WASHINGTON — A National Reconnaissance Office mission flew to geostationary Earth orbit Sept. 10 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.
The rocket lifted off at 8:47 a.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
The launch had been originally scheduled for August 29 but was delayed as a consequence of Hurricane Idalia. A second attempt on Sept. 9 was scrubbed as a consequence of a technical issue found during a pre-launch check.
The NROL-107 mission, also referred to as SilentBarker, carried multiple sensor payloads for surveillance of objects in geostationary orbit.
“It would not be the bottom. It would be space,” said Chris Scolese, director of the National Reconnaissance Office. The NRO didn’t reveal the precise variety of payloads flying on this mission.
SilentBarker was built jointly by the NRO and the U.S. Space Force.
NROL-107 was only the second launch by ULA in 2023 and the Atlas 5’s first in nearly 10 months. The vehicle last flew in November when it launched an environmental satellite for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The launch vehicle carrying NROL-107 was powered by a single-engine Centaur upper stage and five strap-on solid boosters.
On the request of the NRO, ULA ended the launch webcast about three-and-a-half minutes after liftoff, following payload fairing jettison.
ULA said only another national security space mission stays for the Atlas 5, which has been in operation since 2002.
Tory Bruno, president and CEO of United Launch Alliance, said the ultimate Atlas 5 national security space mission will fly in 2024. After that, the corporate expects to begin flying national security missions on the brand new Vulcan Centaur rocket.
The remaining inventory of Atlas 5s has been put aside for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband constellation and for Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule.
Surveillance of GEO orbit
U.S. officials said SilentBarker will help to safeguard the country’s satellites from foreign threats, as Russian and Chinese satellites engage in disruptive maneuvers and follow other nations’ spacecraft in orbit.
Scolese said Silent Barker “goes to offer us with unprecedented coverage of what’s happening within the geosynchronous belt,” greater than 22,000 miles above Earth.
Having more satellites in that region of space “will help us to grasp the intentions of other countries, to see what they’re doing, to see if there’s any indications of threats,” he said.
Most NRO space missions are classified however the intelligence community and the Pentagon decided to reveal the existence of SilentBarker in an effort to dissuade U.S. adversaries from carrying out nefarious activities.
“The space domain, as we frequently say, is contested and congested,” Scolese said. “We would like to let people know, to some extent, what our capabilities are.”
Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, commander of the Space Systems Command, said the goal is to discourage aggression. “An enormous element of deterrence is the flexibility for the adversary to know what we will and can’t see. So we actually want our competitors to know that we now have eyes in GEO orbit,” Guetlein said.
Scolese said a second SilentBarker mission is being planned and will launch by 2026.
Guetlein said the Space Force today primarily relies on ground-based radar sensors to observe the GEO belt. These sensors can only see objects larger than a basketball, and will not be capable of “maintain custody” of objects, or track them as they maneuver.
“By moving the sensor into orbit with those objects, we will actually not only detect smaller objects but maintain custody of those objects,” he said.