SpaceX launched a national security mission for the US National Reconnaissance Office from Vandenberg Space Base on Friday evening. The spy agency described the secret mission as “the second launch of the National Reconnaissance Office’s proliferating architecture, which provides critical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance services to the nation.”
The Falcon 9 rocket supporting this mission lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at the opening of a two-hour window, at 8:14 PM PST (11:14 PM EDT, 0314 UTC).
The Falcon 9 first-stage booster supporting this mission, which carries tail number B1081 in the SpaceX fleet, launched for the eighth time. Its previous missions have included launching the Crew-7 astronaut mission to the International Space Station, two climate-monitoring satellites (NASA’s PACE and ESA’s EarthCARE) and two Starlink flights.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1081 touched down on the “Of Course I Still Love You” drone spacecraft. This was the 95th landing of the OCISLY booster vehicle and the 326th landing to date.
The multiplying architecture grows
The mission was the second launch of the NRO’s so-called “reproducible architecture,” following the NROL-146 mission in May. Reuters reported earlier this year that the satellites are based on the Starshield satellite bus built by SpaceX in partnership with Northrop Grumman.
In a statement to Spaceflight Now, the NRO said:
“NRO systems are designed, built, and operated by the NRO. As a matter of national security, we do not discuss the companies involved in building our systems, our contractual relationships with them, their specific activities, or the locations where NRO systems are built.
The agency also declined to confirm how many satellites are on the missions or their orbits. In a speech at this year’s Space Symposium in Colorado, There will be “about half a dozen such launches” this year, said Dr. Troy Mink, deputy principal director of the National Reconnaissance Organization.
This mission was not procured as part of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 mission order. This is because the NRO needed these missions to move forward before task orders were assigned to Phase III.
“NRO partnered with the USSF Space Systems Command’s Assured Space Access Team on the Phase 3 acquisition and influenced the development of Phase 3, Track 1 – as a way to procure flexible launch solutions while ensuring a customizable mission,” an NRO spokesperson said. In the current situation. “When considering the launch cadence and the need for ad hoc mission assurance, the NRO recognized that we needed a bridge between Phase 2 to Phase 3 – Track 1. This led to the procurement of some missions outside of the NSSL. The NSSL has been, and will continue to be, the NRO’s primary mechanism for procurement Launch services.
