The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has pilot contracts with Airbus‘ U.S. division, Capella Space, Finland-based ICEYE‘s U.S. division, and Umbra Lab, Inc. for commercial radar, and the agency suggested that it will move forward on an acquisition program of record, whether that be classified or unclassified, after the Pentagon and intelligence community (IC) define requirements.
“Through these contracts NRO has been assessing the providers’ capabilities as well as purchasing a growing number of radar products where they meet operational mission needs,” the agency said in an email on Sept. 29. “Efforts are also underway to define DoD and IC requirements and key performance indicators to be used as the basis for the size and scope of the program. Once these are finalized and approved, NRO will move forward with the announcing the request for acquisition proposals.”
In January last year, the NRO announced that it had awarded five commercial radar contracts to Airbus; Capella Space; ICEYE U.S.; Umbra; and Florida-based PredaSAR Corp. (Defense Daily, Jan. 20, 2022).
NRO said on Oct. 2 that “PredaSAR did not meet the requirements to move to Stage 2 and its contract ended” last month.
The five awards in January last year came under NRO’s Strategic Commercial Enhancements Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) Framework, announced by NRO Director Chris Scolese in October 2021.
The NRO has said that leveraging commercial capabilities in commercial radar, hyperspectral imagery, radio frequency remote sensing, and electro-optical (EO) imagery will help the agency reserve its satellites “for the most stressing and sensitive missions.”
Scolese has said that the traditional NRO acquisition process takes five to 10 years and the agency has already demonstrated it can acquire capabilities in three years. The goal with the BAA is to shrink that further, he said.
Pete Muend, NRO’s Commercial Systems Program director, said in November 2021 that the NRO buys about 50,000 commercial images per week and will increase that buy (Defense Daily, Nov. 3, 2021).
Commercial contracts provide the NRO about 100 million square kilometers of commercial imagery per week, Scolese said in 2021.
If the NRO scales up its buy of commercial products significantly, such companies could bolster the NRO in broad area map making; responding to decision maker requests regarding geo-political events and natural disasters; and tracking of global events. In so doing, commercial companies may help maximize the capacity of the NRO’s monitoring and move global hot zones to lower risk ones.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense’s intelligence directorate said last week that imagery from a commercial synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite built by ICEYE helped sink the Russian amphibious assault ship Minsk and the Russian submarine Rostov-on-Don in the Crimea’s Sevastopol Bay on Sept. 13 (Defense Daily, Sept. 28).
“This is really the first major war in which commercially available satellite imagery may play a significant role in providing open source information about troops movements, military buildups in neighboring countries, flows of refugees and more,” Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov wrote an open letter last year.