Why the Feds Appreciate Private Satellite Images of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

The US government takes a back seat to nobody in its ability to take high-resolution photos of Earth from space, but sometimes a private company’s imaging cubesats can be more helpful to Washington than the National Reconnaissance Office’s(Opens in a new window) (NRO) high-powered satellites.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made that especially apparent, three federal officials said Thursday during a panel at satellite-imagery firm Planet Labs PBC’s Explore 2023 conference(Opens in a new window).

The single biggest advantage: Unlike the output of the NRO’s fleet—so strictly classified that observers have had to guess at those satellites’ attributes(Opens in a new window) by poring over the agency’s mission patches(Opens in a new window)—commercial imagery doesn’t come with any top-secret stamp.

“That is helping to hold Russia to account for their actions,” said Pete Muend, director of the NRO’s Commercial Systems Program Office. “It can go places, to partners and allies where sometimes we have a little more difficulty.”

The lack of any sort of government stamp on privately sourced images can also help on the public-diplomacy front by providing “an independent source of imagery, of information showing exactly what the US government was seeing,” said Audrey Schaffer, director for space policy at the National Security Council(Opens in a new window). 

(Left unsaid was how US satellite reconnaissance photos were used to sell the Iraq War(Opens in a new window) in 2003 on false grounds.)

“In this era of misinformation and disinformation, the more independent voices out there, the better,” she said, adding that most widely circulated photos documenting such costs of Russia’s invasion as mass graves didn’t didn’t come from government hardware. “The images that you saw were largely, or almost exclusively, coming from commercial sources.”

Although this panel happened at a conference organized by one satellite-imagery provider, the speakers didn’t talk up Planet in their remarks. That San Francisco firm’s cubesat constellations have company in low Earth orbit from such competitors as Maxar and BlackSky that have also helped to document the war in Ukraine. Maxar’s satellites, for example, spotted the 40-mile-long Russian convoy(Opens in a new window) north of Kyiv that Ukrainian forces then halted and routed(Opens in a new window).

The government has been taking advantage of these commercial capabilities since well before last winter, the panelists underscored.

“When we came to this Ukraine crisis, it wasn’t like we were starting from ground zero,” said James Griffith, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency(Opens in a new window)’s Source Operations and Management Directorate. 

Muend observed that the NRO’s existing contracts with commercial operators gave the agency “agility” when it needed to order up far more imagery than before: “The contract was set up where it was very straightforward to just add more money to surge some collections.” 

But as well as public-private collaboration has worked in this area, the panel pointed to causes of concern that won’t go away.

“I think we’re going to have to start thinking about where is that line between what the appropriate role of government is and what is the appropriate role of the private sector,” Schaffer said. As in: “If you’re using a commercial system to develop a targeting system for a weapon, is that an appropriate activity for a non-government system?” 

SpaceX has already decided that having its Starlink broadband constellation “being used to put metal on target,” as Schaffer phrased it, was not appropriate in Ukraine. The company revealed in February that it’s taken unspecified steps to curtail its use to target Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian forces.

Griffith commented that the flood of satellite imagery will become even more of a torrent in coming years—“there is going to be so much data”—and urged broader development of analytical tools to “make sense of that data for users who are not specialists.” In other words: ChatGPT, call your office.