Up until recently, satellite imagery was the domain of well-funded intelligence services and militaries. These days, a range of commercial actors are filling OSINT social media feeds and reporting with near-real-time updates from their eyes in the skies over Ukraine, Iran, the South China Sea, and wherever else the US government is keeping tabs on.
SkyFi doesn’t have any satellites of its own, but they’re building the software middleman between these satellite companies and the users, including, as of today, America’s elite special operations forces. This morning, SkyFi announced that it has won a prototyping contract with the US Special Operations Command to build a software platform that gives operators faster, in-the-field access to geospatial imagery, including through ATAK.
Eyes in the sky: Up-to–the-minute awareness is important for anyone, but the value of time and reliable information is as critical as it gets for the operators at the tip of the US military’s spear.
“We’re at this inflection point in space over the last couple of years, where there are satellites going up every week, but now it’s like, how do you get it to the edge? How do you get to the users who can make decisions based on it?” SkyFi CEO Luke Fischer told Tectonic. “SOCOM is experimenting with unclassified commercial companies across the board in a very rapid way, because they recognize where commercial space can complement the assets they already have, and how to take advantage of that.”
In the field: Under this new Phase I contract—SkyFi’s first with USSOCOM—the company will develop a prototype “Sovereign Intelligence Platform” for SOCOM, along with an Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK) plugin.
- With SkyFi’s platform, the goal is to allow operators to use the commercial imagery from across SkyFi’s partner ecosystem of over 150 satellite providers to do pre-mission planning, task satellites, access archived imagery, and, “in a future state, apply analytics,” Fischer said.
- He couldn’t confirm the contract value, but it was awarded through the Special Operations Forces Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (SOF AT&L) center.
With the ATAK plug-in especially, this’ll “enable warfighters across the globe to get this technology, literally, in their hands,” he said, and when SOCOM is the user, “speed of information means lethality, and that’s the part that we’re excited to enable those capabilities.”