Demand has grown significantly over the past few years across the Defense Department and federal civil sector for analytic services tied to commercial remote sensing, which is leading the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) to expand its commercial services acquisition efforts in new areas, an agency official said on Monday.
NGA’s pilot Economic Indicator Modeling (EIM) contract, which originally had a $29 million ceiling value over five years following award in August 2021, was tapped out within a year, leading the agency to double the value to $60 million, which is also nearly used up, Frank Avila, deputy director for commercial and business operations, said.
As a result, NGA in January released a solicitation for a new EIM-like program called LUNO A, which is planned to have a ceiling value of $290 million to obtain analytic services from commercial vendors around global economic, environmental, and military activities.
“So, hopefully industry sees that as a demand signal that we’re sending out that vehicle that we’re putting out,” Avila said at the Satellite 2024 conference. “And, at the same time, we’re also looking at developing more of a commercial services acquisition program” to quickly meet demand, he said.
NGA wants to have more than the EIM and LUNO contracting vehicles, he said, adding that this will be an effort to be more “responsive” to customer demands and the pace of industry innovation.
The agency will look at acquisition vehicles such as other transaction authorities and commercial solutions openings, which are designed to quickly get vendors on contract to evaluate technologies and solutions. This way, the larger customer “community” can “kick the tires” on potential solutions that might meet their requirements and at the same time give industry feedback “to help mature some of those technologies to support greater requirements,” Avila said.
The commercial services acquisition program would go beyond the analytics services that are being provided by EIM and that will be provided by LUNO, he said. It will also potentially include new mission sets, he said.
“Especially from the federal and civil sector, as they start looking at what mission sets can be addressed with the solutions that are available today, the type of mission sets will just increase,” he said. “So, in some cases maybe LUNO may not have the scope to address some of the mission sets that we may be getting from them. So, that’s what I mean [by] having different types of vehicles available to be able to address requirements as they come in.”
Contractors competing for EIM task orders are BAE Systems, BlackSky Technology [BKSY], Continental Mapping Consultants, and Royce Geospatial Consultants. NGA expects to select winners for LUNO later this year.