“Of all people, it’s the ‘space warmongers’ doing the most to try to sustain the (space) environment,” one DoD official said.

NGA’s Global EDG program is a good example of how the 2017 bifurcation of authority over commercial remote sensing acquisition between the NGA and the National Reconnaissance Organization (NRO) — a transition that remains somewhat troubled –is supposed to work.

  UPDATED WASHINGTON: US commercial satellite sales to AsiaSat, and the company’s leasing of communications bandwidth to China, are not threats to US national security, say experts — contrary to charges by Republican Senators Charles Grassley and Joni Ernst. Instead, US export control law very deliberately has been crafted to encourage such sales in a… Keep reading →

NGA and NRO “have significantly overlapping Venn diagrams,” one industry source said, and they are still trying to “sort that through.” He added, “It’s not a nice clean line.”

“To be quite honest most of our space systems are not the leading edge technologies,” Troy Meink, head of GEOINT at NRO, said. “We’ve not kept up in many cases with the commercial environment.”