Photo: National Reconnaissance Office

Last month, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) formally ended a commercial radar contract the agency had with PredaSAR, now Terran Orbital, the NRO said on Oct. 2.

“PredaSAR did not meet the requirements, such as having a commercial remote sensing satellite on orbit, to move to Stage 2 and its contract ended in August 2023,” the agency said in an email response to questions on which NRO cost and/or technical requirements Terran Orbital had not met.

In January last year, the NRO awarded five commercial radar contracts to Airbus‘ U.S. division; Capella Space; Iceye’s U.S. division; PredaSAR; and Umbra Lab. The awards came under NRO’s Strategic Commercial Enhancements Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) framework.

But in October 2022, Terran Orbital shifted its strategy away from providing a commercial business and selling data with PredarSAR to solely manufacturing satellites, not operating its own constellation.

Terran Orbital CEO Marc Bell told Defense Daily last week that Terran Orbital has found DoD and/or intelligence community users for a set of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) panels that the company had been developing for two planned, but now canceled, PredaSAR demonstration satellites.

All of the equipment built for the PredaSAR satellites “is being reused by other programs because the government’s just not ready for unclassified commercial SAR,” Bell said last week. “There are a handful of people that are trying commercial, and they’re not making money at it.”

In September last year, the NRO awarded study contracts for commercial radio frequency (RF) remote sensing to Aurora Insight, HawkEye 360, Spire Global, Kleos Space, Terran Orbital, and Umbra. The NRO confirmed on Oct. 2 that it still has an RF study contract with Terran Orbital.

A version of this story was first published by Defense Daily.