Do you think governments are alone in producing world-class geospatial intelligence (GEOINT)? Think again. Over the past five years the global market for commercial remote sensing has skyrocketed. The ubiquitous nature of satellite imagery and location-based data has changed the way nations behave at a strategic level. When everyone has access to overhead imagery, how does one use it to their advantage? To maintain their excellence in delivering GEOINT, the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) are now preparing for hybrid remote sensing architectures.
In 2014, just a handful of nations could claim to have a high-resolution commercial imaging company; and most of these companies primarily serviced their nation’s defense and intelligence enterprises. The commercial high-resolution options were Electro-Optical (EO) only and were primarily limited to the Maxar (then DigitalGlobe) WorldView systems in the U.S. and the Airbus Pleiades systems in France. At the same time, a few civil/governmental systems were providing civil Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR) imagery including the TerraSAR-X and Tandem-X systems in Germany; Kompsat systems in South Korea; COSMO-SkyMed systems in Italy; and RADARSAT systems in Canada. Then in 2016, a little start-up called Planet Labs started launching their tiny Dove satellites. Each Dove was the size of a loaf of bread and capable of Earth Observation (EO) imaging at 3-to-5-meter resolution. Planet kept launching Doves until their constellation of more than 150 small satellites could collectively image the entire Earth every day (reference). Planet disrupted the commercial EO market by combining multiple technological advances into a new form factor — the EO small satellite.
Fast forward a few years and by December 2021, NGA was tracking 111 different commercial satellite constellations around the world (73 EO constellations and 38 SAR constellations). Those constellations represent more than 600 individual satellites and by 2030, NGA predicts there will be more than 5,000 remote sensing satellites aloft (see Figure 1). What started in Silicon Valley with a satellite the size of a single loaf of bread has now multiplied across the globe with companies in many countries offering high-quality commercial imagery across EO, SAR, multispectral, hyperspectral, and infrared phenomenologies (reference). Not to mention the radio frequency spectrum collectors as well. Funding for more satellites has not slowed down a bit as Bryce Technologies reported a near doubling of space startup investment dollars from 2018 to 2019 with steady growth (reference). Commercial EO is now well funded by venture capital and public offerings and many of the planned remote sensing satellites are simply waiting for their rides to get off-planet.
While French balloonists and American U-2 spy planes observed foreign militaries from above to better understand the battlefield, today’s remote sensing data is no longer used for military intelligence alone. Satellite imagery has proven useful for improving agricultural land use, urban planning, energy projects, archeology, human mobility, transportation networks, climate science, economic monitoring, and more. Governments and militaries have realized their overt actions will likely be observed and revealed to the world — just look at the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (reference). We are all rushing headlong towards a state of ubiquitous observation. Josef Koller of the Aerospace Corporation has already named the threshold we are about to cross as the “GEOINT singularity” and is measuring our progress (reference).
Recognizing the national strategic importance of a leading space economy and the fact that competitive markets drive the pace of technology innovation, the IC in 2020 helped to change US regulations overseeing commercial remote sensing to encourage greater private investment and risk taking (reference). The Department of Commerce peeled back its technology restrictions so US companies could once again build and operate the best remote sensing systems in the world. Already some new startups have boldly stepped forward by securing NOAA licenses for what would be world-leading tech (reference Umbra article). Now the IC is promoting a strategy of hybridization where the synergy of government and commercial GEOINT capabilities together creates special value. In late 2020, the Director of National Intelligence chartered the IC Commercial Space Council to generate more policy and strategy changes to help achieve this goal (reference).
In 2016, NGA and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) together created what they called the Commercial GEOINT Activity to begin thinking about how to integrate more commercial capabilities into their architectures and operations (reference). By 2018, this entity had blossomed into more formal organizations at both agencies: the Commercial & Business Operations Group at NGA and the Commercial Special Program Office at the NRO. Working together, these two offices are the focal points for the requirements, market research, assessment, acquisitions, and integration of more commercial imagery and geospatial solutions into the IC and DoD. The volume of commercial imagery being purchased by the NRO will soon double what it was in 2020 and NGA is rapidly pursuing more operational solutions that they call “commercial analytic services” (reference).
With the rapid proliferation of imaging systems, the sheer volume of available imagery now overwhelms human-centered exploitation. The answer is to use automated exploitation with algorithms designed for each unique remote sensing data type and each desired type of information. This creates detections of objects and activities that may be of interest to intelligence analysts. The government can do this with its own unique imaging systems, yet as more commercial sensors proliferate, it is likely more efficient to have vendors themselves combine their collection systems with matching algorithms. The result being commercial analytic services where the government can purchase a steady stream of information and use it directly in various intelligence workflows. This is akin to ingesting the ‘box scores’ instead of the ‘game tape’ for all the possible collection systems out there (reference). It instantly adds value to missions requiring change detection, area monitoring, statistical trends, and pattern analysis. NGA has already launched its flagship multi-vendor contract for these services called Economic Indicator Monitoring, or EIM, and it intends to add more (reference). Once companies demonstrate success at deriving and detecting simple physical changes and tagging specific objects in imagery, new algorithms can build on that information to monitor macro trends in economic outputs, climate dynamics, and military activities. Thus begins the ever-increasing diversity of knowledge and insight services that can be delivered (see Figure 2).
For all this to happen, remember that we need a vibrant space economy and risk-taking culture in the US to keep inducing new startups to innovate upon the prior generation of capabilities and continue to push the limits of GEOINT even further. To that end, NGA is collaborating with many companies early, as they bring in new ideas and new service offerings by quickly signing bailment agreements and no-cost contracts (reference). This enables government and industry to start working together immediately to test and evaluate new products and services for their potential mission utility. NGA calls this “climbing the mountain” (see Figure 3). Some of those companies will acclimatize to government needs and get the critical feedback necessary to make the next ‘killer app’ or high-demand analytic service that then gets purchased at scale for operational use. NGA has been signing up 12 companies per year approximately with bailment agreements for this reason and a few of them have made that climb to the top where they are earning revenues. Clearly, working together is starting to pay off and in November 2021, NGA released a new Commercial GEOINT Strategy to unify the many IC and DoD efforts to build upon this early momentum (reference).
The commercial Space economy shows no signs of slowing down. GEOINT will continue to deliver new value to new market sectors with new applications for years to come. As the IC works towards a hybrid Space architecture (reference), NGA is well poised to harness the world-leading technologies and service innovations as they spring forth from scrappy US Space startups. While the US government will no doubt continue to use trusted, long-standing industry partners to build new GEOINT systems to government specs, it is now time to fully embrace the new radical ones, the startups, whose appetite for risk and ability to raise venture capital will bring us even more exciting GEOINT capabilities we have not yet even begun to imagine. The future is to harness both government and commercial solutions; the future is hybrid.
David J. Gauthier is the Director of NGA Commercial & Business Operations & Chair of the IC Commercial Space Council.
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