Spire Global Wins $28 Million NOAA Hyperspectral Satellite Contract

Spire Global (SPIR ) has been awarded a two-year, $28 million contract by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to advance hyperspectral microwave sounding technology toward operational weather forecasting, the company announced on August 26, 2026. The award moves the program out of data evaluation and into hardware: Spire will build and qualify a matured satellite and hyperspectral microwave sounder payload through flight readiness, with operational capability targeted to begin no later than 2030.

The contract is the largest single NOAA award the Vienna, Virginia-based company has disclosed this year, and it is hardware work, not a data subscription. Under the agreement, Spire will use its existing technology stack to build and qualify the satellite and payload, tailored to an orbit designed to support NOAA’s forecasting needs. The system will also let the agency analyze how hyperspectral microwave observations affect numerical weather prediction and how resilient the measurements are to radio frequency interference.

“Hyperspectral microwave sounding has the potential to change what’s possible in weather forecasting,” said Theresa Condor, Chief Executive Officer at Spire Global. “By bringing this advanced capability to a commercial satellite platform, we can deliver richer observations of the atmosphere at the scale and speed needed to make a meaningful difference in forecasting.”

The sensor at the center of the contract captures atmospheric observations across more than 2,000 sensing channels spanning key temperature and water vapor bands, compared with the handful of channels on conventional microwave sounders. That resolution is what NOAA has been paying to evaluate: the agency has run the technology through a deliberate, staged procurement since Spire launched its first-of-its-kind HyMS demonstrator in January 2026 to validate the compact sensor in orbit.

From Data Evaluations to Flight Hardware

The $28 million award is the third NOAA contract touching Spire’s weather business in August 2026 alone. On August 4, 2026, the agency awarded the company a $3 million, six-month extension to keep evaluating data from the on-orbit HyMS demonstrator across a broader range of atmospheric conditions and seasonal weather patterns, with an additional unfunded option for three months of data valued at $2 million. Ten days later, NOAA awarded Spire a $3.7 million contract for radio occultation weather data covering September 18 through December 1, 2026.

The new agreement expands the microwave-sounder work past demonstration. Where the $3 million extension pays for data from a satellite already flying, the $28 million contract pays to build the operational successor, taking the technology beyond on-orbit demonstration toward the scale required for operational weather observations.

That staged pattern is how NOAA has bought commercial weather data throughout its Commercial Weather Data Program: pay for a pilot, evaluate the data, then fund the path to operations. In 2025, the agency awarded Spire $11.2 million to provide radio occultation data under the program’s Radio Occultation Data Buy II vehicle, an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract, and NOAA has since announced plans for its next phase of commercial radio occultation data acquisition beginning December 1, 2026.

The Scale of the Award Against Spire’s Business

For a company of Spire’s size, $28 million over two years is a material revenue line. Spire reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $18.0 million on August 12, 2026, and reaffirmed full-year 2026 revenue guidance of $75 million to $85 million at the midpoint of which the company expects revenue excluding its divested maritime business to grow more than 50% from 2025. A $28 million, two-year award, if recognized evenly, would contribute roughly $14 million a year, against a business that generated $33.9 million of revenue in the entire first half of 2026.

The company is not yet profitable. Spire posted a net loss of $20.0 million in the second quarter and used $23.4 million of cash in operations, though it held $91.7 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities as of June 30, 2026 and carries no debt. Government weather contracts have become one of its more dependable revenue sources as it rebuilds after selling its maritime tracking business in April 2025. The NOAA work sits alongside the European weather agency EUMETSAT, which on August 25, 2026 awarded Spire a €4 million contract renewal and expansion for satellite weather data.

What the Contract Requires

The award funds a defined engineering program, not a promise of an operational constellation. Spire must build and qualify one matured satellite and hyperspectral microwave sounder payload through flight readiness, in an orbit shaped around NOAA’s forecasting requirements. The stated goal is to demonstrate that advanced hyperspectral microwave sounding can be delivered from a smaller, commercially developed satellite platform, the kind Spire already builds in volume: the company launched 29 satellites in 2026 through July alone, including 10 on a July rideshare mission.

The 2030 date is a target for operational capability to begin, not a contracted delivery date, and the contract covers the path to flight readiness rather than an operational data buy. What NOAA does with a qualified flight-ready system, and at what scale, would be decided in a later procurement. For now, the agency has funded the bridge between a promising January 2026 demonstrator and a sensor it could actually fold into its operational forecast system.