Congratulations are in order: Spire Global just received $2.5 million from NOAA to do something vaguely weather-related with satellites, again. The company, whose name sounds like a budget airline and whose finances feel like a high-wire act, will be delivering GNSS-R data which, for the uninitiated, is a type of satellite information that sounds technical enough to impress but mysterious enough that no one asks for accuracy benchmarks.

NOAA, always the picture of fiscal restraint and strategic foresight, is throwing another pilot contract into the ether, this time for ocean winds. Because nothing says “reliable forecasting” like measuring wind from 500 kilometers up using GPS reflections. Spire’s CEO offered a statement so heartfelt you could almost forget this contract wouldn’t cover a single quarter’s R&D budget.