Beauchamp began working for the department in 2015, and most recently served as the director of security, special program oversight and information protection within the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force. In that role, he oversaw the Air and Space Forces’ highly-classified special access programs (SAP) and worked on insider threat mitigation.

But Beauchamp’s 29-year career spans across multiple positions at the Department of the Air Force, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). By and large, he either led or was involved in several critical events within the national security space — so much so that someone once described him as “the Forrest Gump of the national security world.”

“He goes, ‘You were kind of there in all the big happenings of your time of your career. You were right in the middle of all these things that were the big developments. Sometimes you were there in the background of the scene, and sometimes you were there front and center doing the thing,’” Beauchamp told DefenseScoop in an interview on July 3, his last day at the Pentagon, recalling how a colleague described his tenure.

After graduating from Lehigh University in 1992, Beauchamp was hired as a systems engineer for General Electric Aerospace’s programs with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). He would eventually move to the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) — the precursor to the NGA — after it was founded in 1996 as an operations analyst supporting work to collect imagery and targeting data in the Balkans during the Yugoslav Wars.

In 2000, Beauchamp became NIMA’s senior technical advisor for studies and analysis when he was 29 years old, making him the youngest person to be hired for a senior executive position within the agency since it was founded. Almost immediately, he was tasked with developing a congressionally mandated strategy that would convince the government to purchase imagery from commercial vendors.

At the time, the IC held a monopoly over space-based imagery and data, and the industry market was only just beginning to take hold. Beauchamp described the assignment as “trying to sell milk to people with their own cows.”

“Why would the NRO want to encourage the government to buy commercial imagery? They’re the judge to build and operate imagery satellites,” he said. “So I figured out what it would take in terms of investment to get industry to buy and build satellites sufficient to meet the government’s demands, because the national satellites were not meeting all of the government’s demand for mapping data.”

But after developing a business case for the strategy, Beauchamp said the government was largely opposed to implementing it. He decided to shelve the strategy after one final unsuccessful meeting held on Sept. 10th, 2001, he said.

“On the 11th of September, [Congress] called me up,” he said. “I’m in my office, we’re watching pictures of the [Twin Towers] smoking, and my phone rings and it’s the congressional staff saying, ‘You’ve got your money. Could you spend more?’”

Beauchamp’s $830 million plan was funded by one of Congress’ post-9/11 supplemental packages and created ClearView — the first program that allowed commercial companies to provide satellite imagery to the IC. Once U.S. forces had entered Afghanistan, Beauchamp also moved to purchase all of the overhead imagery of the country, he said.

“What we really wanted to do was make sure that this imagery that was being collected wasn’t being used by the Taliban to target our forces,” he said. “So I basically stitched a camouflage net made out of $100 bills over the country of Afghanistan in order to keep our forces safe.”

Today, commercially derived imagery is one of the fastest growing markets in the world. Companies like Maxar, BlackSky and Planet Labs all have several lucrative contracts with the federal government to provide space-based data for national security, weather and other needs. 

“So this industry, would it exist? Maybe. But would it have blown up the way it did? Probably not, if we hadn’t done this,” Beauchamp said.

The next several years of Beauchamp’s career would be spent at the NGA in various roles focused on strategy and acquisition. In 2012, he began a joint duty assignment as the ODNI’s director of mission integration under then-Director of National Intelligence Gen. James Clapper — a job he noted was one of the highlights of his career. During his second day on the job, U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, were targeted by militant groups, leading to the death of four American citizens.

Once Beauchamp’s team finished the assessment of the attack, he was immediately thrust into the fallout of the classified document leaks by Edward Snowden in 2013. His oversight led to a massive reform of the IC’s compartmented access programs and yet another overhaul of the government’s policy on commercial imagery.

“All of a sudden, now I’m convening people on the analytics side [and the] collection side, trying to figure out how to make up for the losses and capability that Snowden revealed,” he said. “And part of that is doing a reform of the IC’s compartmented programs, because they had way too many of them in overlap.”

Toward the end of his three-year assignment, Beauchamp started working with former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work on a “side project” focused on standing up a new organization to pivot the Defense Department away from counterterrorism operations in the Middle East and towards great power competition, he said.

