Hess, Pamela. "Pentagon Will Acquire, Build Spy Satellites." Associated Press, 2 Jul. 2008. [http://www.ap.com] Hess, Pamela. "Pentagon Will Acquire, Build Spy Satellites." Associated Press, 2 Jul. 2008. [http://www.ap.com]
"The Pentagon will buy and operate one or two commercial imagery satellites and plans to design and build another with more sophisticated spying capabilities, according to government and private industry officials.... The Broad Area Surveillance Intelligence Capability (BASIC) satellite system will cost between $2 billion and $4 billion."
National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) will "buy and operate the satellites." And military commanders "will, for the first time, have the power to dictate what satellites will photograph when they pass overhead. The concept is known as 'assured tasking.'... Military commanders have long desired that kind of tasking control. Now, they submit their requests to a national intelligence authority that prioritizes the missions."
Lipton, Eric. "Administration Trying for Spy Satellites Again." New York Times, 18 Sep. 2008. [http://www.nytimes.com]
A "$1.7 billion project approved last week" seeks "to have two new satellites in orbit by 2012." The government's last spy satellite effort,the so-called Future Imagery Architecture, was canceled in 2005 before a single satellite was launched, at a cost of "at least $4 billion." There is already debate over whether the new program, the Broad Area Space-Based Imagery Collector, " should be building two new satellites of its own or acquiring images from private companies."
Scully, Megan. "National Reconnaissance Office Cancels Contracts for Proposed Space Radar Project." Government Executive, 4 Apr. 2008. [http://www.govexec.com]
NRO officials "last week officially notified Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin that they are terminating their contracts on the troubled Space Radar development project, effectively ending a program whose support on Capitol Hill had been dwindling amid cost concerns, schedule delays and technological problems."
U.S. Congress. House. Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence. Report on Challenges and Recommendations for United States Overhead Architecture. House Report No. 110-914. Washington, DC: GPO, 2008. [http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2008_rpt/hrpt110-914.html]
This is a fairly scathing indictment of the current status of the nation's satellite program. That the report avoids confronting directly the organizational mistakes that began in the mid-1990s and continued through Donald Rumsfeld's tenure as Defense Secretary does not convince this reader that the root problems are understood. Nevertheless, much of the rhetoric in the report is on the mark. The "Executive Summary" states: "The United States is losing its preeminence in space. A once robust partnership between the U.S. Government and the American space industry has been weakened by years of demanding space programs, the exponential complexity of technology, and an inattention to acquisition discipline."
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