Aviation Week's Craig Covault reports in the latest issue that the National Reconnaissance Office is going commercial in its urgent search for a stopgap optical imaging system. The NRO, Covault reports, is starting a several-hundred-million-dollar procurement for camera-carrying satellites, and the leading contenders to meet the requirements are commercial providers GeoEye and DigitalGlobe. The two US companies already operate satellites that provide unclassified high-resolution images for commercial and government users, including the vivid images that make GoogleEarth so addictive.
The NRO's decision is almost certainly a result of three factors. First, the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA) program, planned to replace both today's heavyweight electro-optical satellites - produced by Lockheed Martin and descended directly from the KH-11 class - and the radar-equipped Lacrosse, is in difficulties. A Boeing team won the contract for FIA in 1999 in an upset victory. In November 2002, the USAF's Scientific Advisory Board and the Pentagon's Defense Science Board warned that the program as it stood was "unexecutable". In September 2005, the electro-optical portion of the contract was handed back to Lockheed Martin. In December, an NRO test satellite - which Covault reports was affiliated with the FIA program - failed after launch. To call FIA "troubled" is like calling Jack the Ripper "disturbed."
The second factor is that commercial high-resolution imaging satellites have galloped ahead since the first of the breed, GeoEye's Ikonos, was launched in September 1999. This year, both GeoEye and DigitalGlobe plan to launch new satellites (GeoEye-1 and WorldView 1) with the sharpest resolution yet seen outside the NRO's classified programs, under contract to the white-world National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Both spacecraft, in the two-ton class and carrying cameras produced by ITT, are designed to deliver resolution tighter than 0.5 meters. Presumably, the NRO is looking for something better than that.
The third factor is that many users no longer need the kind of resolution offered by the KH satellites. Being able to measure the diameter of a new missile within a matter of inches can tell you a lot about its performance. However, you don't need that accuracy in order to identify that missile, or to tell a tank from an infantry fighting vehicle. What users want today is timeliness (which means more and hence less costly satellites, orbital mechanics being the awkward things they are) and multi-spectral imagery, which is a matter of relatively inexpensive electronics rather than a massive and costly lens.
--Bill Sweetman
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