US plans to quadruple spy satellite constellation

The US intelligence agency that develops and buys spy satellites plans a fourfold increase by 2033 in orbiting spacecraft like those now being used to monitor Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Within the next decade we expect to quadruple the number of satellites we currently have in orbit,” Bloomberg reports, citing the US National Reconnaissance Office.

These satellites — large and small, in multiple orbits” will reportedly collect and transmit “ten times as many signals and images as we’re getting now, and will engage a mix of government and commercial systems.

Competition for the lucrative Pentagon contracts to launch those satellites will pit billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX against the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of top contractors Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. Blue Origin LLC, founded by Amazon.com Inc. Chairman Jeff Bezos, is also trying to qualify for military launches.

The expansion “will take us from dozens of systems on orbit in 2023 to hundreds of systems on orbit in the next few years,” the agency said in the statement, which expanded on remarks made on April 18 at an industry conference by National Reconnaissance Office Director Chris Scolese.

The NRO, whose existence wasn’t declassified until 1992, received some unwelcome attention with the leak online of Pentagon documents earlier in April. One chart marked “secret” depicted a Jan. 31 narrative of where the battle for the Donbas region of Ukraine was “likely heading.”

“We have moderate confidence in this assessment based on NR0-collected and commercial imagery,” according to the document posted on the Discord social-media app.

Surveillance of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was buttressed by two of the US’s newer satellite systems built with commercial parts and on-board imagery processes, Scolese disclosed in April 2022.

Alongside orbiting spy satellites, new systems built using commercial technology have “enabled NATO and the entire world to see in real-time the Russian military buildup prior to its invasion,” Scolese told a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing at the time. The new systems “went from concept to orbit in less than three years,” he said.