As commercial space companies have proliferated and achieved new technological milestones,

the U.S. government has moved to take greater advantage of the market and get more creative

in how it works with industry. That's the case for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office,

the secretive agency overseeing America's space-based intelligence,

surveillance, and reconnaissance.

Or in layman's terms, the country's extensive network spy satellites.

Director Chris Scalise plans to quadruple the number of satellites the NRO has on orbit over the next decade.

It's really been a combination of our

partnerships with industry, the advancement of technology, and the coincident

reduction in cost of all of those systems, and at the same time it's helped to improve

our reliability so that we can achieve more with more capability at a lower cost.

In a rare one-on-one interview, Dr. Scalese talks to commercial partnerships, innovation

ahead of the NRO's upcoming tech forum, and how, to channel its own motto,

the Classified Intelligence Agency

goes above and beyond.

I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. The NRO has been around for a little bit more than 60 years and our function is to provide the intelligence surveillance reconnaissance from space so that we can provide information

to national leaders, analysts, policy makers, all the way to the warfighter and the individuals who are working natural disasters.

We want to get them the information as quickly as possible in areas that are very difficult to get by other means.

So in terms of spaces of war fighting domain, a contested domain, what has that meant in

terms of how you are thinking about future

capabilities and what the mission of the NRO has evolved to become?

So the mission really hasn't changed. We still need to provide that information that can only be obtained from space to look into the night areas. But what has changed is some of the ways that we have to work. As you said, the space domain has become essentially a war fighting domain has become contested. And as a result, we've had to adjust.

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