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  February 3, 2021 | International, Aerospace

  La NASA et le Pentagone unissent leurs forces

  Les responsables du gouvernement américain et de l'industrie aérospatiale sont en train de faire tomber les barrières vieilles de plusieurs décennies entre les projets spatiaux civils et militaires, en réponse à l'intensification des menaces étrangères au-dessus de l'atmosphère. Le Pentagone et la NASA unissent leurs forces pour se lancer dans des projets tels que l'exploration de la périphérie de la Lune et la prolongation de la durée de vie des satellites. Ce rapprochement est motivé par les activités menées par Moscou et Pékin visant à mettre à mal les intérêts américains dans l'espace, via leurs armes antisatellites, leurs dispositifs de brouillage et d'autres technologies potentiellement hostiles. Le général John Raymond, chef d'état-major de la Space Force (Force spatiale américaine), a récemment dévoilé un partenariat de recherche avec la NASA visant à protéger les satellites des lasers et des cyberattaques. A terme, selon des responsables gouvernementaux et des dirigeants du secteur, la coopération entre civils et militaires devrait s'étendre à la défense des bases que la NASA a prévu d'installer sur le sol lunaire, ainsi qu'à la protection des opérations commerciales américaines censées y extraire de l'eau ou des minerais. L'Opinion du 2 février 2021 - The Wall Street Journal du 1er février 2021

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  June 7, 2019 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR

