Trump has deployed 80 spy satellites in his first 100 days in the White House

Donald Trump has just completed the first 100 days of his second presidential term in the White House after positioning no fewer than 80 new spy satellites in space. 

In the little more than three months that Trump has been in the Oval Office for the second time, he has already put into orbit almost as many as the hundred or so that Biden launched into outer space during the whole of 2024. Donald Trump wants to create the ‘largest and most capable government satellite constellation in US history’. 

Since he was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on 20 January before Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, Trump has called for accelerating the deployment of a new web of electronic eyes and ears, adding to the more than 200 of all types, sizes and technologies that the Department of Defence and various intelligence agencies already have in place above our heads. 

The military organisation responsible for placing US satellites linked to national security into orbit is the Space Force, which since November 2022 has been under the command of General Chance Saltzman. And the Pentagon agency responsible for operating and extracting intelligence data from all military spy devices is the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO. 

The NRO is headed by civil engineer Chris Scolese, who was nominated by Trump and confirmed by the Senate a few months ago. Scolese already held the position throughout Joe Biden's presidency (2021-2025), although it was Trump who appointed him to the post on 5 August 2019, during his first presidential term (2017-2021), which proves that Scolese enjoys prestige as a public servant above political considerations. 

What is known about the Starshield constellation of spy satellites

As Scolose explains in his public statements, the NRO serves the priority needs ‘to observe and listen’ conveyed to it by both the Department of Defence and the Intelligence Community, in particular the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). These requests are compiled by the aforementioned Office, which is responsible for managing them with the various spy satellite constellations it has positioned in space. 

The most important and extensive space network that the NRO is currently deploying consists of the Starshield satellites, the military version of billionaire Elon Musk's famous Starlink broadband communications mega-constellation, which already has more than 7,200 operational devices in low orbit, at an altitude of about 550 kilometres.  

Starshield's latest secret mission took off on 20 April on a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Listed as NROL-145, it was the tenth launch of the so-called Proliferated Architecture, whose platforms are similar in weight and dimensions to Starlink. But they differ in that the NRO satellites are equipped with advanced sensors developed by the powerful technology corporation Northrop Grumman, capable of capturing high-resolution images in the visible and radar spectra from 310 and 500 kilometres above the Earth.  

The concept of ‘Proliferated Architecture’ refers to the new trend in the US Department of Defence to ‘use a constellation of several hundred small satellites instead of a few large ones,’ emphasises Chris Scolese. In this way, the network becomes ‘virtually invulnerable’ to attacks by anti-satellite weapon systems. Potential enemies of the United States, such as Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, ‘can destroy one or more large and expensive spy satellites, but neutralising an entire constellation is much more complicated,’ argues Scolese.  

With several hundred Starshields already in orbit, ‘today we can see, hear and sense what is happening on Earth better than any other nation in the world,’ Scolese emphasises. The NRO already has the capacity to revisit the same fixed or mobile ground target very frequently and check its movements or evolution over time, enabling it to track and follow in near real time what is happening in large areas of the Earth and thus monitor and extract intelligence useful to senior military commanders and political authorities. 

Quadrupling the number of electronic eyes and ears in five years

The NRO's ‘Proliferated Architecture’ network based on Starshield satellites is growing rapidly to achieve global coverage and, if necessary, to survive potential attacks. As these are small, low-cost devices that can be mass-produced, the production time for each Starshield is short and they are therefore easy to replace, provided there is sufficient capacity to access space. 

So far this year, 77 Starshields and three other signals intelligence spy satellites have been placed in orbit. For the remainder of 2025, the Space Force and the NRO have scheduled around ten launches, ’ half of which are dedicated to ‘Proliferated Architecture’ missions, which will continue until 2029,’ said Colonel Jim Horne, who is directly responsible for the launches. The NRO is confident that it will ’quadruple the number of its satellites over the next decade.’ 

To achieve this ambitious goal, the Space Force must have the capacity to carry out frequent launches with the various rockets it has contracted through the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) programme, ‘which guarantees continued access to space for national security missions,’ said Colonel Horne.

With a budget of around $1.8 billion, the Space Force relies on the most reliable US launch service companies for this work, primarily SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket, but also Rocket Lab's Electron, ULA's Vulcan and Northrop Grumman's Minitaur IV. Each of the different rocket models contracted must be able to carry not just one, two or three Starshields into space, but a much larger number, between 17 and 22. 

And it has four space bases for take-offs. One of the main ones is in Vandenberg (California), on the Pacific coast, another in Cape Canaveral (Florida) and a third on Wallops Island (Virginia), both on the Atlantic coast. The NRO and the Space Force also have access to the facilities of private operator Rocket Lab in New Zealand, on the Maia Peninsula, southwest of the Pacific Ocean.