俄乌冲突中西方商业间谍卫星屡次泄露俄军战况
2022-05-05 06:43阅读：
欧美商业间谍卫星。欧美民营公司的商业间谍卫星在本次俄乌冲突中表现抢眼，为俄军战事推进制造了巨大障碍，业内人士甚至表示，人类大规模军事行动的隐秘性或将从此消失。
开战以来，越来越多的欧美卫星公司开始向乌克兰提供卫星监测图像，追踪俄军动向，乌克兰政府的情报能力已跃入世界顶级。本次俄乌冲突，适逢商业监视卫星行业在规模和技术上突飞猛进，目前在轨商业间谍卫星已达数百颗。多家业内公司高管表示，他们正在向欧美政府传输战场数据，有时也会直接提供给基辅当局，辅助乌军作战。此外，部分商业监视卫星拍摄的图像也会提供给相关国际人道主义机构，以帮助评估地面态势并及时疏散平民。
这种商业运作并非没有风险，许多公司拒绝具体说明他们如何协助乌克兰抵御俄军进攻。一位高管表示，他担心自己的公司可能成为俄罗斯网络攻击的目标。然而，一些公司愿意公开宣传他们为乌克兰所做的事情。Planet
Labs高管马绍尔表示，商业对地监测图像的影响远远超出乌克兰，在无人知晓的情况下发动大规模军事行动已不再可能，“技术让我们进入了一个透明的时代”。
Ukraine War Puts Spy Satellites for Hire in the
Spotlight
From Russian tanks to mass burial sites, commercial imaging
spacecraft are shedding light on the Kremlin's war on its
neighbor
By W
arren P. Strobel and Robert Wall
AURORA, Colo.—Ukrainian forces hunting Russian tanks and tracking
troop movement are being aided by imagery from a growing number of
commercial spy satellites, giving Kyiv access to intelligence once
the domain of only a few governments.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on his neighbor has
coincided with a boom in the number and sophistication of
commercial surveillance satellites, with hundreds now in orbit.
Company officials say they are streaming data to the U.S. and
allied governments, sometimes directly to Kyiv authorities to aid
them in repelling Russia’s invading force, as well as to
humanitarian groups to help them map the chaos and evacuate
civilians.
Even before Russian troops poured into Ukraine, satellites detailed
the Kremlin’s plans. When Mr. Putin said his troops massing at the
border were pulling back, satellites showed the opposite, and that
Russia had built a bridge from Belarus for tanks to cross a river
into Ukraine. “No one knew to look at that area,” Planet Labs PBC
co-founder and Chief Executive Will Marshall said.
The imagery provider, which is working with the Pentagon and
others, was able to spot the bridge because its fleet of roughly
200 satellites scan all of Ukraine once a day, Mr. Marshall said.
The company’s satellites have a resolution of around 9 feet, a
measure of the level of detail the sensors can image, and can spot
changes on the ground.
It isn’t just optical imagery being gathered. Some satellites can
see through clouds and track Russian troop movements at night,
industry officials said. Still others scoop up electronic signals
that can be used to track Russian forces. The data from commercial
spacecraft may not be as high-quality as those the latest U.S. spy
satellites can reap, but they can be easily shared without the
encumbrance of security restrictions.
The data from these commercial spy satellites are now an integral,
if often informal, part of the conflict, providing Ukraine with
valuable intelligence it can use to battle Russian forces, but also
in shaping public opinion by exposing civilian destruction and
potential war crimes.
Senior U.S. national security officials and industry executives say
affordable satellites for hire have transformed the war, making it
harder for Russia to hide or dissemble about its military actions.
Since so much information is already public, it has also made it
easier for U.S. intelligence agencies to declassify and share some
of their own secrets.
“Commercial geospatial data is to the war in Ukraine what GPS was
to Desert Storm 30 years ago,” said John Serafini, CEO of HawkEye
360, referring to the U.S. military’s use of satellite navigation
for precision operations in the 1991 conflict. HawkEye 360, one of
many satellite startups still in their first decade, has a
constellation gathering radio-frequency signals from space.
The advent of spy satellites dates to the early days of the space
race. Months after the Soviet Union in 1957 launched the first
artificial satellite, Sputnik, which transmitted radio signals,
then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved plans for the U.S. to
develop and launch spy satellites. Images from those early
spacecraft had a resolution of roughly 25 feet.
