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2023 Mitchell Institute Schriever Spacepower Forum

Maj. Gen. Christopher Povak, NRO Deputy Director

Oct. 10, 2023

INTRODUCTION

Good morning, thank you General Chilton [moderated by Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, USAF (Ret.)], 

and thanks so much for having me here as part of this forum. 

For those who may not be completely familiar with the National Reconnaissance Office, our 

agency is responsible for research and development, acquisition, launch, integration and 

operation of the nation’s vast constellation of space-based intelligence, reconnaissance and 

surveillance (ISR) capabilities. We also develop and operate the data processing systems and 

information technology networks associated with these ISR platforms. As both a Defense 

Agency and an element of the Intelligence Community, the NRO collects intelligence and 

information to support national-level and Department of Defense missions. And we also aid

numerous civil agencies across the U.S. Government to support their scientific research, 

disaster response, and many other vital efforts. 

To accomplish our mission, the NRO maintains close and productive partnerships across 

government, industry, academia, and coalition nations, especially with our functional managers, 

NSA and NGA, the Combatant Commands and military services. 

Overall, the NRO’s primary mission is to work with our partners to gain and maintain this 

nation’s intelligence advantage during peace time and throughout periods of crisis and conflict 

around the world. It’s the reason we were established sixty-two years ago and, today, the NRO 

remains the world leader in delivering and operating space intelligence capabilities. 

But our job is getting harder. For decades, the United States has been the undisputed leader in 

space technology – no one came close. This is no longer the case. 

Competitors across the globe are posing unprecedented challenges and gaining on our 

technology advantage at a rapid pace.

China, in particular, is closing this technology gap. They’re investing significant money, 

manpower, and resources to challenge America’s dominance in space – developing 

increasingly capable military space systems; a troubling array of new, sophisticated, and lethal 

weapons all enabled by space; and a growing arsenal of anti-satellite capabilities.

Today several nations, notably China and Russia, are actively developing ground and spacebased weapons specifically designed to interfere with or destroy our systems in space. These 

counter-space capabilities include missiles and weapon systems designed to deliver directed 

energy, electronic warfare, and cyber-attack effects; all of which will threaten our ability to freely 

access and operate in space. 

At the NRO, we’re answering these challenges by advancing the capabilities we put in space 

and on the ground. We’re employing cutting-edge technologies and providing more information, 

faster than ever before. So our warfighters, analysts, and policy makers can receive the realtime situational awareness and vital intelligence they need when they need it. 
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UKRAINE EXAMPLE

This situational awareness and vital intelligence, provided by NRO systems, has proven 

especially critical in supporting national decision makers, U.S. European Command, our 

European partners and NATO allies during the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. 

For example, NRO, working with NGA, has augmented national collection with electro-optical 

imagery, radar imagery, and radio frequency data from U.S. commercial companies. And, in 

response to Russia’s troop build-up and subsequent invasion of Ukraine, we moved quickly to 

modify existing contracts to add scope and value which enabled surge collection in support of 

mission partners and Allies. 

The unclassified, shareable nature of commercial satellite data makes it an especially valuable 

source for situational awareness and intelligence sharing among U.S. agencies, our allies and 

other foreign partners.

Commercial imagery providers, on their own accord, also share their products with the media. 

This has provided an unprecedented level of transparency into Russia’s troop build-up and

ongoing military actions. It also provided the world with a clear lens into the extent and impact 

of Russia’s unlawful invasion and the atrocities experienced by the Ukrainian people over the 

past twenty months. 

NRO CAPABILITIES

The information needed to fully understand the evolving situation in Ukraine and in areas 

around the world, illustrates the benefits of a modern, hybrid intelligence architecture. 

Fortunately, the NRO is already building the largest and most capable, diverse, and resilient 

overhead constellation in our history. We’re also putting new capabilities on orbit, on the ground, 

and everywhere in between. And we are making great strides in expanding our capacity, 

persistence, and accuracy.

Within the next decade, NRO expects to quadruple the number of satellites we currently have 

on orbit – different sizes, different orbits, both commercial and national. These satellites will 

deliver over 10 times as many signals and images as we’re collecting today. 

The proliferation and diversification of our architecture will provide increased coverage; greater 

capacity and resilience; and more timely delivery of data. We will create more persistent 

coverage over any area on the Earth, provide faster revisit rates and increase the accuracy and 

fidelity of our data. Such improvements will increase the confidence and relevance of NRO 

capabilities, which are already the world’s standard of excellence for space-based ISR.

NRO investments will increase the survivability and strength of our systems by shoring up single 

points of failure and addressing vulnerabilities on the ground, in the cyber domain, and on orbit.

And they will help us anticipate and adapt to emerging intelligence needs, growing customer 

demands, and future threats.

We’re also finding new ways of doing business. This includes applying advanced technologies 

and techniques like enhancing overhead tasking, collection, and data-processing capabilities to 

accelerate delivery of data to the user. This includes adding automation and multi-intelligence 

processes, among other things. 
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These technologies are helping us to reduce timelines and increase the amount of data we 

provide while decreasing the burden on analysts.

NRO is leveraging demonstration, or “pathfinder”, satellite systems to rapidly assess new 

technologies in the space environment and test new concepts of operations on orbit. This 

strategy is already reducing our timelines for deploying future operational systems and are 

allowing us to fill key intelligence gaps more quickly. 

So, today, the integration of commercial systems into our architecture coupled with NRO

demonstration systems make intelligence more available and shareable for analysts across the 

Intelligence Community, commanders on the ground, and our allies. The agility we’re building 

into the NRO’s space, data processing and command and control architectures is allowing us to 

be more responsive. And we are designing and developing systems that can perform multiple 

types of intelligence missions – enabling us to quickly pivot from supporting traditional national 

level analytical support to supporting military requirements for events like those in Ukraine. 

