Future Imagery Architecture
Encyclopedia
Future Imagery Architecture (FIA) was a program to design a new generation of optical and radar imaging
Synthetic aperture radar
Synthetic-aperture radar is a form of radar whose defining characteristic is its use of relative motion between an antenna and its target region to provide distinctive long-term coherent-signal variations that are exploited to obtain finer spatial resolution than is possible with conventional...

 US
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 reconnaissance satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office
National Reconnaissance Office
The National Reconnaissance Office , located in Chantilly, Virginia, is one of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. It designs, builds, and operates the spy satellites of the United States government.-Mission:...

 (NRO). In 2005 NRO director Donald Kerr
Donald Kerr
Donald MacLean Kerr, Jr. is the current Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Thursday, October 4, 2007. He most recently was the Director of the National Reconnaissance Office. He was sworn into that position July 2005 by Secretary of Defense...

 recommended the project's termination, and the optical component of the program was finally cancelled in September 2005 by Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte
John Negroponte
John Dimitri Negroponte is an American diplomat. He is currently a research fellow and lecturer in international affairs at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs...

. FIA has been called by The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

"perhaps the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects."

History

The development contract for FIA was awarded to a Boeing
Boeing
The Boeing Company is an American multinational aerospace and defense corporation, founded in 1916 by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington. Boeing has expanded over the years, merging with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. Boeing Corporate headquarters has been in Chicago, Illinois since 2001...

 team in late 1999, and was estimated to possibly reach a value of US$25 billion over the ensuing twenty years. The exact scope and mission of the program are classified, although the head of the NRO said in 2001 that the project would focus on creating smaller and lighter satellites. Some industry experts believe that a key objective is to make the satellites more difficult to be attacked, possibly by placing them in orbits farther above the Earth. Because of the large size and budget of the program, as well as number of workers involved, some experts have compared it to the 1940s Manhattan Project
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development program, led by the United States with participation from the United Kingdom and Canada, that produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army...

. In September 2005 the contract was shifted to Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin is an American global aerospace, defense, security, and advanced technology company with worldwide interests. It was formed by the merger of Lockheed Corporation with Martin Marietta in March 1995. It is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, in the Washington Metropolitan Area....

 after cost overruns and delays of the delivery date. Lockheed was asked to restart production of an older satellite system with new upgrades, with first deliveries expected to be in 2009. In September 2010 NRO director Bruce Carlson stated that while most NRO "(...) programs are operating on schedule and on cost (...)", one program is "(...) 700 percent over in schedule and 300 percent over in budget".

Launches

A first launch possibly related to the FIA was the USA 193 satellite in 2006, which failed and then was destroyed by a missile. Another launch connected to the FIA program by some analysts is NROL-41 (USA 215) launched on 21 September 2010. It is in a retrograde 1100 x 1105 km orbit inclined by 123 degrees, an orbital configuration indicating it is a SAR
Synthetic aperture radar
Synthetic-aperture radar is a form of radar whose defining characteristic is its use of relative motion between an antenna and its target region to provide distinctive long-term coherent-signal variations that are exploited to obtain finer spatial resolution than is possible with conventional...

 satellite. USA-224, launched on 20 January 2011, is believed to be the first of the large post-FIA optical reconnaissance satellites built by Lockheed .

Successor program

The failed FIA program is to be succeeded by the Next Generation Electo-Optical (NGEO) program. NGEO is intended as a lower-risk modular system, which is capable of being modified incrementally over its lifetime.

External links

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