DENVER \u2015 The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has awarded three new contracts to providers of commercial satellite data, a senior spy satellite agency official said today.<\/p>\n
Pete Muend, the head of NRO\u2019s Commercial Systems Program Office, told the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation\u2019s annual GEOINT Symposium here that latest awards under the agency\u2019s Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO) contract vehicle have gone to:<\/p>\n
Both Earth Daily and Pixxel are brand new providers, whereas ICEYE has a previous<\/a> NRO contract to provide synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m really eager to see where that goes as they kind of march through that process \u2014 first more modeling and simulation, and then as they actually have on-orbit capability, being able to really acquire some of that on-orbit data to really provide that value, and have that grow over time,\u201d Muend said.<\/p>\n NRO launched <\/a>the new CSO contract vehicle with a request for proposals last July and made the first three awards in February<\/a>. <\/p>\n The CSO process differs from the spysat agency\u2019s previous small-dollar, short-term contracts under the Strategic Commercial Enhancement Broad Area Announcement program, Muend explained, allowing longer contract terms. It also allows companies to offer unsolicited proposals across all phenomenologies for gathering \u00a0intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) <\/a>data from space: electro-optical, SAR, hyperspectral, RF geolocation and LIDAR.<\/p>\n Muend also touched on NRO\u2019s cooperation with the US Space Force with regard to acquisition of commercial ISR during his GEOINT presentation, noting that his office strives to provide data that fits the requirements of the service\u2019s Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Tracking or TacSRT<\/a>\u00a0program. <\/p>\n