SkySat images show military transports as they arrive and depart, and queues of evacuees as they prepare to board the aircraft during the Afghanistan evacuation in August 2021. (Planet)

WASHINGTON: The National Reconnaissance Office’s highly anticipated call for bids from commercial providers of electro-optical imagery, released today, debuts new “user friendly” contract terms spy agency officials say will ease data sharing — including adjustments made at the behest of industry.

At the same time, NRO has maintained a controversial provision to initiate a new Civil Space Reserve Fleet (CSAF), first revealed by Breaking Defense, that gives the agency the right to permanently commandeer imagery taken during the time when that “fleet” is called up, confirmed Pete Muend, director of NRO’s Commercial Systems Program Office (CSPO). The use of the shutter control provision, he stressed, would be “very rare” and based on a “very high threshold” for determining its necessity.

“That is a concept where the government would be able to gain exclusive access to a provider’s constellation, at least for those parties that were awarded contracts, for a specific area over a very specific point in time when we needed,” he explained. “And that would be a provision that would only be invoked with the approval of the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense, and only when absolutely necessary.”

The official request for proposals (RFP) for what the agency calls its Electro-Optical Commercial Layer (EOCL) of remote sensing satellites was made available today through the agency’s contracting hub website. However, Muend said, it remains limited to to US-owned and operated firms — as previewed in the agency’s draft released this summer. As recently as last month, top NRO and Biden administration Intelligence Community officials pledged to ease the regulatory burdens US commercial remote sensing firms to promote competition domestically and help increase US industry’s global marketshare.

The agency expects “to receive proposals back toward the end of the calendar year, and then in the springtime, we would be looking to award those contracts, assuming a nominal process,” Muend said in a briefing with a small group of reporters.

He would not reveal the spy agency’s budget for the effort, but said that “multiple awards” are planned based on “a marked increase” in the amount of imagery NRO needs to procure to meet growing requirements for imagery and other geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) products.

“NRO and its IC partners are committed to stable and increasing funding for commercial services into the future to support this acquisition,” stated NRO’s press release today.

NRO currently has at least three electro-optical imagery providers under what Muend dubbed “operational” contracts, as opposed to study contracts it has also been using to assess industry capabilities.

On Aug. 17, BlackSky announced that NRO had modified its study contract, and that the company now would be supplying “on-demand satellite imagery through a monthly subscription” in order to transfer it formally into the spy agency’s new EOCL program. 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, worth $300 million, on the company’s long-running “EnhancedView Follow-On (EVFO) Service Level Agreement,” which will run through Aug. 31, 2022.

While Muend didn’t specifically name the companies involved, he said that “those are ongoing contracts under which we buy imagery every single day in support of our users. We do have those contracts for a period of performance. But as we move forward with this RFP and award contracts under there, we will begin to transition the current work and current scope of our current contracts onto onto the new contracts.”

Increased Demand

Muend stressed that “this acquisition represents the next generation of commercial electro-optical imagery, and is based on a set of requirements that has been thoroughly coordinated across the Intelligence Community, [the] Department of Defense and user groups, principally NGA — the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — in its role as the GEOINT functional manger.”

On Sept. 29 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence signed off on a new IC “statement of capabilities,” which was “fully coordinated as well across the Department of Defense,” he said. “And that really set the baseline for the scope of the EOCL contract and ensures that the community needs are clearly understood and prioritized.”

Military commanders, particularly in the Army, have been clamoring for more and more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) data as they pivot to plans for future conflicts with Russia and China under the budding Joint Warfighting Concept. That new way of war, in turn, is premised on the near real-time ability to find, track and kill targets at very long ranges across all domains of warfare — air, land, sea, space and cyberspace — via Joint All Domain Command and Control. 

Streamlined User Access

Muend said that industry provided “some good input” following the release this summer of the draft RFP, and that NRO “took on board” issues raised.

“We did make some some edits and changes to some of the contract documents,” he said. “I would probably focus on the end-user license agreements in particular — there were some some minor changes there. But nothing that I would really characterize as … material to the larger scope of what we’re purchasing.”

NRO last June announced the plan for a new “common family of End User License Agreements (EULAs),” which would be included in the EOCL RFP that itself was originally planned for release late last year. The goal of the new terms, the agency explained at the time, is to speed dissemination of imagery products to users across the US government and ease the ability of users to share the information, including with allies and partner nations.

“These commercial contracts are designed to afford broad levels of shareability and user-friendly license conditions that enable greater access to and utilization of commercial imagery by a diverse user community,” Muend said in the NRO’s announcement.