Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, Director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, keynoted the GovMilSpace event at SATELLITE 2025, outlining NGA’s AI acceleration strategy to manage a rapidly growing data load from commercial and government satellites.
“We move more ones and zeros than any other agency in the United States,” Whitworth said. “With the size of the constellation growing and the number of terabytes coming from space over the next eight years, that data collection will go up precipitously.” He said commercial satellite coverage is increasingly essential to NGA’s mission: “I want additional collections and additional commercial pixels. I want analytics with commercial. I want it all.”
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Whitworth outlined five goals for AI development at the agency, including organizational restructuring to handle AI entities: “We’re talking about an entity that is not necessarily human, but can be as productive, in some cases, as a human.” Automated collection from AI models put in place in the prior year has already enabled new custodies of objects that NGA previously didn’t track.
NGA has about 9,000 people — roughly 25 percent outside any headquarters — with about 3 percent military, 55 percent government civilian, and the rest contractors. The workforce needs AI accreditation and certification. Whitworth said concerns about AI replacing analysts are misplaced: “I think it’s going to be more of a team approach.” He said the analysts NGA has are among the best in the world and need to be kept in a cycle of continuous training through machine learning and structured observations.
What keeps him up at night: “It’s just the responsibility of not missing something. We don’t want to miss some sort of an exploitation that would help us generate positive identification and targeting.” VS
