IonQ‘s Capella Space, Iceye US, and Umbra have received Radar Commercial Augmentation (RCA) sole source contracts from the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) for commercial synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery, the agency said on Wednesday.
The contracts stem from the NRO’s three phased Commercial Radar Capabilities (CRC) study effort, which began in January 2022.
Capella, Iceye US, and Umbra were the only three companies out of an original five that passed CRC’s modeling, simulation, and on-orbit assessments, according to the NRO.
Despite the sole source contracts announced Wednesday, the NRO said that it “remains committed to fostering a competitive commercial marketplace, and we will continue to evaluate emerging radar capabilities through agile acquisition frameworks, such as Commercial Solutions Openings, allowing us to onboard new providers as their technologies mature.”
In July 2024, Eric Jensen, then the CEO of Iceye US, said that plans to establish a program of record for commercial SAR in fiscal 2026 were behind in finishing requirements and identifying funding. Jensen is now the global chief operating officer for the Finland-based Iceye.
Asked on Wednesday about the timing of making commercial SAR an NRO program of record, the agency replied in an email that it “remains committed to leveraging the latest technologies from our commercial providers and will continue to evaluate commercial radar capabilities” based on intelligence community and Pentagon needs but that the agency was “unable to comment further on specific acquisition programs or procurement activities.”
The NRO’s RCA contracts “represent a significant step in the NRO’s strategy to build a more resilient and responsive overhead architecture,” the agency said. “By integrating commercial SAR capabilities with national systems, the NRO increases its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capacity and flexibility, ensuring timely and persistent global coverage. This approach allows the NRO to leverage the rapid innovation occurring in the commercial space sector to augment its cutting-edge space-based intelligence systems.”
The agency’s selection of Iceye US for RCA “reflects growing readiness to leverage commercial remote sensing alongside national systems — a step in maturing commercial radar for the U.S. government that builds on Iceye US’s prior multi-year study contract with the NRO,” the company said on Wednesday. “Iceye US satellites pair rapid tasking-to-delivery timelines — order acceptance to imagery in hours — with the flexibility to capture areas as large as 120,000 square kilometers or at resolutions as fine as 25 cm from the same satellite.”
Umbra said that its one-year contract with two one-year options for the NRO’s RCA builds on the company’s work with the agency’s Commercial Systems Program Office in the last four years during which time the company said it has provided “more than 100,000 images over critical areas of interest to support U.S. operations worldwide.”
Umbra is to open a new 20,000 square foot engineering and production site in Reston, Virginia, early next year. The company’s 50,000 square foot manufacturing plant in the Santa Barbara, Calif., area opened in June last year.