To accomplish this, our expert, diverse workforce is laser-focused on developing and delivering 

end-to-end ISR capabilities that are relevant to our partners. We engage with our user 

community throughout the entire capability development cycle: from requirements definition to 

system operations. We collaborate with experts across industry, academia and the national 

labs to enhance existing technologies and, in some cases, push the bounds of physics, to 

continually improve the capability and relevance of our systems. Together, we’re meeting our 

goal of ensuring the right data is delivered to the right user at the right time, faster than ever 

before – in some cases, within seconds. 

We’re also improving our ability to protect vital U.S. systems in space. Last month, we launched 

SILENTBARKER which will serve as a “neighborhood watch” in space. It’s a Joint endeavor 

between NRO and U.S. Space Force aimed at building our nation’s resilience in space through 

improved domain awareness. SILENTBARKER will give us indications and warnings to detect 

anything out of the norm, and enable us to figure out where our competitors are and their intent. 

And it will help defend our assets in space and deter aggression. 

PARTNERSHIPS

Of course, we in the NRO know we can’t solve today’s challenges on our own. We depend on 

our relationships with other government agencies, other nations, academia and the private 

sector to identify new opportunities to optimize our talents, tools and effectiveness to serve the

American people. 

For example, our partnership with U.S. Space Command is rooted in years of effective 

collaboration. It’s not new and it continues to grow stronger. 

At the National Space Defense Center, the NRO works closely with our Space Command 

counterparts fusing operations and intelligence – just like we do in other domains like air, land, 

or sea – to protect and defend U.S. interests in space. 

Earlier, I mentioned Space Force and SILENTBARKER. Today, the NRO and Space Force are 

partnered on several efforts to include working hand-in-hand to shape the future of space-based 

Moving Target Indication (or MTI) systems which will provide day, night, all-weather detection 

and tracking of ground and maritime targets of the warfighter. 
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NRO is strengthening ties and cooperation with our traditional Five Eyes allies, taking 

advantage of multiple launch venues, shared satellite investments and exchanges of 

technologies and data. We are also establishing relationships with new international partners to 

advance our common interests. 

With industry, the NRO is actively creating more opportunities to engage new partners, while 

expanding our outreach to small businesses, start-ups, and socially and economically 

disadvantaged business owners. 

We believe our efforts to grow traditional partnerships while exploring new relationships with 

non-traditional partners and infusing our mission with fresh ideas will help us maintain that 

intelligence advantage amid this relentless pace of change. Because innovation knows no 

bounds. 

PEOPLE

At the NRO, we are very proud of our proven ability to innovate, our track record of developing 

and delivering capabilities that are relevant and vital to our customers, and our ability to evolve 

along with the challenges we face. One of the main ingredients of our success is our amazing

workforce. 

Our blended team of Military, DoD, and Intelligence Community civilians is the reason the NRO

has set the standard for space-based ISR for over the past six decades. 

We’re committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse and inclusive workforce, ensuring we have 

a pipeline of talent with the skills necessary to maintain our intelligence advantage. 

In 2015, NRO established the NRO Cadre workforce – direct government hires – to develop a 

more permanent employee base to provide continuity. We continue to grow our internship 

program, welcoming 75 interns this past summer. To date, roughly two dozen of those interns 

have returned to work for the NRO after graduation. 

This past summer, we unveiled a new NRO website specifically designed to help attract best 

talent. And we recently began airing five career videos on social media platforms as a way to 

introduce NRO to the general public. The videos invite potential job candidates to get to know 

us and consider careers in launch, acquisitions, cybersecurity, engineering, and operations. 

And just last month, NRO was designated a federal laboratory – joining the military services, 

NSA, NGA, CIA and others – all of with their own lab capabilities. This designation will give 

NRO greater access to the talent and innovation within academia, private corporations, and 

nonprofits through new, formalized research and development partnerships within the Federal 

Laboratory Consortium. 

NRO’s lab designations will also allow for a greater exchange of expertise and resources and 

further the research, development, and testing of advanced technologies and materials that are 

critical to safeguarding our national security. 

This is an exciting development for the NRO and I can’t wait to see where it takes us. 

It’s just the kind of development we need to meet the evolving challenges we face in this 

dynamic space environment. 
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CONCLUSION

Throughout recent history, our nation has served as a world leader politically, economically, 

culturally, militarily and technologically. This leadership has brought great benefits to our 

citizens and to our allies around the world. It has also provided the U.S. and our allies the 

influence needed to deter aggression in areas spanning the globe. However, our past standing 

in the world is no guarantee of our influence in the future. 

China, among other actors, is dedicating money, manpower, and resources to challenge our 

influence on the world stage – seeking new partnerships to advance their own interests, 

increasing their regional and global prestige and developing more effective and technologically 

advanced weapons to challenge and threaten us across all domains, including in space. 

If the U.S. and our allies are to be successful in a future great power completion or in a crisis or 

conflict scenario someplace in the world, our ability to gain and maintain intelligence superiority 

will be key to this success. And space will continue to be a vital domain where we compete for 

this information advantage. 

Today, the NRO’s space-based ISR capabilities are, without a doubt, the best in the world. 

However, in an era of growing competition in space, our imperative is to develop the 

technologies, tools, capabilities, and space-minded experts to stay that way. With our amazing 

products, partnerships and people, we in the NRO have confidence in our ability to succeed.

Thank you. I’m happy to take your questions. 

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