WASHINGTON: When commercial imaging startup BlackSky launches six satellites, now scheduled for as early as next week, the company will be able to offer hourly pictures of most major population areas, says Peter Wegner, the firm’s chief technology officer.
The launch on a Rocket Lab Electron will bring BlackSky’s constellation of Gen-2 satellites, each with a one-meter resolution, up to 14 total. The Gen-2 birds are manufactured by Seattle-based LeoStella, a partnership between BlackSky and French-based multinational company Thales-Alenia Space.
“That’s a really important business milestone for us,” Wegner told Breaking Defense, noting that the goal of 14 satellites was originally set for next year. “We’ve accelerated by about six months.”
While that milestone may not be the causal factor, BlackSky yesterday announced that the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has modified its study contract for provision of “on-demand satellite imagery through a monthly subscription” in order to transfer it formally into the spy agency’s new Electro-Optical Commercial Layer (EOCL) program.
NRO in June issued a draft request for proposals (RFP), first obtained by Breaking Defense, for the EOCL program, but has received pushback from industry and other government agencies on the issues of shutter control and foreign company participation. The agency originally had planned to issue an official RFP late last year, but is now looking at late this summer or early fall.
Meanwhile, NRO’s Commercial Systems Program Office has been modifying its existing “study contracts” with commercial EO imagery providers, to transfer them to a formal status under the EOCL. On July 15, San Francisco-based startup Planet announced that NRO has “extended its contract with Planet Federal to provide continued access to Planet’s Dove and SkySat imagery.” On Aug. 4, Maxar Technologies announced that NRO has exercised the second of three, one-year options on the company’s long-running “EnhancedView Follow-On (EVFO) Service Level Agreement,” which will run through Aug. 31, 2022.
Wegner, who spoke to Breaking Defense just before the NRO announcement, understandably was unwilling to discuss the NRO draft RFP. But it is clear that BlackSky’s business plan is heavily focused on NRO and its sibling agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), as well as the military services.
“Our whole business premise is about real-time geospatial intelligence,” he said. “And we really view ourselves, not as a space company, not as a satellite company, but as a geospatial intelligence company that uses satellite data to provide that real-time insight into changes in the planet.”
Wegner explained that the firm garners real-time imagery from its satellites, then “overlays that with all kinds of other data streams we’re pulling in — about a million data sets a day from things like news media, social media, weather reports, earthquake reports, all these things that interface.”
Further, the company is already working under a Defense Innovation Unit contract to provide the Army with geospatial intelligence from its planned Gen-3 satellites. Wegner says the Gen-3 system will have a 50cm resolution, and once the full constellation of 30 is on orbit, a half-hour revisit rate.
The company signed the multi-year contract with DIU in January to be part of the Army’s Tactical GEOINT (TacGEO) prototype program, with a demo flight slated for next year, according to BlackSky CEO Brian O’Toole, writing in Milsat Magazine.
Change Detection
The more frequent and more highly detailed imagery will be coupled with “really building out” the rest of its “global intelligence data set” so “that we can start understanding change in real time on a global scale,” Wegner explained.
Change detection is one of the holy grails for NRO, the intel community, and the Pentagon as they seek ways to rapidly detect and fix targets deep in Russian and Chinese territory. The ability to amalgamate real-time or near-real-time geospatial data from multiple sources and rapidly disseminate it is at the heart of DoD plans for Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2). And JADC2 is one of the foundational capabilities for enabling the Pentagon’s masterplan for a new American way of war, All Domain Operations, embedded in the Joint Warfighting Concept.
“What’s going to be really fundamentally different about what BlackSky is bringing is this very high degree of revisit and temporal change, right, the ability to see change in real time,” he said. “And now we’re able to just really understand change in facilities and economic activity in ways that really have not been visible before. And that’s going to start allowing us to get insights into things, … establishing these patterns of life that are the basis for understanding change. And that’s where I think the intelligence communities will be able to jump on top of what we’re doing.”
Wegner noted that already “roughly 70%” of the company’s business is with governments, both US and foreign.
Other customers include non-governmental agencies, with BlackSky in July announcing its partnership with Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and Janes media company to monitor the pattern of life at Iran’s top secret Natanz nuclear facility. (They produced a cool YouTube video, too.)
While hesitating to jump into the ongoing debate about the future division of roles for gathering intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) data from space, Wegman noted that he believes Space Force and Space Command both will eventually be involved.
“I think long term we will see an element of this kind of ISR mission move, certainly, into US Space Command. They’re the space warfighting command, so they’re gonna have a central part of this,” he said. “And then certainly Space Force, as an organizing, training and equipping agency today, is going to also have to have some responsibility to ensure that these capabilities are delivered to the operators.”