New IC Commercial Space Council Hopes To Speed Intel To Users

Hawkeye 360 RF geolocation satellites

WASHINGTON: A new Commercial Space Council set up by the Intelligence Community is designed to rethink how data and analysis is gleaned from commercial space systems to help speed intel products to users.

There are five “standing members” of the council — the NRO, the NSA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the DIA and the CIA — plus “plenty of observers,” David Gauthier, NGA head of commercial space ops, told the SmallSat Alliance today. Gauthier has been named by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe as chair of the new council.

The council is now fleshing out working groups to assess aspects of how unclassified commercial satellite data, analysis and services can be best utilized and integrated with classified intel from DoD and IC sats, he explained. For example, working groups on remote sensing, commercial space operations and outreach have already been agreed. The members are still debating, he added, on whether or not they need one on issues related to the use of radio frequency.

“We’re there to deepen the IC’s understanding of commercial capabilities. We’re also providing recommendations for IC-level strategies and policies,” Gauthier said. “And then we’re supporting the growth — it’s in the charter that we support the growth — of of a robust us commercial space industry that will be responsive to the intelligence community needs. And so those are our three key lines of effort.”

As Breaking D readers know, Gauthier long has championed efforts to expand NGA’s use of commercial products to create a “hybrid” pool of up-to-the-minute geospatial awareness data and analyses for warfighters on the battlefield, as well as for the IC.

In the latest initiative on that front, NGA announced it had launched in September a new pilot program “to examine the viability of using commercial radio frequency geospatial data and analytics to support the agency’s intelligence products.” Radio frequency (RF) geolocation tracks targets using their RF emissions.

The pilot is “leveraging a National Reconnaissance Office’s commercial integration study contract with HawkEye 360, to access commercial RF data. The data is then integrated via NGA’s Predictive GEOINT Prototype, which supports an agile development approach for exploring new commercial sources and analytics that can support NGA’s partners,” the release added.

NRO contracted with Hawkeye in 2019 to study using its data and products, alongside another award to Capella Space to study use of its commercial synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites, which can see through cloud cover.

NRO too, led by Gauthier’s counterpart Peter Muend, has been moving toward a hybrid architecture for obtaining and using space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data. The spy agency has been expanding its traditional approach of building handfuls of large, highly-capable and extremely expensive satellites — the so-called exquisite approach — by opening its doors wider to commercial providers of electro-optical imagery, as well as providers of SAR and other non-traditional sensing capabilities such RF geolocation.

Gauthier noted that a “silver lining” of the COVID-19 pandemic has been that NGA has experienced “a rapid cultural adoption of new commercial capabilities into our analytic workforce who traditionally, because they’re so overworked … have had a hard time adopting new sources.” As many analysts were working at home, he explained, they discovered what was easily available in the commercial arena. “So, we have a new demand signal for some of these commercial services and new data types that we didn’t have before,” he said.