NRO chief: “You can’t hide” from our new swarm of SpaceX-built spy satellites
"You can’t hide, because we’re constantly looking," said Chris Scolese, a longtime NASA engineer who took the helm of the US government's spy satellite agency in 2019.
The NRO is taking advantage of SpaceX's Starlink satellite assembly line to build a network of at least 100 satellites, and perhaps many more, to monitor adversaries around the world. So far, more than 80 of these SpaceX-made spacecraft, each a little less than a ton in mass, have launched on four Falcon 9 rockets. There are more to come.
A large number of these mass-produced satellites, or what the NRO calls a "proliferated architecture," will provide regularly updated imagery of foreign military installations and other sites of interest to US intelligence agencies. Scolese said the new swarm of satellites will "get us reasonably high-resolution imagery of the Earth, at a high rate of speed."
This is a significant change in approach for the NRO, which has historically operated a smaller number of more expensive satellites, some as big as a school bus.