Beauchamp’s time in the intelligence community came to an end in 2015, when he was picked to be the Department of the Air Force’s deputy undersecretary for space and director of the principal DOD space advisor. There, he had two critical tasks, he noted.

“One, I’m working with all the international relationships with other countries who want to cooperate with us in space,” Beauchamp said. “At the same, I’m trying to convince the Americans to shift from space as a sanctuary from which you provide services, to space as a domain for warfighting.”

At the time, the Pentagon was reluctant to expand operations in space out of fear of being the first to weaponize the domain. But Beauchamp argued that the idea wasn’t about weaponization, and instead protection of critical space-based capabilities.

“It’s almost like before then, we were deliberately not protecting them so as you didn’t look like you wanted to start something,” he said. “And I was like, ‘This is not an option anymore.’ The Chinese had already demonstrated they could shoot down their own satellites, what’s to stop them from doing the same thing to us?”

Part of Beauchamp’s work was to develop a plan for how the Pentagon could make its space systems more resilient — many of which have become central to the Space Force’s operations, he noted. And when the first Trump administration decided to stand up the Space Force, Beauchamp was at the forefront of the effort to convince officials to approve the new military service.

Beauchamp would then transition to the Department of the Air Force’s office of the CIO, first as its director of enterprise IT in 2018 and later as the deputy CIO in 2020. His main focus was preparing the DAF for transitioning to telework operations as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, as well as consolidating the department’s enterprise licenses and creating a plan for modernizing base-level infrastructure, he noted.

“The overall trend line was eliminating the county option of uniqueness that was taking place at every base, and replacing it with a core set of enterprise services that were provided centrally,” Beauchamp said. “Big things like moving to zero trust — you can’t do those things if every base and every two-letter has their own architecture independent of everybody else’s.”

Today, the DAF has a strong path forward on modernizing its IT infrastructure, but Beauchamp said the true challenge will be convincing the department’s major programs to rely on enterprise services instead of building their own networks.

“It’s going to allow them to consolidate and collapse multiple redundant networks and really reduce the amount of money we’re spending on sustaining all this infrastructure,” he said. “When you modernize those networks, you also improve your cybersecurity, because the more deviation you have, the more gaps are created between the different baselines and different versions of software.”

Moving forward, Beauchamp said he will be taking time off but is open to other opportunities in the future.

“I’m excited for whatever the next challenge might be,” he said. “I’m interested in talking to folks who do exciting things, and to see who needs somebody like me to solve big problems.”

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Inked by Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman and NGA Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth during the annual GEOINT Symposium in St. Louis, Missouri, the MOA outlines the boundaries between NGA’s operations and the Space Force’s nascent Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Tracking (TacSRT) program — putting an end to a two-year turf war over which organization should purchase commercial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance products and deliver them to combatant commanders.

“What [the agreement] really reflects is the quality of collaboration and every echelon that was necessary to work through these procedures,” Saltzman said in a statement. “I’m excited about this because of what it represents, and that’s really industrial strength collaboration.”

Whitworth first shared news of a drafted MOA with the Space Force in April during an interview with DefenseScoop, noting that moving forward NGA will work closely with the service to ensure the organizations weren’t “paying twice” for commercial ISR.

In a statement, Whitworth called the finalized agreement “a new standard for collaboration.”

While the full text of the MOA was not made public, the document outlines a “governance framework” between the intel agency and the Space Force by detailing the roles and responsibilities each organization has in providing commercial ISR to military leaders, an NGA spokesperson said in a statement to DefenseScoop.

Furthermore, a Space Force spokesperson told DefenseScoop that the MOA requires the service to collaborate with NGA support teams to “ensure data purchases and derived products … conform to consistent, mutually agreed upon National System for Geospatial Intelligence standards when applicable.”

The accord also states the Space Force will “coordinate processes and procedures for dissemination and releasability of products,” and submit a report to NGA each quarter that describes the service’s efforts to minimize overlapping efforts, the spokesperson added.

Disputes between the Space Force and NGA first arose when the service kicked off TacSRT in 2023. The program established a marketplace where combatant commanders can directly buy and rapidly receive “operational planning products” — including unclassified imagery and data analytics — from commercial space providers. 

