All verified mentions of this organization in source documents.
The National Reconnaissance Office plans for a mix of small and large satellites launched to different orbits to become the norm.
The National Reconnaissance Office previously conducted the RASR-2 launch on 2020-06-13 from New Zealand using a Rocket Lab Electron rocket.
Two SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets launched national security National Reconnaissance Office satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base earlier 2022.
NROL-199 was the second of two back-to-back national security missions for the National Reconnaissance Office performed by Rocket Lab.
Two National Reconnaissance Office missions launched 2022-07-13 and 2022-08-04 were small satellites developed jointly with the Australian government and launched on Rocket Lab vehicles from New Zealand.
The National Reconnaissance Office worked closely with the New Zealand Space Agency, which licensed the NROL-199 launch, and with Rocket Lab as the launch provider.
For lower-cost smallsat missions, the National Reconnaissance Office will buy satellite buses from the open market like the ones used by commercial operators.
The National Reconnaissance Office will continue to build large bespoke satellites and will increasingly rely on lower-cost commercial smallsats and payloads developed with international partners.
A Rocket Lab Electron rocket launched the National Reconnaissance Office mission NROL-199 on 2022-08-04 at 1:00 a.m. Eastern.
The National Reconnaissance Office treats spacecraft buses as commodities and plans to take advantage of increasingly capable commercial buses to reduce the cost of its constellations.
NROL-199 was originally scheduled to lift off on 2022-07-22 but was rescheduled to allow the NRO additional time to implement required payload software updates.
The NROL-199 payload was designed, built, and is operated by the National Reconnaissance Office in partnership with the Australian Department of Defence.
The National Reconnaissance Office previously launched NROL-151 on 2020-01-31 from New Zealand using a Rocket Lab Electron rocket.
Rocket Lab planned with the National Reconnaissance Office to launch two missions within 10 days.
The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office is teaming up with the U.K. Ministry of Defence to launch experimental smallsats to low Earth orbit in late 2022 on a Virgin Orbit air-launched rocket.
The commercial RF data program will follow the model the National Reconnaissance Office used to work with commercial providers of space-based synthetic aperture radar data.
The National Reconnaissance Office plans to award contracts for the commercial RF data program later this summer or early fall.
In January the National Reconnaissance Office signed agreements with five synthetic aperture radar companies to give the agency access to data collected by commercial satellites so government analysts can better understand the quality of commercially available imagery.
NROL-162 and NROL-199 are missions awarded to Rocket Lab under the NRO’s Rapid Acquisition of a Small Rocket (RASR) contract.
The second RASR mission for the NRO was deployed on an Electron launch in June 2020.