The National Directorate of Military Space Intelligence of the United States announced the conclusion of ten-year contracts with BlackSky, Maxar Technologies and Planet Labs to provide commercial satellite images to intelligence, military and federal civilian agencies of the United States. This is reported by SpaceNews.
The transaction amount of Maxar Technologies exceeded $ 3.2 billion. The BlackSky contract includes options worth up to $1 billion. Planet Labs has not yet disclosed the value of its contract. The National Directorate of Military Space Intelligence of the United States assessed this purchase as "the largest work in the history of the agency for the conclusion of contracts for commercial images."
The publication mentions that since 2010, the department has been working under an EnhancedView contract, paying Maxar about $ 300 million annually for access to high-resolution satellite images and the company's image archive. The EnhancedView is now being replaced by the Electro-Optical Commercial Layer (EOCL) agreement common to the three contractors.
In March, SpaceNews reported that SI Imaging Services (SIIS) from South Korea refused to share its own satellite images with the government of Ukraine. The publication notes that it was to this company, as well as Planet Labs, Maxar Technologies, Airbus SAS, BlackSky Global, Iceye, SpaceView and Capella Space, that the Ukrainian Minister of Digital Transformation Mikhail Fedorov had previously asked for satellite data from Ukraine and neighboring countries.