  Satellite imagery startups to challenge Maxar for big government contracts

  by Sandra Erwin The NRO is ready to start buying products from new vendors and move beyond the single-supplier arrangement with Maxar Technologies. SAN ANTONIO — The talk of the industry at this week's geospatial intelligence symposium GEOINT 2019 was the National Reconnaissance Office's friendly outreach to commercial suppliers of satellite imagery that for years have felt shut out of the market. A year after taking over the responsibility for buying commercial satellite imagery from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the NRO is ready to start buying products from new vendors and move beyond the single-supplier arrangement that NGA signed nearly a decade ago with DigitalGlobe, which has recently been rebranded by its parent company as Maxar Technologies. Maxar is now the NRO's sole supplier of commercial satellite imagery under the EnhancedView contract, which NGA inked in 2010 with two companies — DigitalGlobe and GeoEye. By 2012, government spending cuts forced NGA to slash its imagery budget by half. EnhancedView subsequently was reduced from more than $7 billion to about $3.5 billion, which led to the merger of the two companies under DigitalGlobe. Now, the NRO pays $300 million a year for access to Maxar's WorldView-1, WorldView-2 and WorldView-3 satellites and its image library under the program it renamed EnhancedView Follow-On. EnhancedView was originally a 10-year deal set to expire in 2020. When the NRO took over the management of the contract, it added three yearly options worth about $300 million a year. NRO officials said extending Maxar's options until 2023 gives the agency sufficient time to transition to a new procurement while continuing to buy imagery from Maxar to ensure there is no disruption in supply. Troy Meink, director of the NRO's geospatial intelligence directorate, announced June 3 that the agency in 2020 will start a new procurement that will include multiple companies. To begin the process, it awarded one-year contracts to Maxar and two other suppliers — Planet and BlackSky — to allow the NRO to study the companies' products and gain insight into the projected size and capacity of their satellite constellations. The NRO calls these “study contracts” because the information they receive from vendors will be used by the agency to examine the companies' abilities to task, collect process and deliver satellite imagery. “These are major efforts to start working with vendors that traditionally we have not, to figure out how they can deliver product and best meet the requirements,” Meink told SpaceNews in a June 3 interview. “We are trying to understand how we can use their capability. Licensing is always a big deal. That's part of the study phase. How could we license that data?” Meink said the opportunities for new players will be significant because the NRO expects it will need more imagery than it currently acquires from Maxar, which means it is likely to spend more than $300 million annually. Meink declined to say how much more. A newly created Commercial Systems Program Office at the NRO will oversee the procurement of imagery. The office's director, Peter Muend, said that after the one-year study phase, the NRO will start planning large procurement awards in late 2020. “We see a dramatic increase in commercial requirements. That means we're going to be buying a lot more commercial imagery than we have in the past,” he said June 4 at GEOINT. While the NRO will acquire the imagery, the NGA will continue to buy the “value added” services and analytics after the imagery is purchased, Muend said. “We are just buying the pixels.” Muend said the NRO has an important relationship with Maxar but “no single provider can meet all of our needs. We'll be on contract with multiple providers in the future.” Maxar will remain a key provider, he said. “We're very much eager to continue to move forward with them but also add Planet and BlackSky, and others beyond that.” Planet and BlackSky were selected because they are able to provide products now whereas other companies have plans to offer imagery but can't yet, Muend said. As the industry matures, the NRO will be open to bringing in more vendors. The study contracts will be a chance for Planet and BlackSky to actually show they are viable competitors. “We want to make sure there's truth in advertising,” Muend said. Both companies have sold imagery and services to the government under narrowly scoped contracts, but the NRO needs to see whether they are able to satisfy the agency's more ambitious demands. The NRO will model the companies' capabilities and analyze how their imagery would be integrated into the agency's ground systems architecture that will combine commercial and government imagery. The NRO also will examine the companies' business plans “so we have confidence in their projections of what they're going to build in the future,” Muend said. In the first part of the study contract, the companies will demonstrate their imagery collection abilities. The second part is more complex and requires the companies to deliver imagery to “user specified downlinks.” This would show whether they are capable of providing imagery to military forces in war zones, for example, which operate tactical ground terminals. During a conflict, the military would need imagery quickly and would not want data to pass through the corporate enterprise architecture. The study contracts will “lay the groundwork for the future,” said Muend. The plan is to focus first on optical imagery. The NRO will consider procuring other data sources from commercial vendors such as synthetic aperture radar, he said, when those products are available. New competitors Both Planet and BlackSky are commercial players that have been eager for a shot at the biggest imagery buy from the U.S. government. When BlackSky was formed in 2015, several of its employees were GeoEye and DigitalGlobe alumni, including chief technology officer Scott Herman. “We're made up of people from the national security community that support national security missions,” Herman told SpaceNews. “We see that as our primary and first vertical that we really want to focus on.” At the same time, BlackSky is rapidly building a commercial business. “The government wants us to have a commercial business,” Herman said. “They don't want us to be solely dependent on the government.” Based in Seattle, BlackSky is owned by Spaceflight Industries, a space services firm. BlackSky has two Earth imaging satellites in operation and plans to have eight in service by year's end, Herman said. The company' long-term goals are to deploy 30 satellites by 2023, and possibly 60 in the years after, depending on the market demand. BlackSky supplies high-revisit imagery but primarily sees itself as a provider of global monitoring and alerting services that combine pictures — taken by its own satellites and other companies' satellites — with other sources of intelligence such as social media, news and other data feeds. “We are not just a satellite company,” said Herman. “We build satellites to support our global monitoring.” BlackSky's foreign military customers have described the company's service as “NGA in a box,” Herman said. San Francisco-based Planet has been making modest inroads into the defense and intelligence market. In March, the NGA renewed its third contract since 2016 with Planet, extending the agency's subscription access to daily imagery over select areas of the Earth. “We're excited” about the NRO contract, Robbie Schingler, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Planet, said in a statement. Schingler and other former NASA scientists founded Planet Labs in 2010 with the goal of providing universal access to satellite Earth imaging. It makes small, low-cost satellites and operates the world's largest constellation of commercial imaging satellites, with 140 currently in orbit. The head of Planet's federal business, Jen Marcus, told SpaceNews the company is developing new analytics products using artificial intelligence, and is upgrading satellites with new cameras to satisfy demand for higher resolution pictures. Marcus said the company will remain primarily a commercial business but does want to increase its footprint in defense and intelligence. In the future Planet is looking to become a vertically integrated imagery and analytics company, said Marcus. “We think there's a big value and efficiency in vertical integration.” Despite the competitive pressures from new players, Maxar executives said they are confident the company will remain a key provider of imagery to the U.S. government. “For nearly 20 years, Maxar has been a trusted partner of the U.S. government,” Maxar CEO Dan Jablonsky said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing to work with the NRO as they increasingly adopt commercial imagery.” Tony Frazier, Maxar's executive vice president of global field operations, told SpaceNews the company has committed $600 million to building a new constellation of satellites, WorldView Legion, that would be smaller and image the Earth at faster rates than its legacy spacecraft. Legion will start launching in 2021 in anticipation of future government demands for high revisit imagery, Frazier said. The company has not yet revealed how many satellites it will build, although an FCC filing indicated it would be as many as 12. Culture change at NRO The commercial imagery procurement is viewed as a sign of a cultural shift at the secretive NRO. Meink said a desire to buy products from the market instead of developing government-owned systems is just common sense, given the massive investments made by the private sector in satellites and launch vehicles. Muend said the NRO is changing but not radically. “When we first assumed responsibility for commercial imagery some folks worried that we wouldn't do it justice,” he commented. “I feel we have done the right things. We are having a deliberate discussion to make sure we buy commercial imagery everywhere we can, and only build national systems where commercial systems don't exist.” There is a real effort to increase openness in “how we interact with providers,” said Muend. The agency will be watching developments in the industry as it figures out a procurement strategy for commercial imagery and other types of data. “We're operating on the information that we have now,” said Muend. “We recognize that what we're setting up now is not the final answer.” https://spacenews.com/satellite-imagery-startups-to-challenge-maxar-for-big-government-contracts/

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  May 29, 2020 | International, Naval

  British-Spanish naval team gunning for another go at revamped UK carrier-support program

