Via Satellite archive illustration

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) selected 10 companies to compete for task orders under a potential five-year, $290 million contract seeking commercial data and analytic services that monitor and assess global economic, environmental, and military activity. NGA announced the award on Sept. 13.

Airbus Group’s Airbus U.S. Space & Defense business, Booz Allen Hamilton, BlackSky Technologies, BlueHalo, CACI, Electromagnetic Systems, Maxar Intelligence, NV5 Geospatial, Royce Geospatial Consultants, and Ursa Space Systems all won a spot on the Luno A contract.

No task orders have been awarded yet to any of the vendors.

Luno A succeeds the Economic Indicator Monitoring (EIM) contract, which was worth $60 million, and included BAE Systems; Ball Aerospace, which was recently acquired by BAE; BlackSky; Continental Mapping Consultants, which rebranded as Axim Geospatial; and Royce Geospatial.

The products and services demanded under Luno A are in high demand across the government. The original EIM effort was a $29 million pilot in August 2029, but was so successful it was enlarged to $60 million in November 2022. The potential $290 million value of Luno A showcases the sustained and increasing desire for more of these products.

“The contract will leverage industry’s commercial computer vision and artificial intelligence capabilities to augment existing capabilities and will integrate directly into analytic workflows for operational use,” NGA said on Friday. The computer vision and analytics are put against geospatial intelligence data, mostly produces by satellites that remotely monitor Earth.

The Luno A solicitation was released in January. The program will support the larger National System for Geospatial Intelligence, which includes NGA, the intelligence community, the Joint Staff, military departments and combatant commands, international partners, the National Applications Office, and Civil Applications Committee members.

In May, NGA released a solicitation for Luno B, a five-year $200 million effort, that will have a different focus than its sister Luno A effort.

“Luno B will get at domain awareness, human domain awareness, and emerging capabilities,” Devin Brande, director of commercial operations for NGA, told reporters in May during the annual GEOINT conference when he discussed both Luno programs. “Both have an emerging capabilities aspect to them. Whereas Luno A is a little bit more focused on a lot of stuff we were doing in EIM with more computer vision centric facility monitoring, infrastructure monitoring.”

This story was first published by Defense Daily