In 2024, the new military junta ruling Niger demanded the departure of nearly 1,000 US service members stationed in the country on a mission to deter extremist groups.
With tensions high, US Africa Command turned to a new Space Force program called TacSRT (Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Tracking), to keep an eye on vehicles and people in the unsettled territory around a US airbase ahead of the withdrawal.
Space Force Chief of Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman said afterwards that the time between collection on orbit to delivery of data to the base was as low as 1.5 hours, validating the new service’s contribution to the security of the joint force. TacSRT was first used in June 2023; through the first quarter of 2025, the program has produced 525 OPPs (operational planning products), with 50+ used during the Niger pull-out.
But the episode led to pushback from the NGA, the agency that has historically led the distribution of space intelligence. For legal and operational reasons, the Space Force and the NGA had to figure out who does what when it comes to providing space intelligence.
“That’s when it was noted that NGA needs to be on the front end,” Col. Mia Walsh, the director of the Space Force’s Current Operations Division, told Payload. “We realized very quickly we needed to have a closer collaboration to ensure that we were each staying in our lane for TacSRT.”
In late May, NGA director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth and Saltzman signed an agreement to formalize how each agency provides space intelligence from private companies to the military. This is how we got there.
Tale as old as time: “TacSRT, to me, was a response to a frustration,” Robert Cardillo, the former NGA director who now chairs Planet Labs’ government subsidiary, told Payload. “From time immemorial, the one certainty in life is that operators—whether they’re intelligence or military—are never satisfied with intelligence.”
In a world where you can buy a satellite image on your smartphone and download it from the cloud, Cardillo explains, traditional concerns about intelligence being too slow to arrive or too classified to share with allies suddenly had a solution.
The idea for the program arose in 2023, when Saltzman heard complaints from US Africa Command and about the slow pace of intelligence delivery, according to a Space Force officer familiar with the program but not authorized to speak publicly.
Leaders tasked then-Space Systems Command leader Gen. Michael Guetlein with solving the problem. There, a digital marketplace for space domain awareness data built by CO-based Bluestaq was adapted for TacSRT queries.
The details of the formal relationship between USSF and NGA aren’t public, but there are few rules:
- Troops don’t ask TacSRT for imagery. They ask for answers, and focus on current operations.
- TacSRT products are explicitly not to be used for targeting, and situations where US troops are at risk would lead to national assets being called upon.
NGA products also offer more information from sources within the government, according to people involved in the program.
“You might just be asking, for instance, if there are vehicles within an area of interest,” Amelia Wolf, the deputy director for Space Force Current Operations, said. “If that question were to go over to NGA, you’d get more fidelity on what those vehicles are, who they’re owned by and what they’re doing. That’s really a key difference.”
In the mix: Now, Space Force components at combat commands around the world submit queries to an operations center at SSC, which vets them with NGA to avoid redundant efforts, then puts them up for bid. Firms can offer their answers, often pairing up with “competimates” to share complementary data or analysis across sensor types and resolutions.
“We emphasize an ability to fuse diverse data to address varied operational needs,” Lt Col. Craig Hackbarth, who acts as the program’s manager at SSC, said in an email. “This fusion gives us the flexibility to respond to most requests leveraging several phenomenologies and in all-weather, day or night.”
The goal is to return the analysis to the combatant command within 24 to 72 hours.
Where the US military supports partner nations, the program provides diplomatic firepower. In the case of a chemical spill off the coast of Africa, airborne surveillance capabilities couldn’t track the source down. TacSRT products were able to identify the specific ship within days of being tasked. Africa Command was able to share that information with the relevant governments.
“Part of the beauty of TacSRT [is taskings are] announced on Monday, award on Wednesday, deliver on Friday,” Cardillo said, noting that responsiveness varies by the question but can often fill the gap ahead of more exquisite national intelligence products or for lower priority missions.
Dozens of Planet employees can be called in to handle requests. “It’s pretty intense for that 24-48 hours,” Cardillo says. “And I’ve seen it around the clock as they’ll work to get that task-order response.”
Cardillo noted that Planet’s medium-resolution global daily monitoring product is often a starting point for narrowing down potential answers to TacSRT taskings.
Susanne Hake, Maxar’s head of US intelligence business, said her company has participated in 160 TacSRT OPPs, drawing on its own constellation of high-res EO spacecraft as well as data provided by SAR partners like Umbra and ICEYE US.
Title fight: Congress assigns some responsibilities for intelligence collection to military organizations under the secretary of defense and others to intelligence agencies, under legal authorities known by the shorthand of Title 10 and Title 50.
“That’s where the core debate existed for a while, you know, telling Space Force, ‘You’re producing intelligence,’ and Space Force said, “No, we’re not.” That went on for a while,” Cardillo said. “I was very glad to see the admiral and the general get together and deal with it.”
That tension became public last spring, when Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) revealed at a hearing that TacSRT’s efforts to monitor Chinese satellite launches on behalf of Indo-Pacific Command had upset intelligence officials. Monitoring satellite launches and collecting images of them in space was apparently not seen to be as “tactical” as efforts to monitor natural disasters or illegal fishing. However, that capability is still in demand.
“One of the examples that we are allowed to talk about…involves monitoring different satellite launch facilities, integrating different multisource data, developing patterns of life on launch facilities,” Hake said. “We were able to accurately predict a satellite launch event 24 hours before a launch…and one of the things that Maxar brings that’s unique is our ability to take non-Earth images and pictures of things that could also be launched.”
Asked if this referred to the Chinese satellite in question, a Maxar spokesperson said “We’re not talking about the specific location at this time, but, you know, it sounds pretty similar.”
Commercial surge: Figuring out the right lines of reporting is important for Congressional oversight to ensure intelligence is being used appropriately; the program has gathered data in the US in support of the military’s disaster response role. There’s also a need to avoid double-buying: Many contractors for TacSRT also provide imagery to the intelligence community.
And yet, demand for this data led to a $40M budget in FY2023 and a $50M budget in FY2024, with similar figures expected in this year’s appropriations, although the process ahead remains murky without a detailed Space Force budget request.
At a time when the NRO is reportedly planning to cut its commercial imagery budget by a third, the private space industry is poised to play an important role in meeting the demand for more data from the military.
“We defer to our customers on how they want to procure and which agency wants to procure,” Hake said. “One of the positive things here is that they are looking to buy commercial capabilities, and that’s generally in line with a lot of what we’re hearing under the new administration…something that’s ready to go, that’s off the shelf, that can be delivered quickly and at the speed of mission.”
Correction: This piece has been updated to fix a misattributed comment.
