NRO’s strategy to buy satellite imagery shaped by thriving commercial

WASHINGTON — The U.S. satellite imagery industry will soon see the details of a highly anticipated procurement by the National Reconnaissance Office.

The NRO is the U.S. intelligence agency responsible for developing, launching and operating the nation’s spy satellites. It is also the primary acquirer of commercial imagery for the federal government.

The agency in the coming months is expected to launch the Electro-Optical Commercial Layer (EOCL) program, an open competition for satellite imagery products.

The NRO in June issued a draft solicitation for the EOCL procurement. A final request for proposals is being reviewed by the Defense Department and the U.S. intelligence community, and should be released before the end of the year, an NRO spokesman told SpaceNews.

Under this new imagery procurement, the NRO plans to buy products from multiple vendors and move beyond the current single-supplier arrangement that the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency signed more than a decade ago with DigitalGlobe, which is now Maxar Technologies. The NGA in 2017 turned over responsibilities for commercial imagery procurement to the NRO, while the NGA remains the primary buyer of commercial geospatial data analytics.

The NRO is expected to select at least three U.S. suppliers and structure the program with onramps for new providers. The agency also will require vendors to sign “end user license agreements” so imagery can be shared across government agencies without additional licensing fees.

“We reconfigured our next-generation commercial contracts to include pricing that incentivizes innovation and rewards the development of new capabilities,” NRO Director Christopher Scolese said Aug. 24 at the the 36th Space Symposium in Colorado.

The EOCL program is focused primarily on acquiring imagery for military users but will also obtain imagery to help domestic agencies monitor natural disasters, crop production and climate change. “Today’s commercial partners now provide imagery as a service, which allows us to focus on the difficult tasks,” said Scolese.

EOCL TO REPLACE ENHANCEDVIEW

Maxar Technologies is the NRO’s sole supplier of commercial high-resolution satellite imagery under the EnhancedView contract, a deal that dates back to 2010 when NGA selected two imagery providers — 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.

The NRO pays Maxar $300 million a year for access to the former Digital Globe’s WorldView-1, WorldView-2, WorldView-3 and GeoEye-1 satellites, as well as the company’s image archive. EnhancedView was a 10-year deal set to expire in 2020 but when the NRO took over the management of the contract, it added…