The Straits Times (Singapore) March 20, 2001, Tuesday
Wanted : Thousands of engineers for supersecret spy satellite project
An undertaking worth $45 billion -- tipped to be the backbone of US intelligence -- will create sophisticated spy probes. But nobody is talking
LOS ANGELES -- A team of Southern California aerospace companies is covertly recruiting engineers across the country for a new generation of spy satellites under what analysts believe is the largest intelligence-related contract ever.
The supersecret project for the National Reconnaissance Office is estimated to be worth as much as US$25 billion (S$45 billion) over the next two decades, providing a major boost to the area's aerospace industry and solidifying its long-held dominance of high-tech space research.
Equipped with powerful telescopes and radar, the nation's newest eye in space is expected to form the backbone of US intelligence for decades, analysts said.
The satellites will be farther out in space and harder to detect than the massive spy probes that currently orbit the Earth.
They will also be able to fly over and take pictures of military compounds anywhere in the world, in darkness or through cloud cover, with far more frequency.
Company officials are restricted from talking about the highly classified contract, but Mr Roger Roberts, general manager of the Boeing Co unit in Seal Beach overseeing the project, gave a hint of its scope and size.
The endeavour will require 5,000 engineers, technicians and computer programmers over the next five years, and that will just be for the initial design and development of the satellites, he said.
That figure does not include thousands more who will be required to assemble the satellites, most likely at Boeing Satellite Systems in El Segundo, and thousands of workers employed by hundreds of subcontractors and parts suppliers.
The need for engineers has been so great that two months ago Boeing opened a recruitment office in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Sunnyvale, where it is targeting both dot.com survivors and Lockheed Martin Corp engineers who built many of the spy satellites now in orbit.
After dominating that business since the 1950s, Lockheed lost the new contract to Boeing.
Mr John Pike, a Washington, DC-based military space consultant, believes that in all, the work could eventually mean jobs for at least 20,000 people in California and be similar in scope to the US$20-billion Manhattan Project, the 1940s programme to build the first atomic bomb.
"Lots of kids will be sent to college, lots of swimming pools are going to get built and a lot of people will spend their career working on this project," Mr Pike said, adding that the Southern California economy should benefit for a generation or more.
Still, most state officials said they know little about the project.
"We know California benefits substantially, but by exactly how much we just don't know," said Mike Marando, a spokesman for the California Technology, Trade and Commerce Agency.
The National Reconnaissance Office has not helped.
The enigmatic agency announced the contract in a three-paragraph news release posted on its bare-bones website little more than a year ago.
The project is officially known as Future Imagery Architecture.
Besides saying it awarded the contract to Boeing "to develop, provide launch integration and operate the nation's next generation of imagery reconnaissance satellites," not much else has been revealed.
Boeing and other contractors -- which would normally gloat -- are not talking, other than to confirm that they are part of the winning team.
SMARTER SPIES
ALTHOUGH little has been said about the new spy satellite programme, analysts believe:
The number of satellites in orbit will increase substantially.
The new models are likely to be significantly smaller and cheaper.
A bigger constellation of satellites will let the probes revisit and take pictures of an area more frequently.
If placed at a higher orbit, satellites could take pictures for a longer period and to collect eight to 20 times more images than are currently possible.
Copyright 2001 Singapore Press Holdings Limited
