BlackSky said on October 15 that it had extended an agreement with HEO into a third year, at a seven-figure annual value, putting spare capacity on its imaging satellites to work photographing other satellites. A week earlier it had won a six-figure pilot for Gen-3 imagery with a new international intelligence customer. The executive who leads its United States government engagement used to buy commercial imagery for that government, and he takes the MilSat Symposium stage at Silicon Valley Space Week in October.
Scot Currie is Senior Vice President of US Government Engagement at BlackSky, where he also oversees the company’s development contracts with the government and with strategic partners. He was previously BlackSky’s chief solutions architect, with responsibility for technical solutions and research and development. He joined in 2021 from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, where he led the Source Operations Group, which managed the United States government’s national and commercial geospatial intelligence satellite operations. Earlier he was a program manager for EnhancedView, the agency program that bought commercial satellite imagery from GeoEye and DigitalGlobe. He also held assignments at the National Reconnaissance Office and spent three years in the United Kingdom supporting the Ministry of Defence. He studied business administration as an undergraduate and holds a master’s in systems engineering from George Washington University.
The program bills the session as commercial geospatial intelligence for the battlefield. Of BlackSky’s two October announcements, one covers imagery of the ground and the other imagery of objects in orbit. The HEO agreement began as a six-figure pilot in 2024 and now runs on Gen-2 and Gen-3 imagery tasked through HEO’s own software, returning subsystem identification, anomaly detection and pattern-of-life mapping on objects already in orbit. HEO describes the approach as turning satellites that are already flying into inspection platforms. Will Crowe, HEO’s chief executive and co-founder, said the industry is entering an era in which it must inspect, understand and maintain the infrastructure it has put in orbit, and that pairing the two companies’ systems gives customers that picture without building a dedicated spacecraft for every mission. SatNews reported the Gen-2 version of the arrangement in August last year. The Air Force Research Laboratory awarded BlackSky a contract worth up to $99 million in March for a large optical satellite payload, of which $2.1 million was funded at award with the rest to follow through task orders, and in August the company took a multi-year international defense contract combining Gen-2 and Gen-3 imagery for an undisclosed military customer. The company has not named the customer on either the August contract or the October pilot. Robert Cardillo, who directed the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency from 2014 to 2019, sits on the same panel.
Currie joins “Commercial GEOINT for the Battlefield” on Thursday, October 29, from 10:45 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. in the Hahn Auditorium at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. James Crawford of Privateer Space moderates, and the panel also seats Eduardo Bendek of NASA Ames and SETI, Robert Cardillo of Planet Federal, Matt Jenkins of Vantor and Didi Kuo of the National Reconnaissance Office. The session follows the morning break, and at 11:30 the room turns to a technical brief on nuclear power for satellites.
Silicon Valley Space Week runs Tuesday, October 27 through Thursday, October 29 at the Computer History Museum, with Satellite Innovation across the first two days and the MilSat Symposium across the last two. Currie sits on a forty-five-minute panel on the final morning. BlackSky reports its third-quarter results on November 5.
