The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is preparing to launch its ninth mission supporting its so-called proliferated architecture satellite constellation using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The mission, dubbed NROL-192, also marks a big milestone for SpaceX. It will be the 400th launch of a previously flown Falcon booster.
It is the third such launch so far in 2025. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base is targeting Saturday, April 12, at 5:25 a.m. PDT (8:25 a.m. EDT, 1225 UTC).
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about 30 minutes prior to liftoff.
The Falcon 9 first stage booster flying the mission, tail number B1071, will launch for a 24th time. It previously supported four missions for the NRO, three rideshare missions and 14 Starlink flights.
A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1071 will target a landing on the droneship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You.’ If successful, this would be the 430th landing of a first stage booster to date.
A word from the director
The flight Saturday morning from the Western Range comes about 11 months after the NRO began deploying what NRO Director Chris Scolese called this week “the world’s most capable, resilient, and technologically advanced satellite constellation.” It adds further capabilities in the agency’s ability to conduct reconnaissance, surveillance and intelligence gathering.
The constellation is made up of what are believed to be Starshield satellites, a government variant of SpaceX’s Starlink. In a video statement shared on April 8, Scolese described the May 2024 launch of the NROL-146 mission as “setting a new standard for data collection, speed, and responsiveness.”
“This enhanced constellation is already shortening revisit times and increasing observational persistence; delivering enhanced coordination; and empowering faster data processing, fusion, and transmission speeds. All with greater resilience and security,” Scolese said.
“Most profoundly, we’re making it harder for our adversaries to hide, while reducing time to insights for our customers from minutes to seconds – strengthening national security with improved prospects for lethality, when it’s necessary.”
Without going into firm specifics, Scolese said that across the past eight missions supporting this constellation, SpaceX launched more than 150 satellites on behalf of the NRO.
Scolese said that the NRO is working to increase its launch cadence and announced that the ninth and 10th missions for the constellation would be launching just days apart in April. About a day later, the agency announced the planned launch dates for NROL-192 and NROL-145 on April 12 and 19 respectively.
In between the two missions, on April 16, the NRO has another mission launching from Vandenberg. This is a separate, classified mission that will fly on a four-stage, Northrop Grumman-built Minotaur 4 rocket.
Scolese said the aim for the NRO under his direction is not only to deploy a wider variety of assets and capabilities into orbit, but also to increase investment in its various ground systems and to expand the NRO’s partnerships. The latter is a notable goal for an agency that, when formed back in 1961, was a secret, classified agency that wasn’t known to the public until was declassified on Sept. 17, 1992.
“My third commitment was to expand the NRO’s partnerships across the whole of government, and with commercial space enterprises, academia, and our allies to marshal the phenomenal levels of expertise that exist within each group,” Scolese said.
“These partnerships are yielding enhanced capabilities in areas from electro-optical to radar and other phenomenologies. We’re benefitting from our exposure to world-class expertise in areas such as AI, machine learning, quantum sensing, computing, cybersecurity, and launch.”
According to the NROL-192 mission’s press kit, the NRO has plans for continuing launches for its proliferated architecture through 2029. It announced that the next two missions will be NROL-145 and NROL-48, the latter of which doesn’t have a declared launch date yet.
The NRO also hasn’t said if all of the proliferated architecture launches will continue flying exclusively on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets or if it will utilize United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, now that it’s certified for national security missions, or Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, once it too achieves government certification.
source: spaceflightnow.com