"This will be a modified mission from the Victus Nox mission," David Ryan, space portfolio manager at the Defense Innovation Unit said, noting that "there are two parts of the mission, and DIU is working on a single part with Space Safari."
"In a sense, we drive our satellites today as if we're going to church. Our adversaries drive their satellites as if they're going to combat," Lt. Gen. John Shaw, who recently retired from US Space Command, told Breaking Defense in this Q&A.
As the Space Force prepares to launch highly classified space domain awareness satellites, China calls foul on purported close approaches to its sats by existing US birds.
The NRO is planning to award new contracts for commercial satellite imagery, perhaps including that of other satellites, the spy-sat agency's head of commercial operations, Pete Muend, said today.
Stephen "Bucky" Butow, director of space at the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit summed up the end goal for future operations as creating a "blue collar space."
The two hosted payloads, designed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory, will keep tabs on spacecraft and dangerous debris in geosynchronous orbit (GEO).