Although Space Force officials have touted the success of TacSRT and begun efforts to scale it, the program caused some tension between the service and the intelligence community.

Under current Pentagon-IC policies, NGA holds responsibility for acquiring commercial ISR products and determining who across the government receives them. At the same time, the National Reconnaissance Office is tasked with buying commercial remote sensing imaging and sharing it across the department and intelligence community.

Space Force leaders have claimed that TacSRT is not meant to step on the toes of NGA and NRO, but instead serve as a complement to the intelligence community’s work.

During a hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Saltzman said the program “fills a niche where you have unclassified capabilities that can get quickly into planners’ hands.”

Now that the Space Force has finalized an agreement with NGA, the service is expected to also reach a similar arrangement with the NRO.

When asked by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., about progress on the Space Force’s work with the intelligence agencies on Tuesday, Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink emphasized that foundations for collaboration have been laid — but “the devil’s in the details.”

“We’re just starting to feel good now and starting to do experimentation with [TacSRT] now, using tools to allow that to happen,” Meink said. “There’s obviously still a lot of work to go, but I think there’s been great progress made, and the fact that we already have systems that we can start doing testing work and start doing exercise will be critically important.”

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Troy Meink — who worked at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) prior to his nomination — also told lawmakers that the department must move faster on innovating new technologies, while also improving acquisition processes for onboarding new capabilities.

“One of the first things I plan to do is take a holistic look at all the modernization and all the readiness bills that we have coming. And then I will put together and advocate for what resources I think are necessary to execute all of those missions,” Meink said Thursday during his confirmation hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Both during his testimony and in responses to advance policy questions prior to the hearing, Meink emphasized that the Air Force is at an inflection point as it works to upgrade key systems and capabilities across all of its core mission areas.

The service is responsible for modernizing two legs of the nuclear triad with its new B-21 Raider stealth bomber and its replacement for the aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile system known as the LGM-35A Sentinel. Other high-cost efforts include the Air Force’s next-generation fighter platforms — such as the F-47 and Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones — new command-and-control capabilities and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems.

Managing those efforts with ongoing readiness and maintenance requirements would be his top priority — and a significant challenge — if confirmed, Meink told lawmakers.

“We also need to balance today’s requirements with the need to modernize and maintain future readiness, deterrence and lethality,” Meink wrote in his written responses to lawmakers’ questions. “Manage short-term risk to readiness to modernize and prepare our forces for mid-to-long term and enduring strategic missions as well as acute and persistent threats.”

Meink also pledged to improve the Air Force’s ability to innovate on new technologies for warfighters, adding that his previous experience at the NRO and in other leadership positions at the Pentagon would help him do so.

“I spent the last decade increasing competition and expanding the industry base, which has significantly accelerated delivery capability and at a lower cost. I intend to bring that same drive for innovation to the department,” he said.

Prior to being tapped by Trump in January to serve as the next secretary of the Air Force, Meink spent four years as principal deputy director of the NRO — the spy agency responsible for intelligence space systems. He was also previously the organization’s director of geospatial intelligence systems and held numerous other positions focused on the space domain.

Meink said growing the Space Force would be among his top priorities if he’s confirmed.

“Space is critical. This is actually one of the areas that we’re most challenged, I believe,” Meink said in response to questions from Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb. “From the rapidly evolving threat from China and others — both the direct threat to our systems, as well as the threat those systems pose to operations across the department in general.”

However, Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., probed Meink on rumors that the Space Development Agency (SDA) is planning to cancel contracts for Tranche 2 and Tranche 3 of the transport layer in the Proliferated Space Warfighter Architecture (PWSA) and instead award a sole-source contract to SpaceX for its Starshield capability. Cramer added that, if true, such plans would mean at least eight mid-sized space vendors would not be allowed to bid on the contracts.

Meink’s alleged ties to Elon Musk’s SpaceX have come under scrutiny in recent weeks, but the nominee claimed that he was unaware of any considerations to replacing current contracts with Starshield but would investigate them if he’s confirmed.

Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and York Space Systems are on contract to build some of the satellites under the Tranche 2 transport layer, while a separate contract previously awarded to York and Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems is being re-competed following a protest bid. The agency is currently gearing up to formally begin bidding for Tranche 3 of the transport layer this year.

“One of the things that I’ve pushed for — particularly over the last 10 years — is to expand competition and expand the industry base,” Meink said. “That ends up almost always with the best result, both from capability and cost to the government.”

In a statement to DefenseScoop, a Department of the Air Force spokesperson said the department and the Space Force are working with the Office of the Secretary of Defense to review all acquisition programs under the fiscal 2026 budget process, and that no decision has been made regarding Tranche 2 and Tranche 3 of the transport layer.

“The DAF and [Space Force] are committed to the efficient use of taxpayer dollars and maximizing the delivery of capability to the joint warfighter,” the spokesperson said. “We look forward to sharing the status of our acquisition programs with our stakeholders in Congress and elsewhere when the FY26 budget is delivered in the coming months.”

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Since May, NRO has completed three of six launches planned for 2024 that have put operational satellites on orbit for the proliferated constellation, which is expected to enhance the office’s ability to capture and deliver space-based data for military users. Prior to launching the first batches of operational satellites this year, NRO began a series of on-orbit demonstrations with prototypes in June 2023 to verify the constellation’s performance and cost.

“From last June to December this year, we’ll have probably launched 100 satellites. So, we are going from the demo phase to the operational phase, where we’re really going to be able to start testing all of this stuff out in a more operational way,” Scolese said at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Envisioned as a constellation comprising hundreds of satellites stationed across multiple orbits, NRO’s proliferated architecture is part of the office’s broader plan to drastically increase the number of space vehicles it operates over the next decade. The shift to larger constellations of low-cost satellites is one happening across the space sector, including both in the national security and commercial industries. 

An NRO spokesperson told DefenseScoop that the office has launched over ten missions related to the proliferated constellation since mid-2023. Additional launches are expected to fill out the constellation through 2028, according to NRO.

“The purpose of this proliferated architecture is to increase revisit rates, enhance NRO’s coverage, and capture and deliver — by orders of magnitude — more data to our users than ever before,” the spokesperson said.

Scolese emphasized that a key benefit of the proliferated constellation will be its ability to increase NRO’s revisit rates — or the ability to repeatedly take images of a location over a period of time — and deliver that intelligence directly to warfighters.

“We need to have persistence, or fast revisit. Persistence you get by going into higher orbits, but that means you need much, much larger apertures in order to accomplish whatever the mission is,” he said. “Or you can proliferate your architecture, put more satellites up there, so that a satellite is always coming over an area within a given, reasonable amount of time that’s needed by the users.”

The constellation is enabled by a burgeoning commercial space industry able to build hundreds of satellites at lower costs than before, Scolese added. NRO is able to leverage commercial space vehicles for its own missions by adapting them with additional military-specific sensors and systems, he said.

As NRO moves into using the proliferated satellites in operations, the office is also looking at how it can leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation to help operators in tasking the satellites and processing intelligence they collect, Scolese said.

“When it comes to tasking the satellites, asking them what to do and figuring out which satellite is the best one to do it — or which combination is — that’s where we’re taking advantage of advanced processing techniques, [and] some of the techniques in artificial intelligence and machine learning, to do that,” he noted.

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The payloads were carried by United Launch Alliance on board one of the company’s Atlas V rockets. The event took place at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Liftoff was initially scheduled for Aug. 29 but got scrapped due to Hurricane Idalia making its way across the Florida coast. It was rescheduled for Saturday but was postponed until the following day “due to an issue found during a prelaunch ordnance circuit continuity check,” according to a ULA post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

NRO Director Christopher Scolese told reporters in August prior to the launch that Silentbarker underscores an important burgeoning partnership between his spy agency and the Space Force.

“Working together, we’ve developed a system in a relatively short amount of time that’s going to provide us with unprecedented coverage of what’s going on in the [geosynchronous] belt so that we can understand the intentions of other countries to see what they’re doing in the GEO belt, to see if there’s any indications of threats or if it’s just normal,” he said.

