Taylor Jordan Puts a $2.35 Billion Price on NOAA’s New Commercial Data Vehicle.

By Nick David, Editorial Lead, SatNews

Taylor Jordan, NOAA’s assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction, told a Paris conference on Sept. 14 that the agency’s new commercial data contract carries a ceiling of $2.35 billion over 10 years. That figure appears nowhere in NOAA’s solicitation or its award announcements.

Jordan, who also directs the Office of Space Commerce, gave the number in a fireside chat at World Space Business Week, three days after NOAA named the companies selected for the vehicle. “We have our new space-based environmental monitoring, IDIQ, and it has a two and a half billion dollar ceiling,” he said. A few minutes later his interviewer, Thomas Dorame of the Space Foundation, came back to it with a slightly different number: “So you mentioned a pretty big number there. You said $2.35 billion.” Jordan took it up without correcting him. “So the $2.35 billion ceiling, my intent is to use all of that money for task orders under the 10-year IDIQ. So it is going to be for 10 years.”

NOAA’s public materials confirm the structure and not the money. Space-Based Environmental Monitoring (SBEM) is the fifth and final domain of ProTech 2.0, joining Satellites, Fisheries, Oceans and Weather. Its IDIQ runs from Sept. 1, 2026, to Aug. 31, 2036, as a five-year base with a five-year option. SBEM covers seven data categories, and 14 companies were selected; one category, infrared sounders, drew no selections. The awardees are BAE Systems, Care Weather Technologies, Ethereal Space, Hydrosat, ICEYE US, Muon Space, PlanetiQ, Precursor SPC, SpaceX, Spire Global, Tomorrow.io, Tropical Weather Analytics, Umbra Lab and Weather Stream. On stage, Jordan put the count at “like 15 different vendors.”

The SBEM solicitation cites a single ceiling: the $8 billion shared across all five ProTech 2.0 domains. A $2.35 billion sub-ceiling fits comfortably inside that total, though NOAA has not stated one for this domain.

What SBEM succeeds

Jordan framed the scale against the vehicle that came before. “The previous IDIQ for commercial data was a five-year IDIQ before this,” he said. “And it had a ceiling of $50 million. So we are really turning the keys here to change the way we do business in space.”

The closest match in NOAA’s records is Radio Occultation Data Buy II (RODB-2), awarded in March 2023 to PlanetiQ and Spire with a combined ceiling of $59,312,954 and a five-year ordering period that runs to March 26, 2028. That contract remains open, so the new vehicle succeeds it without shutting it down. Measured against RODB-2, the vendor pool has grown from two companies to 14 and the ceiling roughly 40-fold, though RODB-2 bought a single data type and SBEM spans seven.

NOAA placed the first task order under SBEM on Sept. 18, and it bought the same data RODB-2 did. The three two-year base awards total $67,053,698 for radio occultation: $33,158,160 to Spire Global, $28,413,038 to PlanetiQ and $5,482,500 to Ethereal Space. Spire and PlanetiQ deliver from Dec. 1, 2026, to Dec. 1, 2028; Ethereal Space starts Jan. 5, 2027. The awards also carry surge options. PlanetiQ puts the potential value of its contract at $47.3 million and Spire at about $66 million, which would take the order to about $119 million before any options on Ethereal’s contract. Against a $2.35 billion ceiling, the base awards commit under 3%, and the order stays near 5% even with those options exercised.

Jordan was candid that current spending does not approach it. “We already spend over $50 million per year on space-based commercial data buys,” he said. “So if you do that for 10 years, that’s $500 million. If you mix in our other commercial data buys that are in situ or terrestrial, that’s another $50 to $100 million. So we are, per year, NOAA is already spending about $100 million on commercial data buys. I intend to increase that over the coming years. And I do think if we get to $100 or $200 million, we’re going to eat up that ceiling.”

Spread evenly, $2.35 billion over 10 years comes to $235 million a year. Space-based commercial data, the only spending this vehicle can absorb, runs a little above $50 million a year today, so filling the ceiling implies close to a fivefold increase. Even $200 million a year, the top of Jordan’s range, adds up to $2 billion over a decade; using the full ceiling requires spending to keep climbing past that.

The contract mechanics under the number

Jordan described three structural changes beneath the headline figure. Contracts get longer: “we’re going to be buying longer, we’re going to have longer contracts, multi-year contracts.” Task orders can be stacked: “we’re going to ensure that we can stack different task orders on top of each other so we can surge demand whenever we need to.” And the vehicle stays open after award: “It’s not just a one-off… If you’ve launched and you’re in orbit, don’t worry. Next year we’ll get to you and we’ll consider you. Now we are having continuous on-ramping of new technologies.”

On-ramping is the change operators will feel first. Under a closed award, a company that reaches orbit after the window shuts waits years for the next competition; under SBEM, it can compete the following year. NASA runs its commercial Earth observation buys the same way; in July it added Kuva US to its $476 million Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition on-ramp contract.

On data rights, Jordan claimed a global lead. “I think we are being the most forward leaning for redistribution rights in the entire world. Whenever we ask companies to sketch out what that looks like, we tell them come to us with four or five different scenarios in which a data redistribution right could exist.” He tied the approach to vendor viability: “these companies can continue to operate with NOAA as either an anchor tenant or not the only customer. Because if we do tend to give the data away for free, that can limit the utility of a commercial business model.”

Buying commercial data against building satellites

Speed is the rationale Jordan gave. “A government satellite system can take five, seven years to build and deploy, and these commercial actors are going much faster. Their timescales are two to three years.” Ninety percent of the data going into a weather forecast, he said, comes from space-based assets.

He offered a cost comparison and qualified it in the same breath. “If you compare that to some of our government-built satellite systems like our JPSS or our GOES, those have a lifecycle cost for four satellites of anywhere between $15 or $20 billion. And it’s not an apples to apples comparison.” The caveat matters because NOAA still needs its own fleet: “some of the private sector companies need to calibrate and validate their data based off the government satellite infrastructure.” The agency “will not be doing away with its government system.”

The risk he named himself

Asked for the downside, Jordan answered directly. “The risk and the downside is that commercial companies will not be ready when the government says go. And that’s always been the case.” He spelled it out: “If NOAA puts out a task order under this new IDIQ for a specific type of data, whether that’s IR, microwave, or radio occultation, and a commercial company says, yes, but I won’t be there when you need me to be there, that’s the risk.” Infrared, the first example he reached for, is the one SBEM category that drew no selections.

The risk he described falls on NOAA: a task order is only useful if a company can deliver when it is issued. SBEM’s hedge is breadth: 14 vendors where RODB-2 had two, and continuous on-ramping to add more, including in infrared, where it has none yet.

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About the Author

A storyteller at heart, Nick David covers space policy, satellite markets, defense, and the technologies reshaping how humanity operates beyond Earth. With a background in creative direction, brand strategy, and editorial storytelling, he brings a modern lens to complex subjects and a relentless curiosity about what comes next.