How Industry-Government Partnerships Transform NOAA’s POES Satellite Operations And Enhance Global Environmental Monitoring
This month, our team officially completed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Polar Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) Extended Life (EL) program. This groundbreaking collaboration marks the first-ever ‘commercial as a service’ operations for U.S. Government satellites and expanded NOAA’s ability to provide vital global weather data.
Leveraging Commercial Infrastructure For Enhanced Satellite Performance
The three POES satellites were transferred to our commercial ground system in November 2023 and operated for approximately $4.4 million per year, providing automated, lights-out satellite operations on a secure cloud environment, along with dedicated weekday staffing through subcontractor, Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC) Federal. Using our infrastructure and applications, and Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) antennas, the team was able to deliver more data, faster, and at a significantly reduced sustainment cost when compared with the legacy ground architecture.
NOAA’s government-led effort to efficiently extend the POES mission life was achieved, demonstrating the ‘as a Service’ satellite operations concept while adding two operational years of weather data collection. The 20-year-old NOAA-18 vehicle lasted until it experienced an onboard anomaly and was decommissioned on June 6, 2025. Two months later, on August 13, 2025, the 16-year-old NOAA-19 was officially decommissioned. The oldest of the three POES satellites, NOAA-15, was decommissioned on August 19, 2025, after 27 years of valuable service. The extended life approach for the satellites, which were designed to last only 5 years, yielded impressive scientific data and maximized government investment.
We’re proud to participate with NOAA in this first-ever use of a commercial entity performing a previously government-operated, government-controlled activity as a commercial service to extend the life of the POES constellation, proving the viability of satellite operations as a service on a satellite-agnostic, common ground element.
Cloud-Native Solutions: GOCaaS And OrbitXchange
Our cyber-secure Ground Operations Center as a Service (GOCaaS) employs our commercial cloud-native Telemetry, Tracking and Commanding (TT&C), mission planning, and scheduling applications hosted on the Microsoft Azure Government Cloud, ensuring full lights-out automation for optimal efficiency. Additionally, this system connects seamlessly with our OrbitXchange (OX) antenna as-a-service, brokering autonomous satellite contacts through a diverse array of commercial antennas from Parsons and its partners, including KSAT, Viasat’s Real-Time Earth (RET) ground segment service, and Capricorn Space.
Both GOCaaS and OX are versatile solutions that can operate with any satellite as a common ground element. They deliver resilient and cost-effective operations through the proliferated global commercial antenna market with machine-to-machine automated scheduling and execution. POES was the first of four US Government programs to use GOCaaS and OX, with one other in operation and the third and fourth awaiting launch.
Setting the Standard For Future Federal ‘As-a-Service’ Contracts
This was truly a leading effort within the US Government, with the success also being due in large part to NOAA’s leadership, flexibility, and support to the combined Parsons, ASRC, KSAT, and Microsoft execution team. For the our team, working with NOAA on this project was, by far, one of our best customer experiences. NOAA truly embraced change, and they are now leaning forward with commercial-as-a-service operations to operate their other critical Earth and space weather missions while significantly reducing the cost for US taxpayers. The NOAA team, in one sense, was ahead of its time. Approaches like this directly meet the intent of the President’s Executive Order – Ensuring Commercial, Cost-Effective Solutions in Federal Contracts (April 16, 2025).
All spacecraft are capable of being operated by a ground system composed almost entirely of commercial products, or as a commercial service. As with most commercial product lines, our commercial applications are agnostic to the spacecraft, can support any mission, any manufacturer, in any orbit, using any network, and any government or commercial ground antennas, with new programs being onboarded without any software development.