WASHINGTON — Members of the House Armed Services Committee in a report last week expressed support for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s use of economic satellite data. In addition they asked NGA for details on its plans to integrate industrial data and services into “base programs of record.”
“The committee notes that the domestic industrial satellite imagery industry continues to develop rapidly with latest capabilities available from constellations of satellites dedicated to day by day monitoring of your complete planet together with a growing domestic geospatial intelligence analytic industry,” said the report by the HASC strategic forces subcommittee.
The congressional language reflects concerns by remote-sensing space firms that U.S. defense and intelligence agencies will not be adopting industrial services on the pace and scale they hoped.
Images collected by industrial Earth-watching satellite tracked the movement of troops after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and helped document the toll of the conflict. NGA was at the middle of U.S. government efforts to tap industrial providers of satellite imagery to fill the demand.
The conflict has been a distinguished use case for industrial imaging satellites and their power to deliver crucial intelligence. But that has not translated into growing demand for imagery outside of the Ukraine crisis, noted David Gauthier, former director of NGA’s industrial and business operations
Gauthier, who’s now chief strategy officer on the consulting firm GXO Inc., said firms are concerned in regards to the “lagging adoption” of economic imagery and analytics services by U.S. intelligence and defense agencies.
“What’s happening in Ukraine is special and it ought to be a benchmark for all other U.S. combatant commands in areas where the warfighter must operate with the advantage of open source intelligence and industrial distant sensing,” Gauthier told .
“My tackle that is that the industrial market developed capability faster than the federal government could react to it,” he added. “Investors put money in, and corporations expect the federal government to buy more imagery and other industrial data and services faster.”
NGA and the National Reconnaissance Office are the industry’s top customers. The Space Force also has indicated interest in buying more industrial imagery and data analytics services.
The NRO awarded large contracts to Maxar Technologies, BlackSky and Planet for electro-optical imagery. Business distant sensing from space has rapidly expanded into other phenomenologies, like synthetic aperture radar (SAR), radio-frequency (RF) mapping and hyperspectral imaging.
About 20 firms within the SAR, RF and hyperspectral imaging sectors have signed agreements with the NRO to conduct experiments.
“These firms have small dollar study contracts, they usually are all waiting in line for the large programs to deliver data to the U.S. government,” Gauthier said.
“The NRO has done an excellent thing by getting out in keeping pace with industry on study contracts. But they’re not following it up with large programs,” he said. “So it is a huge concern for the industry that’s now out on a limb, that has created capability believing there could be a approach to sell that at scale. And to date, there’s nothing within the budget to indicate us that may occur.”
The priority is notable within the SAR sector, considering that radar became the breakout remote-sensing technology of the Ukraine conflict because it could actually see through clouds.
“Business SAR is making huge headways,” Gauthier said. “And we have now study contracts for it, but there’s no significant budget in either the NRO or the Defense Department to really put industrial SAR in at the dimensions that shall be essential to sustain our industrial base and to deliver it to the battlefield for mission effects.”
Jason Mallare, vp of presidency programs and strategy at Umbra, a industrial operator of SAR imaging satellites, said this nascent sector of the industry is reliant on government support.
“The U.S. industrial SAR portion of the economic base is at a critical tipping point and the U.S., because the world’s largest consumer of SAR data, has a necessity and a chance” to benefit from domestic capabilities, Mallare said in an announcement. “We’re working closely with the NRO, NGA and the DoD to be certain that the warfighter and taxpayer can profit from the investment and technology that’s presently available.”
Startups need revenue
Transitioning from research projects to revenue-generating contracts has been a challenge for startups on this sector, said John Serafini, CEO of HawkEye 360, a industrial provider of space-based RF data that works primarily with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.
“I feel the U.S. government writ large has gotten superb at early stage research, development, testing and evaluation engagements” with industry, Serafini said June 15 on the Tech Summit.
“There are many RDT&E programs on the market” sponsored by agencies just like the Defense Innovation Unit, AFWERX and In-Q-Tel, he said.
“But sometimes they’re doing RDT&E projects for the sake of RDT&E projects,” Serafini said. “They’re not doing it for the sake of really bringing it through the contracting process to deliver a totally embedded fielded capability to the warfighter.”
Meanwhile, “young firms are desperately looking for access to revenue to showcase validation for investors,” he added. Small business innovation research contracts will not be going to assist firms survive, he added. “They’re not constructing fully tested, ready-to-go products that may exit to the warfighter and support the analysts.”
Some pockets inside the federal government, nonetheless, are getting “pretty good at understanding that transition paradigm,” Serafini said. “They arrive with transition partners before they begin the RDT&E engagement, they arrive with transition money and earmarks ready so when the technology does successfully scale, they’ll construct programs of record.” But that is normally the exception, not the rule, Serafini noted.
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Tony Frazier, executive vp and general manager of Maxar Public Sector Earth Intelligence, said some government agencies have adopted “buy industrial first” approaches but changing the culture takes time.
Speaking on the Tech Summit, Frazier said NGA is trying to expand the Economic Indicator Monitoring (EIM) program where industrial firms compete for data analytics task orders.
Some military organizations are seeing the worth of economic data analytics, said Frazier. The Navy, for instance, subscribes to Maxar’s vessel detection service. “They’re not buying pixels, they’re trying to know illegal fishing activity and share insights with allies and coast guards.”
Interest in industrial services is growing, he said, “however it just takes time to transition a mission that historically has been done in house.”
NGA plans to begin a brand new program, called Luno, that shall be modeled after the EIM program but with a broader scope. The plan is to make use of industrial monitoring services to trace global military and economic activity.
Gauthier said he expects Luno to be a “substantial contract for industrial analytics services of many sorts.”
“This is sweet for the distant sensing industry because they not only can sell imagery into the NRO, and potentially imagery into the Space Force, but then they may also sell analytics to the NGA, combatant commands or any warfighting element that needs answers as a substitute of raw data.”