Huge Commercial Satellite Imagery Contracts Awarded
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has awarded two large contracts for commercial satellite imagery to meet U.S. intelligence community needs. DigitalGlobe received a contract worth $3.5 billion and GeoEye received another worth $3.8 billion over ten years, according to an August 6 news release (pdf) from NGA. The contracts “will help meet the increasing geospatial intelligence needs of the Intelligence Community and Department of Defense,” NGA said.
“This is such good news for the commercial satellite imagery industry,” said Mark Brender of GeoEye. “Our government is really moving to ‘outsource overhead’,” he said.
To increase the real and perceived benefit of research funding, funding agencies should develop challenge goals for their extramural research programs focused on the impact portion of their mission.
Without trusted mechanisms to ensure privacy while enabling secure data access, essential R&D stalls, educational innovation stalls, and U.S. global competitiveness suffers.
Satellite imagery has long served as a tool for observing on-the-ground activity worldwide, and offers especially valuable insights into the operation, development, and physical features related to nuclear technology.
This year’s Red Sky Summit was an opportunity to further consider what the role of fire tech can and should be – and how public policy can support its development, scaling, and application.