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Testimony of Dr. Christopher J. Scolese, 

Director - National Reconnaissance Office

House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Strategic Forces

Hearing on “Fiscal Year 2022 Space Priorities and Posture”

Monday May 24, 2021

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Good afternoon Chairman Cooper, Ranking Member Turner, and members of the 

Subcommittee. It is a great honor to represent the people of the National 

Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Our mission is to develop, acquire, launch and operate

the nation’s reconnaissance satellites; we are a member of both the Intelligence 

Community (IC) and Department of Defense (DoD).

Mr. Chairman, before I address the NRO’s capabilities and priorities, please allow me to

briefly reflect on our past year. Like other agencies across the government, the COVID19 pandemic presented challenges for us. Despite that, it was also a year of opportunity 

and achievement, and I would like to share just a few of these with members of the 

Subcommittee.

Meeting Mission, Overcoming Challenges

Due to the incredible efforts of our people and partners, I am pleased to report to the 

Committee that NRO’s systems have maintained 100 percent of their capabilities 

throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. We ensured our customers received the 

intelligence they needed while protecting our workforce and their families by instituting

health and safety protocols. During this period, the NRO experienced one of the most 

successful years in recent memory with six launches and twelve payloads delivered to 

orbit, many with first-ever capabilities. The launches included our first dedicated launch 

with Rocket Lab from New Zealand and our first dedicated launch from the NASA 

Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. On the business side, our outstanding fiscal

processes have earned us a reputation for financial management excellence. In 2020, 

the NRO achieved our 12th consecutive clean financial audit — a feat unrivaled in the 

IC. Also, last year, we inaugurated our NRO cadre internship program and continued 

our progress in the execution of our cadre workforce strategy to establish a reliable 

talent pipeline for the future. During these challenging times, the people of the NRO 

have been adaptable and have overcome numerous obstacles to meet commitments.

Sixty Years Above and Beyond

Turning to today, the NRO is bridging the innovative legacies of our past with a cuttingedge vision for our future during the NRO’s 60th Anniversary celebration. Since 1961, 

the NRO has taken quantum leaps each decade in the evolution of our overhead 

reconnaissance space and ground systems to provide the timely, relevant, responsive 

global situational awareness that national security decision-makers and the military 

depend on for success in their missions.

The systems we build and operate collect geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) and signals 

intelligence (SIGINT) — enabling discovery, monitoring, and tracking of activities for a 

range of defense, intelligence, and civil applications, including:

• Maintaining global situational awareness

• Monitoring the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
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• Tracking international terrorists, drug traffickers, and other criminal 

organizations

• Developing highly accurate military targeting data and battle damage 

assessments

• Understanding the capabilities of competitors

• Supporting international peacekeeping, humanitarian relief operations, and 

natural disaster response and mitigation.

Our products and services are in high demand and support a wide range of national 

security requirements from the strategic to the tactical. The GEOINT and SIGINT 

information collected from our sensors deliver insights about activities in hard-to-reach

areas, and our collaborative work with DoD and IC mission partners at NRO’s ground 

stations are used for many purposes, including indications and warning.

NRO supports civilian agencies across the U.S. Government in support of their efforts to 

understand climate change, assess crop production, map endangered species habitats, 

study wetlands, and track damage from hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, floods, and 

other natural disasters.

Close relationships with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the 

National Security Agency (NSA), who task our satellites, provide the foundational pieces 

of the vital GEOINT and SIGINT that underpins the full-spectrum all-source analysis 

done at the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of 

State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and at the Combatant Commands. Since 

the stand-up of U.S. Space Force (USSF) and U.S. Space Command (USSPACECOM), 

we’ve forged strong relationships to mutually coordinate activities to assure that the 

space-based systems the U.S. and our allies rely on can operate without disruption in 

an increasingly contested and congested space domain.

The NRO is able to maintain U.S. space surveillance leadership because our 

organizational business model is flat, which encourages agility and innovation. The 

agency’s end-to-end functional responsibilities allow us to develop what is needed from 

requirements through design and build to operations.

Focus on the Future

While the U.S. continues to lead the way in space-based surveillance, there has been

growth in the number of competitors in the space domain. Adversaries are increasingly 

becoming aggressive and capable as they attempt to challenge the U.S. in space.