Details about the Silentbarker satellites — including any contractors involved or what specific capabilities are included with the payloads — have largely been kept secret since the NRO began working with the Pentagon on the program. However, Scolese confirmed that the entire constellation will eventually include multiple payloads that will keep track of objects stationed in geosynchronous orbit. 

Scolese described the constellation as a “watchdog” for the GEO regime, which is about 22,236 miles above the Earth’s equator and a difficult area of space to monitor from the ground. Silentbarker will allow the Space Force and the NRO to have a better understanding of what’s happening in that orbit, where a number of critical space assets are.

“We also want to know if there is something going on that is unexpected or shouldn’t be going on that could potentially represent a threat to a high value asset — either ours or one of our allies,” he said.

Space domain awareness is considered a priority mission for the Space Force, especially as more military and commercial assets are launched into space and that realm becomes increasingly contested. The service is actively working to close current capability gaps that prevent it from having adequate data on what’s happening in space.

In the case of Silentbarker, moving the capability on orbit offers unprecedented opportunities for sensing objects in the GEO regime, according to Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, commander of Space Systems Command — the Space Force’s acquisition arm.

“Today, we primarily rely on our ground-based radars. Our ground-based radars are pretty exquisite, but they pretty much can only see about a basketball-sided object in space. And because of the challenges of day, night and weather, it gets extremely hard to maintain custody of those objects,” Guetlein said during the roundtable with reporters. “By actually moving the sensor into orbit with those objects, we can actually not only detect smaller objects, but maintain custody of them.”

The Space Force requested $115.6 million in fiscal 2024 for Silentbarker, which includes “on-orbit support” in order to meet initial operational capability and a continued development of the Silentbarker “expansion” increment to achieve full operational capability, according to budget documents. The constellation is on track to meet full operational capability by 2026, Scolese said.

The payloads launched Saturday will now undergo a checkout phase that could range from 30 to 90 days, he noted.

Once full operational capability is achieved, Silentbarker will be maintained by NRO while data gathered from the satellites will be sent to the National Defense Space Center jointly operated by NRO and U.S. Space Command, the combatant command responsible for American military operations in space.

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During his keynote address at the Space Symposium on Tuesday, National Reconnaissance Office Director Chris Scolese emphasized that the NRO is integrating AI and ML widely across the organization. 

“We’re also increasing automation, multi-intelligence processes and machine learning capabilities so we can operate at the speed of machines and deliver the right information, at the right time, to the right place,” he said. “Automation and machine learning can focus on the ‘what, where and when’ of our intelligence questions and allow humans to focus on what they do best — answering the ‘why.’”

Scolese later told DefenseScoop during a media roundtable that he sees two critical roles for AI and machine learning at the NRO: filtering data collected by its satellites and assisting in managing a growing constellation.

“We bring down a lot of data down today, and we’re going to bring down more in the future. It’s not possible for a human to deal with all of that data,” he said. “So we want to use AI [and] ML to go off and filter that data, find the objects of interest or find those things that are changing, so that the analyst can deal with a much smaller set or deliver a much more complex set to the warfighter.”

At the same time, the agency has plans to quadruple the number of intelligence and reconnaissance satellites it operates within the next decade, Scolese announced during his keynote speech. The agency will be operating a mix of satellites that are proliferated across multiple orbits

Because of the growth, AI and ML can help operators task, collect and disseminate information from multiple spacecraft, he noted.

“When you’re operating one satellite, one person can sit there and think about it,” he said. “When you start multiplying that to tens or hundreds, it becomes more important to go off and look at how I am optimizing that constellation.”

Gen. James Dickinson, commander of U.S. Space Command, also told DefenseScoop that the growing number of assets in space is influencing how he envisions artificial intelligence and machine learning — especially for the space domain awareness mission as space becomes more congested.

When Spacecom stood up in August 2019, it tracked and monitored about 25,000 objects in orbit on a daily basis. That number has since nearly doubled to over 48,000 objects, Dickinson said.

“You can imagine the size of the datasets that are coming, or the data that’s having to be understood and manipulated so we understand what’s happening and we’re characterizing it,” he said. “I think that a great application of AI and ML is to be able to tell us what we really need to look at [and] what we really need to pay attention to, because certainly we can’t look at everything all the time.”

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