June 7, 2019 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR
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/
March 31, 2023 | International, Land
A new $2.6 billion U.S. military aid package that could include air surveillance radars, anti-tank rockets and fuel trucks for Ukraine's fight against Russia is expected to be announced as soon as Monday, three U.S. officials said on Friday.
October 21, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security, Other Defence
Mark Pomerleau WASHINGTON — On the heels of its capstone March report, the Cyberspace Solarium Commission has released a detailed follow-up with recommendations for how to secure the information and communications technologies supply chain. The commission is a bipartisan organization created by Congress in 2019 to develop a multipronged U.S. cyber strategy. It delivered a report in March, advocating for multiple cyber deterrence efforts. The whitepaper, released Monday, is one of several add-ons to the original report that go into greater depth on a particular topic or recommendation from the March report. This specific whitepaper solely focuses on the recommendation that Congress should direct the U.S. government to develop and implement a strategy for the information and communications technology industrial base to ensure more trusted supply chains and the availability of critical information and communications technologies. The whitepaper frames in stark terms that the United States lacks a strategy vis-a-vis China. “Over the past two decades, China has mobilized state-owned and state-influenced companies to grab a dominant position in markets for several emerging technologies, including the market for telecommunications equipment,” the report noted. “This is no accident but rather the result of a concerted, strategic effort by the Chinese government to capture these markets through a mix of government-led industrial policy; unfair and deceptive trade practices, including state-led intellectual property theft; the manipulation of international standards and trade bodies; a growing network of influence built on the back of diplomatic and trade negotiations; and significant investments in research and development in ICT.” As a result, the whitepaper is the commission's effort to help lay out a strategy for the government to better compete in this space, become less reliant upon manufacturing and resources in Asia, and thus spur greater security. “We're doing a lot but we lack a north star or a strategic approach that weaves or stiches it all together,” Robert Morgus, senior director for the commission, told C4ISRNET ahead of the whitepaper's release. “Without that north star, U.S. federal government efforts are uncoordinated.” The paper lists a five-pronged strategy to build trusted supply chains: Identify key technologies and equipment through government reviews and public-private partnerships to identify risk. Ensure minimum viable manufacturing capacity through strategic investment. Protect supply chains from compromise through better intelligence, information sharing and product testing. Stimulate a domestic market through targeted infrastructure investment, and ensure the ability of companies to offer products in the United States similar to those in foreign markets. Ensure global competitiveness of trusted supply chains, including American and partner companies, in the face of Chinese anti-competitive behavior in global markets. Moreover, the paper lists a series of recommendations to achieve the strategy, which include a variety of ways to streamline information sharing and efforts that could be taken within the federal government. The report couches supply chain security in both economic and national security terms, which Morgus noted cannot be decoupled. “The simple fact that we aren't competing with China on that front creates that security issue. ... The economic issue here is leading to a national security and a cybersecurity issue, and the two issues really can't be disentangled,” he said. “The fact that we don't have trusted suppliers or a robust network of trusted suppliers that can compete has created a security issue where we are reliant on Chinese manufacturing or companies with manufacturing presence in China, which is a potential security issue from the trustworthiness and the availability of those goods and services.” Among one of the key pillars of the strategy to build a stronger supply chain, the report suggests greater intelligence sharing between allies and partners to disseminate intelligence on risks, which is also beneficial to the private sector. The paper recommends Congress direct the president to create or designate a national supply chain intelligence center that would integrate supply chain intelligence efforts from across the government with other members of the public and private sectors. It would also serve as the shared knowledge center for threats to the supply chain. https://www.c4isrnet.com/cyber/2020/10/19/cyber-solarium-commission-outlines-recommendations-for-strengthening-the-supply-chain/
September 14, 2020 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR
By: Joe Gould WASHINGTON ― Human fighter pilots, your jobs are safe for now. Weeks after an artificial intelligence algorithm defeated a human pilot in a simulated dogfight between F-16 jets, the Pentagon's director of research and engineering for modernization said Thursday at the Defense News Conference that it's more likely an AI will team with military pilots than replace them. “I don't see human pilots being phased out, I see them being enhanced, not physically, but I see their work, their effectiveness being enhanced by cooperation with artificial intelligence systems,” said Mark Lewis, who also serves as the acting deputy undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. The AlphaDogfight Trials in August marked the finale of the Pentagon research agency's AI air combat competition. The now-notorious algorithm, developed by Heron Systems, easily defeated the fighter pilot in all five rounds that capped off a yearlong competition hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ― which is overseen by Lewis and the Defense Department's research and engineering shop. “The key takeaway from that was the artificial intelligence system did so well because it wasn't so concerned about self-preservation, it was willing to do things that a human pilot wouldn't do. And that's the advantage of artificial intelligence,” Lewis said. “I think the real answer is teaming AI with a human for the best combination of both. So I'm pretty confident we're going to have human pilots into the future.” The AlphaDogfight Trials were a subset of the Air Combat Evolution program, or ACE, which is one of a few DARPA efforts exploring human-machine teaming, agency spokesman Jared Adams said in an email. ACE is using human-machine collaborative dogfighting to increase trust in combat autonomy, and the goal is for it to scale to more complex multi-aircraft scenarios to pave the way for live, campaign-level experimentation. Fiscal 2023 will see the first in a yearlong series of trials using tactical fighter-class aircraft (currently L-39 trainers), with safety pilots on board to assist in case of trouble. Those pilots would be given “higher cognitive level battle management tasks while their aircraft fly dogfights,” all while sensors gauge the pilot's attention, stress and trust in the AI, Adams said. DARPA foresees a single human pilot serving as a mission commander in a manned aircraft, orchestrating multiple autonomous, unmanned platforms that would all be engaged in individual tactics. ACE would ultimately deliver that capability. “ACE, therefore, seeks to create a hierarchical framework for autonomy in which higher-level cognitive functions (e.g., developing an overall engagement strategy, selecting and prioritizing targets, determining best weapon or effect, etc.) may be performed by a human, while lower-level functions (i.e., details of aircraft maneuver and engagement tactics) is left to the autonomous system,” Adams said. “In order for this to be possible, the pilot must be able to trust the autonomy to conduct complex combat behaviors in scenarios such as the within-visual-range dogfight before progressing to beyond-visual-range engagements.” In announcing the future trials using tactical aircraft on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said: “AI's role in our lethality is to support human decision-makers, not replace them.” “We see AI as a tool to free up resources, time and manpower so our people can focus on higher-priority tasks and arrive at the decision point, whether in a lab or on the battlefield, faster and more precise than the competition,” he added. But Esper warned that both Russia and China were pursuing fully autonomous systems, and drew a distinction between them and what he described as the U.S. military's ethically guided approach to AI. “At this moment, Chinese weapons manufacturers are selling autonomous drones they claim can conduct lethal targeted strikes,” he said. “Meanwhile, the Chinese government is advancing the development of next-generation stealth UAVs, which they are preparing to export internationally.” https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/09/10/ais-dogfight-triumph-a-step-toward-human-machine-teaming/