SpaceX launches 4th batch of Starshield satellites for the NRO on its 100th Falcon 9 rocket of 2024

The Falcon 9 at sunrise Thursday, Oct. 24, 2024 as final preparations were made for the NROL-167 mission. Image: SpaceX.

SpaceX launch its fourth mission of the year for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) carrying satellites for its so-called “proliferated architecture,” which are believed to be Starshield satellites.

The mission, dubbed NROL-167, added an unspecified number of satellites to the growing constellation. Liftoff happened at 10:13 a.m. PDT (1:13 p.m. EDT, 1713 UTC) from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base.

The Thursday morning flight marked the 100th Falcon 9 launch for SpaceX in 2024. This number includes the launch failure during the Starlink 9-3 mission in July when an upper stage issue caused SpaceX to fail in placing the satellites into their intended orbit.

The Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission, tail number B1063 in the SpaceX fleet, launched for a 21st time. It previously supported two national security missions (NROL-113 and SDA-0B), NASA’s DART mission and 14 Starlink flights.

A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, the booster touched down on the SpaceX droneship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You.’ This was the 105th booster landing for OCISLY and the 358th overall booster landing.

The mission patch for the NROL-167 mission as designed by the National Reconnaissance Office. Graphic: NRO

A proliferated architecture

Given the nature of the NRO, the agency has been reticent about disclosing many details on its proliferated architecture constellation. In a press kit published prior to the fourth launch supporting this mission, the intelligence agency note that including the NROL-167 mission, “Approximately nine additional launches supporting NRO’s proliferated architecture are planned for 2024, with additional launches expected through 2028.”

“The NRO’s proliferated system will increase timeliness of access, diversify communications pathways, and enhance resilience. It will provide greater revisit rates and increased coverage, and eliminate single points of failure,” the NRO wrote. “With hundreds of small satellites on orbit, data will be delivered in minutes or even seconds. This will ensure the analysts, warfighters, and civil agencies NRO serves receive actionable information faster than ever before.”

The exact number of satellites per mission is also something that the NRO doesn’t advertise. However, according to astronomer and expert orbital tracker, Jonathan McDowell, the third such launch for the NRO, NROL-113, featured 21 satellites.

Assuming that 21 satellites were launched on each of the previous proliferated architecture missions so far (NROL-146, -186 and -113), and that they are all still in full operation, that would account for 63 such satellites on-orbit so far.

The satellites from the third Starshield launch are now in the Space-Track catalog as USA 400 to USA 420, as expected. (And, as expected, with no associated TLEs).

— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) September 12, 2024

During a talk with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on Oct. 3, Chris Scolese, the first Senate-approved director of the NRO, touched broadly on the status of the architecture and a rough timeline.

“By roughly December of this year, from last June till December this year, we’ll have probably launched 100 satellites,” Scolese said. “So, we are going from the demo phase to the operational phase, where we’re really going to be able to start testing all of this stuff out in a more operational way.”

“That’s a challenge to the policy-making community to get the policies, the authorities fixed, so that as those operational capabilities come online, it’s seamless for the users,” replied Kari Bingen, the CSIS director for the Aerospace Security Project, referring to the Department of Defense and other parts of the U.S. government and its allies that will call upon the capabilities provided by this satellite constellation.

These satellites are believed to be the Starshield satellites manufactured by SpaceX with cooperation from Northrop Grumman. In a recent job listing for a software engineer working on the Starshield program, SpaceX noted the distinction between these satellites and the commercially available, Starlink:

“Starshield leverages SpaceX’s Starlink technology and launch capability to support national security efforts. While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use, with an initial focus on earth observation, communications, and hosted payloads.

“The Starshield software team is building highly reliable in-space mesh networks, designing secure systems to guarantee access to space, designing next-gen communication and sensing software, and more.”

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) on the NROL-113 mission, carrying satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office’s proliferated architecture. These satellites are believed to be Starshield, which is manufactured by SpaceX in partnership with Northrop Grumman. Image: SpaceX

During a media town hall meeting on Oct. 17 with the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, Troy Meink, the deputy director of the NRO, was asked about the NRO’s “partnership with Starlink and Starshield” in regard to “their envisioned role in the proliferated architecture.”

Meink didn’t address the Starshield portion of the question, but did state that they don’t use Starlink.

“The NRO, we really don’t have a direct role with Starlink,” Meink said. “The Air Force has a contract to provide commercial comm services, like they do with the rest of the commercial comm services, but the NRO itself does not procure anything direct from Starlink.

“We don’t use commercial Starlink services other than maybe in some test environments, but we don’t have any direct procurement of Starlink services.”

Scolese described the benefits of a proliferated architecture constellation during his Oct. 3 talk with CSIS. He said the frequency of launch and refreshing of the constellation allow for the NRO to not only adapt to new technologies as they become available, but also creates better protection for these as an on-orbit asset for intelligence gathering.

“We all know that there are countries, Russia and China are examples, that have developed ASATs (anti-satellite weapons) that can take out satellites,” Scolese said. “Well, if you have 100 satellites up there, you have to have at least 100 missiles in order to take them down. And that gets to be much, much more complicated in order to deal with that. So, it gives us a degree of resilience that we didn’t have before.”