Last month, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) formally ended a commercial radar contract the agency had with PredaSAR, now Terran Orbital [LLAP], the NRO said on Oct. 2.
“PredaSAR did not meet the requirements, such as having a commercial remote sensing satellite on orbit, to move to Stage 2 and its contract ended in August 2023,” the agency said in an email response to questions on which NRO cost and/or technical requirements Terran Orbital had not met.
In January last year, the NRO awarded five commercial radar contracts to Airbus‘ U.S. division; San Francisco-based Capella Space; Finland-based ICEYE’s U.S. division; PredaSAR; and Santa Barbara-based Umbra Lab Inc. (Defense Daily, Jan. 20, 2022).
When reached by phone on Oct. 2 and asked for the current status of Terran Orbital’s commercial radar contract with the NRO, Terran Orbital CEO Marc Bell said that he would look into it. Defense Daily will add any response received from Terran Orbital.
The January 2022 awards came under NRO’s Strategic Commercial Enhancements Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) Framework, announced by NRO Director Chris Scolese in October 2021.
The NRO said that it is pursuing the BAA to buy a range of commercial imagery, including electro-optical, radar, hyperspectral, radio frequency remote sensing, and light and detection ranging (LIDAR) data, and to help providers scale up their capabilities.
Bell said last week that Terran Orbital has found DoD and/or intelligence community users for a set of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) panels that the company had been developing for two planned, but now canceled, PredaSAR demonstration satellites (Defense Daily, Sept. 26).
In an Aug. 9 earnings call last year, Bell said that Terran Orbital was “well along” in building the antennas for the PredaSAR bus and that the intent was to launch the first PredaSAR satellite in the first quarter of this year.
Last October, however, Bell announced the formal transition of Terran Orbital from a SAR data as a service business that was to use a future constellation of 96 PredaSAR satellites to a strategy of selling satellite buses, including to Lockheed Martin [LMT] for the Space Development Agency’s Transport Layer. At the time of the change in strategy, Lockheed Martin took a 33.5 percent stake in Terran Orbital with a $100 million investment to allow Terran Orbital to scale up its building of satellite buses.
All of the equipment built for the PredaSAR satellites “is being reused by other programs because the government’s just not ready for unclassified commercial SAR,” Bell said last week. “There are a handful of people that are trying commercial, and they’re not making money at it.”
In September last year, the NRO awarded study contracts for commercial radio frequency (RF) remote sensing to Denver’s Aurora Insight, Virginia-based HawkEye 360 and Spire Global Inc. [SPIR], Luxembourg’s Kleos Space [KSS], Terran Orbital, and Umbra (Defense Daily, Sept. 28, 2022).
The NRO confirmed on Oct. 2 that it still has an RF study contract with Terran Orbital.