Further, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused us to take a harder look at our supply 

chain to assess how global events, security vulnerabilities, and production limitations 

can impact the technologies and products we need for our systems. To meet the tough 

challenges of today and the future, we are expanding our commercial partnerships, 

strengthening our government and international partnerships, adapting processes to 
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innovate faster, baking in resilience from our assets on the ground to our systems on

orbit, and recruiting and retaining a highly skilled, diverse workforce.

Leveraging the Commercial Marketplace

The NRO is taking a whole of commercial approach to address some of our mission 

areas and deliver additional capabilities for our customers. In areas such as 

commercial imagery, commercial launch services, and Cloud computing services, the 

growth and maturation of commercial space industry capabilities are allowing the NRO 

to securely and efficiently supplement or replace government systems. Commercial 

satellite capabilities are critical to future national security space architectures — and 

commercial constellations already provide actionable, timely, and shareable data to 

military units who were underserved in the past.

Leveraging the commercial marketplace allows the NRO to buy and adapt for our own 

purposes a new range of capabilities that expand our supplier base, lower costs, 

shorten timelines, and increase flexibility. In the not-too-distant future, the NRO 

envisions a proliferated and diversified overhead architecture comprised of national and 

commercial satellites, large and small constellations, electro optical and other 

phenomenologies. This hybrid model will provide greater capacity, capability and 

responsiveness.

Encouraging Faster Innovation

We continually create new capabilities by developing and employing new technologies, 

often with new partners. Through the Director’s Innovation Initiative, our Directorate of 

Advanced Systems and Technology has created a risk-tolerant environment for nontraditional partners to bring forward proposals for disruptive and high-payoff concepts 

that could support NRO missions. We are expanding the number of academic 

institutions we work with to develop future capabilities and materials, and to create a 

pipeline of diverse, skilled, cleared talent for a sustainable future workforce. 

Innovation on the ground includes unlocking the power of data-centric systems for 

faster, more efficient data access and curation. Additionally, the use of artificial 

intelligence and machine learning brings us real-time, shared overhead data awareness 

at faster speeds and provides automated tipping and queueing capabilities to support 

timely multi-INT anticipatory intelligence.

Building Resilience into Everything We Do

From our spacecraft design to our information technology infrastructure to our collection 

architecture, NRO teams take a cross-enterprise approach to ensuring mission 

resilience. We collaborated closely with industry, academic, and mission partners to 

design an overhead architecture that leverages small to large satellites and best-inclass government and commercial solutions to deliver a resilient, proliferated, and 

persistent constellation that can anticipate and adapt to current needs, emerging and 

future customer demands, and adversary threats.
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The National Space Policy directed the Secretary of Defense and the Director of 

National Intelligence to protect and defend U.S. national security space assets through 

integration and synchronization of operational command and control capabilities and 

activities that foster seamless execution between the IC and DoD. Key relationships in 

this effort are among USSPACECOM, USSF and NRO. I am pleased to report that 

these ties continue to strengthen as we work together to protect and defend our assets. 

The NRO and the space community are coordinating and collaborating like never 

before.

Our People Make the Difference

I cannot mention enough the NRO’s most important asset: Our people. The NRO is 

only successful because of the outstanding dedication of our workforce. Building and 

operating the NRO's advanced reconnaissance systems requires the talents of a team 

of engineers, scientists, financial managers, acquisitions professionals, space 

operators, and many other career fields. Making sure that we have the talent to 

compete and meet future mission demands is the driving force of the NRO’s workforce 

strategy. As we mature the NRO cadre, which stood up just a few short years ago, we 

are invested in growing a highly skilled, diverse, and thriving workforce.

When the NRO was established in 1961, our challenge was best expressed by a 

Founder of the NRO, Edwin Land, who said our task is to: “See it all, see it well, and 

see it now.” Our people make all the difference and they are the reason we at the NRO 

can make the seemingly impossible — possible. It is the people of the NRO that will 

lead us to a future where we can, as we like to say with a nod to Edwin Land: “Observe 

it all, observe it well, observe it now, and innovate faster.”

Conclusion

Chairman Cooper, Ranking Member Turner, and members of the Subcommittee, thank 

you for the opportunity to share with you the unique value and capabilities the NRO 

brings to our military, intelligence analysts, and national decision-makers. I look forward 

to the Subcommittee’s questions.