Spaceflight Industries has announced that BlackSky has been awarded a two-year $16.4 million cost-plus-prime contract with the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) to develop and deliver a cloud-based geospatial intelligence broker platform — the brokering platform will provide on-demand analytics, collection, and information services from global data sources.

The BlackSky Geospatial Solutions team brings extensive expertise in geospatial intelligence, commercial remote sensing, cloud-based architectures, geospatial analysis, and machine learning to help customers harness the power of global data sources to gain improved situational awareness and actionable intelligence.

BlackSky is a division of Seattle, Washington-based, Spaceflight Industries and serves government and private sector organizations with solutions enabled by the BlackSky platform. Within the platform, users can access BlackSky Spectra’s on-demand imagery service to search, purchase, task, and download visual imagery and multi-spectral data from a global collection network. They can also subscribe to BlackSky Events, the platform’s global event monitoring service that fuses news, social media, industry data services and physical sensor networks to provide early warning and insights on risks, threats, and opportunities that can impact their business.

Brian O’Toole, executive vice president and chief technology officer of BlackSky, commented that this partnership with the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Government stakeholders on the development of leading-edge anticipatory analytics and commercial GEOINT brokering capabilities offers easy access and streamlined delivery of timely and relevant insights about this changing world, essential to faster and more informed decision making. The BlackSky platform combined with the company's world-class solutions team is proving to be a key enabler for accelerating customers’ success.