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WASHINGTON — BlackSky secured a second contract from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) under the Luno A program, the company announced Sept. 16.
The award, confirmed by NGA to be worth $24.4 million, brings BlackSky’s total orders under Luno A to nearly $50 million in just three months. The deal underscores the agency’s push to fold commercial satellite data and artificial intelligence into U.S. national security workflows.
The Luno program — split into Luno A and Luno B — is structured as a five-year, $490 million ceiling indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract. That means NGA can issue task orders over time as needs evolve. Luno A is specifically focused on commercial analytic services powered by machine learning and computer vision, while Luno B will look at directly integrating commercial AI tools into NGA’s own analytic processes.
BlackSky’s first Luno A award, announced in June, was worth $24.4 million and tasked the company with facility and object monitoring — tracking activity around aircraft, ships, ground equipment, and railcars, and identifying changes at high-priority sites.
Under the second award, according to BlackSky, the company will fuse data from its Gen-3 and Gen-2 imaging satellites with other commercial sources to detect areas of the Earth undergoing human-caused change. That includes shifts in natural resources, climate effects, infrastructure growth, and both economic and military activity.
“BlackSky’s automated detection algorithms will monitor anomalies in real-time and report changes in natural resources, climate, infrastructure development and economic and military activity,” the company said in a statement.
Gen-3, Gen-2, and tip-and-cue
BlackSky highlights its third-generation imaging satellites as a differentiator in the increasingly competitive commercial intelligence sector. Gen-3 delivers 35-centimeter resolution imagery with AI-enabled analytics that the company says are available within 12 hours of launch. For NGA and defense customers, the selling point is “warfighter speed” — meaning information arrives quickly enough to support real-time decision-making.
The company also leans heavily on its tip-and-cue architecture, where its second-generation satellites provide wide-area surveillance and “tip” or flag points of interest to higher-resolution Gen-3 satellites. Gen-3 can then be “cued” to collect sharper imagery of a specific site. In practice, this allows Gen-2 to monitor routine activity at facilities while Gen-3 zeroes in on changes to vehicles, equipment or infrastructure. In a military context, the combination provides both situational awareness and tactical-level intelligence.
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