WASHINGTON — The National Reconnaissance Office is on course to dramatically increase the variety of spy satellites it relies upon to gather intelligence, the agency’s deputy director Maj. Gen. Christopher Povak said Oct. 10.
Speaking on the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, Povak offered further insight into the agency’s plan to grow its constellations of satellites for imaging, signals intelligence and reconnaissance.
The NRO, an intelligence and defense agency, builds and operates an unknown variety of classified satellites that collect intelligence for U.S. policymakers, military commands and other organizations. The director of the NRO Christopher Scolese earlier this 12 months revealed the agency set a goal to quadruple the variety of satellites it operates over the following decade and move to a more “proliferated architecture” of various size satellites in additional orbits.
Povak on Tuesday said these recent satellites “will deliver over 10 times as many signals and pictures as we’re collecting today.”
“The proliferation and diversification of our architecture will provide increased coverage, greater capability and resilience and more timely delivery of knowledge,” he said. The range of assets will make it harder for adversaries to harm the U.S. intelligence infrastructure, Povak added.
Responding to competitors
The NRO is increasingly counting on business imaging satellites but can also be constructing more of its own assets in space partly in response to the growing capabilities of rival nations, he said.
“Competitors across the globe are posing unprecedented challenges and eroding our technology advantage at a rapid pace,” Povak said.
“China specifically is closing a technology gap,” he added. “They’re investing significant money, manpower and resources to challenge America’s dominance in space, developing increasingly capable military space systems, a troubling array of sophisticated and lethal weapon systems, all enabled by space, and a growing arsenal of anti-satellite capabilities.”
China and Russia are developing ground and space-based weapons specifically designed to interfere with or destroy U.S. systems, he said. These weapons include ground-based missiles, electronic jammers and cyber attacks.
“We’re answering these challenges by advancing the capabilities we put in space and on the bottom,” said Povak.
The brand new satellites the NRO expects to deploy over the following decade, he said, “will create more persistent coverage over any area of the Earth, provide faster revisit rates and increase the accuracy and fidelity of our data.”
“Our investments will increase the survivability and strength of our systems by shoring up single points of failure, addressing vulnerabilities on the bottom, within the cyber domain and on orbit,” Povak said.
The NRO is also buying small satellites for experiments to “rapidly assess recent technologies within the space environment and test recent concepts of operations on orbit,” Povak said. “This ‘pathfinder’ strategy is already reducing our timelines for deploying future operational systems.”
‘Responsive space’
Povak said the NRO is watching U.S. Space Force efforts to hurry up the timeline to launch space missions, under a program often called responsive space.
“Responsive space to us implies that we would like to have the ability to be prepared to launch a payload as soon as that payload is prepared,” he said.
It also means accessing multiple launch providers and launch sites to deploy a diversity of spacecraft starting from the normal schoolbus-size satellites so smaller platforms built with business satellites buses “that we are able to integrate recent payloads on.”
To have the ability to fulfill the goal of quadrupling the variety of satellites, the NRO is shrinking the production cycle, said Povak. “As a substitute of taking six to eight years to create one specific satellite, we’re now producing multiple satellites yearly.”