THAT used to be a close held secret that the government and few serious satellite watchers only knew…
But the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has come clean to those who might want to know …..
“From last June to December of this year, we’ll have probably launched 100 satellites. So we are going from the demo phase to the operational phase, where we’re really going to be able to start testing all of this stuff out in a more operational way,” Christopher Scolese, director of the NRO, said today at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
Some of those 100 belong to a new network of satellites that will collect information for the Pentagon and intelligence community. The agency’s first batch of operational satellites in this constellation launched in May, and the agency has since launched two more batches. But officials haven’t disclosed the number of satellites in those first launches or how many the constellation will have in total….
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Growing this constellation of intel-gathering satellites will enable the United States to keep a persistent gaze on a given point on Earth, Scolese said. “Now you can’t hide because you’re constantly being looked at.”
The agency will continue launching new satellites into various orbits for this architecture through 2028, and aims to eventually quadruple the number of satellites it has in orbit over the next decade….
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Separate from NRO’s planned network of satellites, the Space Development Agency has been building out its own proliferated constellation of satellites, called the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, or PWSA, which will start delivering operational capabilities for troops this year….
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The US is also actually keeping an eye on China satellites in space with other satillets….
The satellites are known as GSSAP, the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program. A decade ago, Defense Department leaders declassified the program as a way to show the world the U.S. military had eyes on what was happening in orbit.
But U.S. officials have rarely discussed the work of the six GSSAP satellites. Nor do they include the standard information about the satellites’ location in public U.S. space catalogs aimed at avoiding collisions…
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U.S. military space leaders have said the GSSAP satellites perform rendezvous and proximity maneuvers to allow close-up looks at spacecraft in geosynchronous orbits, some 36,000 kilometers above Earth’s surface. They’ve described the mission as a kind of “neighborhood watch.”….
The US Intel KH Satellite’s are the size of buses and can look down at locations on Earth and send back imagery in realtime….
The capabilities of the KH-11 are highly classified, as are the images they produce. The satellites are believed to have been the source of some imagery of the Soviet Union and China made public in 1997;[citation needed] images of Sudan and Afghanistanmade public in 1998 related to the response to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings;[10] and a 2019 photo, provided by then President Donald Trump,[11] of a failed Iranian rocket launch….
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