Satellites Series A
Eyes in orbit
Infrastructure Pre-seed
Persistent identity for everything in space.
The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory awarded BlackSky Geospatial Solutions a $99 million IDIQ Small Business Innovation Research Phase III contract on March 6, 2026 to develop a large-aperture optical imaging system testbed for future space-based intelligence missions. Work will be performed in Herndon, Virginia through March 2032. The payload design centers on a segmented primary mirror architecture, precision laser metrology and mirror positioning, and large-format focal plane arrays — technologies that enable very high-resolution imagery at lower cost than traditional monolithic optics. The award is separate from BlackSky's existing Gen-3 constellation and its planned AROS wide-area search satellite.
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