SpaceX launched a national security mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office from Vandenberg Space Center on Friday evening. The spy agency described the secret mission as “the second launch of the National Reconnaissance Office’s burgeoning 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 rocket supporting this mission, tail number B1081 in the SpaceX fleet, blasted off for the eighth time. His 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.
Just over eight minutes after liftoff, B1081 touched down with the unmanned spacecraft “Of Course I Still Love You.” It was the 95th landing for the OCISLY booster and the 326th landing to date.
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The mission was the second launch of the NRO’s so-called “replicative 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, NRO said:
“NRO systems are designed, built, and operated by the NRO. As a matter of national security, we do not discuss companies associated with building our systems, our contractual relationships with them, their specific activities, or the locations where NRO systems are built.
The agency also refused to confirm the number of satellites included in these missions, as well as their orbit. In a speech at this year’s Space Symposium in Colorado, Dr. Troy Mink, the NRO’s principal deputy director, said there will be “about six such launches” this year.
These missions were not performed as part of the mission order for Phase II of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program. This is because the National Reconnaissance Office needed to perform these tasks before assigning mission order tasks to Phase III.
“The NRO partnered with the USSF Space Systems Command’s Assured Access to Space team on Phase 3 acquisition and influenced the development of Phase 3, Track 1 – as a means of obtaining flexible launch solutions with customizable mission assurance,” an NRO spokesperson said in a statement. “When considering the launch cadence and the need for customizable mission assurance, the NRO realized that we needed a bridge between Phase 2 and Phase 3 – Track 1. This led to some missions being acquired outside of the NSSL. The NSSL has been, and will continue to be, the NRO’s primary mechanism for obtaining launch services.”
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