The new satellites will have improved resilience and cyber capabilities and provide polar coverage — a capability not featured on the legacy satellites.
The Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Review is underway and lawmakers, through both the House and Senate defense policy bills, are signalling the direction they want to go when it comes to developing the future defense architecture against both regional and homeland missile threats.
Both satellites were built by Israel’s state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries and both carry high-resolution payloads produced by Israel’s Elbit Systems.
Rep. Mike Rogers, the House Strategic Forces Subcommittee chairman and Congress’s chief advocate for a new branch of the military focused on space, issued a dire warning to fellow lawmakers. The United States faces very real threats from Russia and China, he said, and “war-fighting has become absolutely dependent on space.”