Dr. Troy Meink, NRO’s principal deputy director, left, speaks with Charles Galbreath,
Senior Resident Fellow for Space Studies, at the Mitchell Institute’s Spacepower
Advantage Center of Excellence (MI-SPACE).
ARLINGTON, VA – With more than 100 payloads due on orbit by the end of the year, the NRO is leveraging data analytics and advanced computing environments to fuse and organize multiple sources of unstructured data to more rapidly share it with the nation’s warfighters, analysts, and first responders.
Dr. Troy Meink, NRO’s principal deputy director, in an address to the Mitchell Institute’s Schriever Spacepower Forum Oct. 17, shared how the NRO is capitalizing on whole-of-government as well as expanded commercial partnerships to adopt new technologies and increase the pace of innovation to meet growing customer demand for information delivered at speed.
“We have been dealing with rapidly-growing data volumes almost since our inception more than 60 years ago,” said Meink. “The difference is the new tools we have available to apply to this challenge.”
The NRO’s ongoing build-out of its proliferated overhead architecture will result in an expanding constellation – from dozens of satellites on orbit to hundreds – resulting in the largest government constellation in history.
“This is no longer aspirational,” said Meink. “We’re launching operational systems today.”
As the number of satellites grows, the volume of data also expands. Meink highlighted how the NRO has invested in expanding its data science talent base over the past decade, and is working with commercial partners to take advantage of new tools, including advanced computing and data analytics, which are enabling the NRO to expedite the delivery of data to customers.
“We know that innovation can come from anywhere. If there’s a good idea that can add capability, capacity, resilience, and speed to our systems we want it,” he said. “Which is why we’re fusing commercial and governmental ingenuity, investing in commercial support of mission needs where it makes sense.”
Dr. Meink highlighted how the NRO is working with a broader set of industry partners than at any time in its history – large and small players across the defense, intelligence, and commercial space industrial base. By leveraging a large audience of diverse industry partners, the NRO is able to strengthen the resilience of its supply chains and launch capabilities.
“Leveraging commercial – especially in the areas of digital engineering and data analytics – has allowed us to do a lot of things we couldn’t do just ten years ago,” Meink said.