NGA Says It Wants Small Businesses. The Contract Structure Says Otherwise.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency wants to buy satellite intelligence from small businesses in weeks, not years. The delivery orders it has already issued suggest the path to get there still runs through established aerospace companies that already hold government intelligence contracts.
Deputy Director Brett Markham told the 2026 GEOINT Symposium on May 3 that NGA has established a Rapid Capabilities Office charged with cutting acquisition timelines from years or months down to weeks or days, responding to a Trump administration executive order on expanding commercial technology adoption. He announced a small business collider event in June at the agency's St. Louis campus and an industry day in July at its Springfield, Virginia headquarters. "We are constantly surveying the marketplace for innovative capabilities," Markham said.
The commercial satellite market has expanded faster than the procurement system designed to buy from it. More than 13,000 satellites are currently in orbit, a number expected to rise sharply by the end of the decade, producing far more commercial imagery and analytics than the traditional defense intelligence supply chain was built to absorb. Luno is NGA's roughly $500 million multi-vendor program designed to buy finished intelligence products (change detection, facility monitoring, human activity analysis) rather than raw satellite data. Luno A covers infrastructure monitoring; Luno B covers human domain and situational awareness.
The delivery orders under that program tell a specific story about who is actually winning work. BlackSky, a geospatial intelligence company, received a $24.4 million order for facility monitoring under Luno A. Ursa Space Systems, a commercial radar analytics firm, received a $21 million order for maritime intelligence under Luno B. Planet Labs, a satellite imagery company, recently won a $12.8 million maritime intelligence contract under Luno B: its first prime win under the program.
Planet Labs' win illustrates both the promise and the limits of NGA's small-business messaging. New entrants can break in, but in specific categories and through existing relationships rather than independently. The Luno B program was structured as a competitive solicitation under federal acquisition rules with one small business reserve slot, a mechanism that sets aside one contract position for a qualifying small business rather than redesigning the evaluation criteria to lower barriers for firms without a defense prime track record.
The RCO's weeks-or-days acquisition target is the real test of whether the outreach events can produce actual new entrants rather than reinforce relationships with primes who already hold slots. The solicitation structure governing Luno B was designed around the defense prime ecosystem, not around lowering barriers for new commercial players.
NGA is also rebuilding its technical workforce after reductions tied to last year's government-wide DOGE efficiency push. Roughly 1,000 applicants attended a recent hiring event in Springfield, with several hundred offers extended, and a similar event planned for St. Louis has already drawn more than 1,000 expressions of interest, Markham said. The hiring push and the contracting push are separate tracks, but they reflect the same structural problem: the people and companies with the capabilities NGA needs are increasingly located outside government, and the procurement and hiring machinery is still catching up to that reality.