The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is open to flying payloads on reusable rockets in the future, though it is unsure exactly how that will unfold, presumably because the technology is in its infancy.
NRO Director for Signals Intelligence Systems Acquisition Tina Harrington said Thursday there would be a risk calculation to assess where reusable rockets might work with certain classes of NRO payloads. At the Hosted Payload and Small Satellite Summit in Washington, hosted by Defense Daily parent company Access Intelligence, Harrington said she toured Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) this summer and looked at where it was going with reusable rockets.
SpaceX and Blue Origin are pursuing reusable first stage boosters that land while United Launch Alliance (ULA), the Pentagon’s incumbent launch provider over the last 20 years, is developing a next-generation launcher called Vulcan that will use a helicopter to recover the first stage in the air. ULA and SpaceX are certified to perform military launches while Blue Origin is not.
The NRO is assessing how to do a different type of business with contractors due to the prevalence of small satellites that have hit the market. Harrington said the agency is either now working with folks it has never worked with before, or it is working with familiar faces, but in unfamiliar roles. She said, for example, the NRO may have known a certain company for decades as a parts supplier, but now this company is delivering whole spacecraft as opposed to just parts. Harrington said such changes allow the small sat industry to grow and allow the NRO to examine different ways of doing business and at different price points.
Harrington said the NRO is also building its architectures with small sats in mind from the beginning instead of treating small satellites as an afterthought. The challenge, she said, is figuring out how to embrace the small sat market. Harrington said the NRO is also discussing the proper role for small sats to play in its architecture, whether some capabilities should be done traditionally, via big spacecraft, and others than can be performed via small sats. A small satellite is a spacecraft weighing between 10 kg and 125 kg.
Harrington also said the NRO is working very closely with the Air Force, the federal government’s launch provider for national security missions, on how it would procure future launches considering there are now multiple players for military launches. ULA is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Boeing [BA].