Four decades of government monopoly began to change with the
launch, in 1999, of the Ikonos satellite, a commercial
earth-imaging spacecraft that offered users resolution as good as
about 3 feet.
In the early years of commercial imaging satellites, customers
still were largely governments, according to industry officials.
That started to shift as more earth-imaging satellites were
launched and users became more familiar with what they could
provide, and spacecraft showed greater detail, said Stephen Wood, a
senior director for Maxar Technologies Ltd., which has four
operational satellites in orbit.
Maxar, which has been a leading provider of Ukraine imagery to the
media—including The Wall Street Journal—during the Russian
invasion, uses cameras that take images with a resolution down to
12 inches. The company can reposition onboard cameras to collect
imagery of what’s happening on the ground across a larger area,
including border regions with Ukraine, Mr. Wood said.
While government intelligence agencies once viewed commercial spy
satellites with suspicion, they are now eager customers.
U.S. government spy satellites cost billions of dollars each and
can take years to build and deploy. Commercial spy satellites are
relatively cheap and can fill gaps.
The U.S. government is encouraging private companies to share their
haul, Navy Vice Adm. Robert Sharp, director of the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which collects, analyzes and
distributes data from U.S. spy satellites, said in an
interview.
The commercial industry has “been an important aspect of our
government being able to have the right information, the right
classification at the right time,” he said at GEOINT, an annual
space-intelligence conference.
Industry executives said Ukraine, with its notoriously tricky
weather, is a perfect proving ground for a space technology that
has been commercialized only recently: synthetic aperture radar,
which can peer through clouds, fog and snow.
Space technology company MDA Ltd. said it has a contract with a
commercial U.S. space partner. The imagery it collects is merged
and analyzed with that gathered by other companies. Those
intelligence reports are then shared with the Ukrainian
government.
“Ukraine is a tricky place and has a lot of cloud cover and night
operations,” MDA Chief Executive Mike Greenley said. The company
owns one radar satellite and the Canadian government a
constellation of three. They can detect where vehicles have moved,
even in bad weather, and spot tanks hiding under trees, he
said.
The company can image Ukraine daily, Mr. Greenley said, and the
images can be ready to view in some cases in less than 15
minutes.
Adm. Sharp said the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency—perhaps
best known to the public for constructing a model of Osama bin
Laden’s Abbottabad compound in Pakistan based on space imagery—has
increased its resources dedicated to Ukraine. Private firms say
they have done likewise.
Brian O’Toole, CEO of BlackSky Technology Inc., said that days
after Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion, the company decided to change the
planned orbit of two imaging satellites that would be launched
April 2 so they would cross over Ukraine more frequently. That
required rejigging the rocket launch and securing U.S. government
approval to modify its launch license, he said.
Imagery of Ukraine was delivered to customers within 24 hours of
the launch, the company said.
HawkEye 360 deploys a different set of sensors. Its satellites
gather and pinpoint radio-frequency signals from space—anything
from illegal fishing vessels to emergency beacons. As Mr. Putin’s
troops surged into Ukraine from the north and then pulled back
after failing to take Kyiv, HawkEye’s spacecraft followed them by
tracking the Russian forces’ jamming of GPS signals, Mr. Serafini
said in an interview.
The commercial operations aren’t without risk, however, and many
companies declined to be specific about how they are assisting
Ukraine in its effort to fend off Moscow’s assault. One executive
said he feared his firm could become a target for Russian
cyberattacks.
Adm. Sharp said his agency has seen no disruption of U.S.
government or commercial imaging satellites.
The Pentagon has declined to provide details on “commercial
satellite imagery services” that were included as part of a package
of security aid to Ukraine announced April 14.
Some companies are openly promoting what they are doing for
Ukraine, however.
Satellogic, an earth observation company which began in Argentina,
is providing space imagery directly to the Ukrainian government, as
well as free data to humanitarian groups such as the Red Cross and
Doctors Without Borders, said Thomas VanMatre, vice president of
global business development. “If you’re helping the cause, we send
you a login and credentials,” he said.
The company has partnered with the Halifax International Security
Forum, a nonprofit, to raise $10 million to provide Ukraine with
dedicated time on satellites passing over its territory, instead of
relying, as it does now, on what governments and companies provide
it. The Forum says it has raised about $100,000 so far.
Planet Labs’ Mr. Marshall said the impact of commercial imagery
goes well beyond Ukraine: Governments can no longer get away with
large-scale military activity without everyone knowing.
“We’re moving to a transparent and accountable era through these
technologies,” he said.
