NRO has Signed Historic Contracts with Several Commercial Satellite Service Providers

The US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) recently announced that it has awarded contracts with a potential value of billions of dollars to Blacksky，Maxar and Planet three commercial satellite image data service providers. This action not only reflects the growing dependence of the US military and intelligence community on commercial data, but also indicates that commercial data may occupy half of the Geospatial Intelligence field of the US intelligence community in the next decade. Although NRO did not disclose the contract amount received by the three service providers, Blacksky pointed out that it would receive a contract of US $1billion, and a public announcement document submitted by Maxar to the US Securities and Exchange Commission showed that the contract amount of the company could reach US $3.24 billion at most. In the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the commercial earth observation satellites and UAVs provided by the United States and the West have become the eyes of the sky for the Ukrainian military to monitor the activities of the Russian ground forces, determine high-value targets, evaluate the strike effect, and greatly flatten the gap between the Ukrainian military and Russia. In addition, the US and Western news media, Bellingcat and other open-source intelligence analysis organizations also take the commercial satellite image data as the main basis for tracking the situation of the Russian Ukrainian battlefield and planning the anti Russian information war. In this context, three commercial satellite image service providers, Blacksky, Maxar and Planet, won a "historic" order with a potential value of billions of dollars, which will obviously stimulate more capital to flow into the new track of commercial space data services.