http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-101030,00.html
MONDAY MARCH 19 2001
America orders £17bn fleet of spy satellites
FROM BEN MACINTYRE IN WASHINGTON
THOUSANDS of American scientists are being quietly recruited to build a vast
new network of spy satellites, in a top secret $25 billion (£17.5
billion)project that will enable America to peer into every corner of the
globe at any time with far greater accuracy.
A group of Californian aerospace companies will employ about 20,000 people
to build the new generation of spy satellites over the next 20 years in what
is believed to be the biggest intelligence-related contract, the Los Angeles
Times reported yesterday.
Using high-powered telescopes and radar, up to two dozen spy satellites will
be able to photograph anywhere in the world, day or night, regardless of the
weather, zooming into specific areas and sending back thousands of images.
The project is expected to be comparatively more costly than the building of
the atomic bomb.
There are about half a dozen spy satellites now in orbit, but these will be
replaced by smaller, more powerful and more versatile satellites that will
play a key role in American intelligence-gathering for decades.
The project, officially known as Future Imagery Architecture, is being
co-ordinated by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), one of the most
secretive and well-financed government intelligence agencies.
The NRO has released only a brief statement, saying that Boeing has won the
contract to launch and operate “the nation’s next generation of imagery
reconnaissance satellites”.
The Federation of American Scientists recently concluded that the satellite
project “will be the most expensive programme in the history of the
intelligence community”.
About 5,000 scientists and computer programmers will be brought into the
project over the next five years, during the initial design phase. Thousands
more will be needed to build and operate the system.
“The programme is so secret that most of the people who work on it won’t
have a good sense of what they are doing,” Loren Thompson, a defence analyst
at the Lexington Institute, was quoted as saying.
The project was partly inspired by intelligence problems encountered during
the Gulf War, when military commanders complained that satellite
reconnaissance photographs were late to arrive, patchy and insufficiently
detailed.
The new system will be able to focus on a single area for twice as long as
the existing satellites, beaming back up to 20 times as many high-resolution
images of activity on the ground.
The NRO, which dates back to 1960, has an annual budget of $6 billion and
spends more than either the CIA or the National Security Agency.
The Los Angeles Times calculated that the Manhattan Project to build the
atomic bomb, which employed up to 125,000 people starting in 1942, cost the
equivalent of $20 billion in today’s dollars.
Most of the research and development work on the new breed of satellites is
likely to be carried out at the Boeing plant in El Segundo, California, and
the company has started recruiting technicians from Lockheed Martin
Corporation, the company that built many of existing spy satellites. Refugees
from ailing high-tech and Internet companies are also being recruited.
“I don’t think most people are aware of how big this thing is,” a spokesman
for the California Technology, Trade and Commerce Agency, said.
The new satellites will be about two thirds smaller than the 15-ton models
now in orbit, and positioned further out in space, making them far harder to
detect.
Advances in optical and radar technology will enable the satellites to take
pictures with greater frequency, while the higher orbit will allow the target
area on the ground to be filmed for a longer period.
A spokesman for the NRO declined to give details of the massive space-spying
project but confirmed that a new species of satellite would be launched
starting in 2005 that would be “more capable of fulfilling the nation’s
imaging needs”.
