The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency awarded BlackSky Technology a five-year, up to $290 million contract designated "Luno A" to monitor global economic activity, environmental changes, and military capability using AI-powered satellite surveillance. The contract marks a major escalation in the U.S. intelligence community's reliance on commercial surveillance infrastructure connected to Peter Thiel's investment network.
BlackSky operates 14 satellites in Low Earth Orbit capable of imaging any location on Earth up to 15 times daily at 1-meter resolution. Its proprietary Spectra AI platform uses machine learning and computer vision to automatically detect changes in human activity — identifying aircraft, ships, vehicles, and construction across more than 30 million square kilometers. The system delivers intelligence from satellite tasking to customer within 90 minutes, with no human interaction required.
The Luno A contract is the follow-on to the NGA's $60 million Economic Indicator Monitoring contract (2021), under which BlackSky won six competitive delivery orders. BlackSky has since secured nearly $30 million in Luno A delivery orders including a $24 million facility operational monitoring order and a $5 million AI-enabled change detection order.
What makes Luno A significant beyond its dollar value is its position within a vertically integrated surveillance architecture. BlackSky is a Peter Thiel portfolio company — Mithril Capital (co-founded by Thiel) led the Series B-1 in 2016, participated in the SPAC merger PIPE, and holds 6.6% of the company. Critically, BlackSky maintains a strategic integration with Palantir Technologies (also Thiel-founded), which purchased $8 million in BlackSky stock in 2021. The integration embeds BlackSky's Spectra AI directly into Palantir Foundry, allowing intelligence and military customers to task BlackSky satellites and receive automated intelligence delivery within minutes — creating a seamless space-to-action surveillance pipeline.
With 83% of revenue from U.S. government customers, BlackSky's contract portfolio now includes the $290 million NGA Luno A, the $200 million NGA Luno B (January 2025, shared among 13 vendors), a 10-year NRO Electro-Optical Commercial Layer contract worth up to $1.021 billion (2022), multiple U.S. Space Force Global Data Marketplace contracts, and a sole-source $99 million Air Force Research Laboratory contract for next-generation imaging capabilities (March 2026). The company went public via SPAC merger with Osprey Technology Acquisition Corp. in 2021 at a $1.5 billion valuation; as of April 2026 its market cap exceeds $1 billion.