  By: Andrew Chuter LONDON — Spanish shipbuilder Navantia has formed a joint venture with Northern Ireland's Harland & Wolff to pitch for an upcoming program to build up to three logistics ships to support the Royal Navy's new Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers. The Anglo-Spanish partnership, known as Team Resolute, has been announced as expectations grow that the British Ministry of Defence is preparing to reopen a competition to build two, or maybe three, ships capable of delivering ammunition, dry stores and spares in a requirement known as the Fleet Solid Support program. The MoD pulled the plug on the competition late last year claiming the bids did not represent value for money. With the competition poised to be restarted around September, Team Resolute is the first to show its hand. Navantia, one of Europe's leading shipbuilders, and Harland & Wolff have been working together for a while under a memorandum of understanding but the two have now firmed that up into a joint venture agreement as the MoD prepares to restart with a new procurement strategy. The third player in the Team Resolute line-up is British naval design company BMT. Although not a joint venture member, BMT will participate as a subcontractor providing the design. The company worked with Navantia in the original competition. The design house has built a reputation in recent years of providing designs to navies around the world, including oilers for Britain and multi-role logistics ships for Norway, both based on its AEGIR design. For Harland & Wolff, the Belfast yard famous for building the Titanic, it's the latest move in an effort to revive fortunes after the company almost went out of business last year before current owners InfraStrata acquired the operation. InfraStrata, a small British company looking to develop a huge underground gas storage facility just up the coast from Belfast, plans to use Harland & Wolff to undertake much of the fabrication work required on the energy program as well as seek to build a credible shipbuilding and support business. John Wood, CEO of InfraStrata, said the partnership with Navantia could open up the possibility of challenging a status quo which has seen BAE Systems and Babcock dominate the maritime sector here. “This partnership has the capability to disrupt the UK defence shipbuilding and through-life support duopoly that currently exists, as well as providing much needed competition in the defense sector to ensure optimum value for taxpayer money and guaranteed delivery," said Wood. “The Fleet Solid Support program gives us the opportunity to take the expertise in depth that Navantia and BMT have in order to put together a really strong offering based on a best-value-for-money strategy," he said in a telephone interview with Defense News. The yard only employs 130 people at present but Wood said there was plenty of expertise available not least among the 1,200 skilled staff who were laid off at Harland & Wolff prior to the InfraStrata acquisition. Navantia and a British group calling itself TeamUK – led by Babcock and including BAE Systems, Cammell Laird and Rolls-Royce – were the two contenders competing the final stages of the Fleet Solid Support program when the MoD called a halt to the competition amid a growing controversy over the fact that the competition had been opened to foreign bidders and not reserved for local companies. The British government claimed its was acting under European Union regulations as the support vessels were not warships. Britain has now left the European Union but remains subject to its rules and regulations while the two sides try to negotiate a trade deal. Now the MoD is preparing to recompete the requirement, which could be worth approaching $1.9 billion if all three ships are purchased for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, the support arm of the Royal Navy. A spokesperson for TeamUK said the group was formed to deliver prosperity benefits for the local economy. “We look forward to understanding the updated requirements when the Ministry of Defence announces their future plans for this procurement process,” said the spokesperson. Babcock and BAE dominate the shipbuilding business in the UK and have significant contracts building the Type 31 and Type 26 frigate programs, respectively. Few outside the government know whether the new invitation to negotiate will leave the door open to foreign bidders and what the requirement will actually look like. Some analysts think the damage the Covid-19 crisis has done to the economy should rule out foreign bidders, giving priority to high local content to boost jobs and skills. The conundrum is, though, that as a result of the virus, the MoD is likely to have less money rather than more in future budget deliberations, putting even greater pressure on finding the best value for money solution. Wood says he is open-minded about which way the MoD jumps on the issue of foreign bidders. “Who knows where this will go. They are looking for value for money. What we are saying is they can have the best of both worlds with some outside influence from Navantia, a leading shipyard that has massive pedigree, and local company BMT supporting H&W, which has the best facilities for this kind of project in the UK. If we gear up for an international competition we are confident we can come through and put a credible bid on the table. If it's UK bidders only, we think we can do the same,” said Wood. Infrastrata's CEO said a manufacturing role for Navanti has not been ruled out. “There could be workshare going to Spain. There could be components or blocks coming from Spain, but the agreement we have is to do the majority of the work in the UK. It's really about coming up with a project that fits the delivery schedule. Until we get the timelines nothing is ruled in and nothing ruled out. The key fundamental is it's a British cooperation, with the ability to reach back into Navantia,” he said. The executive said the plan was to spread the work beyond Harland & Wolff into other parts of the UK. “We are looking at opportunities in the UK on fabrication. We may also look at another acquisition in the UK to spread the work wider,” he said. Save the Royal Navy, a well regarded online group campaigning to reverse the decline of the Britain's naval forces, speculated recently that rather than buying two or three large Fleet Solid Support ships the MoD may look at altering the requirement and buying several smaller, cheaper, multi-role logistics ships as part of a wider update to British maritime support requirements. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2020/05/28/british-spanish-naval-team-gunning-for-another-go-at-revamped-uk-carrier-support-program/