Monday released two solicitations, one for its $200 million commercial analytics services effort called LUNO B, and the other a pilot to for the acquisition of commercial analytics around maritime domain awareness.
LUNO B follows LUNO A, a $290 million program currently in source selection that will allow multiple vendors to compete for task orders to provide analytics for monitoring global economic, environmental, and military activity. Offers for LUNO B are due by June 6.
Both LUNOs will replace a $60 million contract for Economic Indicator Monitoring (EIM) that BAE Systems
, BlackSky Technology [BKSY], Continental Mapping Consultants, and Royce Geospatial Consultants compete for work under. The success of the EIM contract and the demand from stakeholders on the analytics led NGA to craft the separate follow-on efforts with far higher funding ceilings.
“LUNO B will get at domain awareness, human domain awareness, and emerging capabilities,” Devin Brande, director of commercial operations for NGA, said on Monday during an agency media briefing at the annual GEOINT Conference near Orlando. “Both have an emerging capabilities aspect to them. Whereas LUNO A is a little bit more focused on a lot of the stuff we were doing in EIM with more computer vision centric facility monitoring, infrastructure monitoring.”
Both LUNO efforts are for five years.
The maritime domain awareness solicitation, which Brande likened to a Broad Agency Announcement, represents NGA’s first use of a Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO). A CSO is a relatively new procurement mechanism that allows the Defense Department to acquire capabilities proposed by industry that meet requirements that may not be clearly defined.
“The CSO for us is a mechanism to work more flexibly with industry, to allow them to come in with more creative ideas where we don’t necessarily have the clearly defined thing that we want them to build and provide for us,” Brande said. “And so, it gives us another tool in the toolbox to really partner with our with our industry folks.”
The CSO is part of a new NGA initiative called Project Aegir, which is “aimed at enhancing maritime domain awareness through GEOINT, and combatting illicit activities around the planet,” NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said during a keynote address Monday morning at the conference.
The initial topic of interest in the CSO is illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing (IUUF), with a specific focus on Chinese fishing, and other vessels operating in U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s area of operations. Often, vessels conducting IUUF have turned off their transponders, which is called going dark.
Commercial sensing satellites, particularly those that sense for radio frequency emissions, and those that use radar, can locate these vessels even when they have gone dark.
NGA wants solutions from non-traditional vendors that provide “near real-time delivery of exploited imagery of a small number of identified vessels as a result of maintained custody regardless of ‘dark’ status across various EEXs (exclusive economic zones) and territories in the USINDOPACOM AOR in order do be operationally shared with international partners,” the CSO says.
Proposals for the CSO are due by May 24. Selected vendors will be invited to pitch their solutions at the Defense Innovation Unit headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., June 24-28. Winners will be invited to participate in a $1.5 million pilot program to test their capabilities, and, if successful, “Project Aegir will be rolled into a major acquisition effort,” NGA said.
“By working with the commercial sector, we can drive automation that enables more rapid collections, allowing those on the front lines to move at speed to stay ahead of evolving global security threats,” Brande said in a statement.