The New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) is conducting satellite-surveillance research linked to the country’s membership of the Five Eyes spy alliance—the electronic eavesdropping network that also includes Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.
NZDF business unit Defence Science and Technology (DST)—the main provider of military-technology advice to the Ministry of Defence and the NZDF—is collaborating with the US Navy’s Naval Postgraduate School. More than twenty of this school’s masters and PhD students have been directly involved in the work with DST. DST’s participation likely falls under its Space and Navigation Warfare program to develop ‘space domain interoperability’ with militaries of larger states like the United States.
Researchers aim to ‘smooth the way for future Pentagon satellite programs and give personnel important know-how’, states DefenseScoop. This know-how includes developing ‘critical capabilities for the next war’, according to a graphic linked to the research for the 9-11 July 2024 Naval Space Summit at the Naval Postgraduate School in California.
Signalling the country targeted for ‘the next war’, an accompanying poster advertises a project addressing ‘People’s Republic of China Activities in the South China Sea & Cislunar Space’ (the region between the Earth and the Moon).
Working for the National Reconnaissance Office
The NZDF is working for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a major US spy agency. Indicating the NRO’s scale, its proposed budget for the 2013 fiscal year was US$10.3 billion out of a total intelligence expenditure of US$52.6 billion, according to The Washington Post’s interpretation of documents obtained from whistleblower Edward Snowden. In comparison, the National Security Agency (NSA) received US$10.8 billion and the CIA US$14.7 billion.
National Reconnaissance Office satellites ‘collect raw data that are processed by the NRO and then provided to one of its mission partners’, states the 2000 National Commission for the Review of the agency. It has provided signals intelligence (analysis of intercepted electronic communications) to the NSA, imagery intelligence (analysis of visual data) to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and measurement and signature intelligence (analysis of data from sensing instruments) to the Defense Intelligence Agency. The National Reconnaissance Office’s ‘expanding list of customers’ includes the CIA and the (US) Department of Defense (DOD).
The NZDF has been linked to Five Eyes spying for decades. In 1996 there were six to ten electronic warfare specialists on each Navy frigate, and twenty-one personnel in an electronic warfare Army troop, investigative journalist Nicky Hager revealed. Their work involved ‘collecting information from the content of intercepted communications’. Both services cooperated directly with New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau, which is integrated with the NSA.
Although the National Reconnaissance Office is a US Department of Defense agency, when Radio New Zealand asked the NZDF late last year if a satellite used for the research belonged to the Department of Defense, the military replied that it was ‘not currently authorised to provide further details’.
‘FVEY Payloads’: Tui and Korimako
As part of National Reconnaissance Office-commissioned research, New Zealand produced the Tui FVEY (Five Eyes) payload, which was launched into low-Earth orbit on 14 January 2025 with the SpaceX Falcon 9 Transporter 12 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Tui is the primary payload of the Otter 6U CubeSat—CubeSats being a class of small satellite measured in units of 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm. Low-Earth orbit enables high resolution image capture, reduces data transfer latency, and provides high revisit rates, as satellites orbit the Earth roughly every ninety minutes.
A US Naval Postgraduate School poster describes Tui as a ‘risk reduction effort for space-based maritime domain awareness capabilities’. These capabilities may complement the surveillance role of the NZDF’s four Boeing P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft. More specifically, for two years the payload will produce data enabling researchers to ‘test communication pathways that will help reduce communications delays in space operations’, as stated in a January 2025 DST-produced Defence Weekly Report for the Minister of Defence, an excerpt of which I obtained under the Official Information Act.
Along with Tui, the Otter CubeSat includes two Naval Postgraduate School-built payloads: an X-band SDR (software-defined radio) and an LED on orbit payload (LOOP). The role of the X-band SDR, according to the 2020 US Navy press release, is ‘to begin the transition from congested traditional communication frequencies to X-band, which has better bandwidth and data range’. Meanwhile, as the Naval Postgraduate School explains, LOOP enables researchers to experiment with ‘line-of-sight communications by using two banks of LEDs, transmitting in green and near-infrared wavelengths, that are capable of modulating light for basic messaging’.
Tui is not New Zealand’s only project linked to the US Naval Postgraduate School. Rather, as New Zealand’s Defence Science and Technology director David Galligan said, it ‘demonstrates a continuation of DST’s pathway into space operations research and development that began with the Korimako payload’.
Korimako was launched into low-Earth orbit as part of the Mola 6U CubeSat on 21 March 2024 aboard a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia. Although Mola was Rocket Lab’s first launch for the National Reconnaissance Office from the United States, the New Zealand-United States aerospace company had launched four earlier National Reconnaissance Office missions from New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula.
The Naval Postgraduate School described Korimako as a ‘beacon payload to measure download capacity per ground station node’. Notably, Mola contains a terahertz imaging camera, with the satellite sending ‘imagery and functional data’ using an X-band SDR. A 2020 Naval Postgraduate School presentation indicates that this camera is also part of the Otter CubeSat. Explaining the purpose of this research, interim chair of the school’s Space Systems Academic Group Wenschel Lan said, ‘the capability that we’re developing is to add sensors in the space layer to be able to see what’s going on in the water…. It’s not just a camera, but a lot of different phenomenologies [sic] that you can sense from space to then help paint the picture of what’s going on’. ‘The next generation of terahertz imaging’, states a 2020 US Navy press release, ‘will have the capability to see through non-metallic solids that the sun illuminates. Lan explained it’s like an X-ray that requires less power’.
During development, the Naval Postgraduate School connected remotely to at least one of the payloads using a testbed called FlatSatNet. With this testing equipment, researchers developed software interfaces that allowed different software components to interact before the payload was sent to the Postgraduate School and attached to the CubeSat.
This capability set ‘the precedent that concurrent development can occur across oceans to maximize collaboration between allied government small satellite programs’, said Space Systems Academic Group faculty research associate Giovanni Minelli.
Proliferating Satellites
The Mola and Otter CubeSats form part of the National Reconnaissance Office’s shift from ‘stationing a small number of large, expensive intelligence-gathering satellites in high orbital regimes’ to ‘launching hundreds of smaller systems into low-Earth orbit’, according to DefenseScoop. This shift coincides with the development of the Pentagon’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture—a network of hundreds of satellites with the aim of providing secure communications as well as warning and tracking capabilities for ‘advanced missile threats’, including hypersonic missile systems. Early last year, Rocket Lab won a US$515 million prototype agreement to provide eighteen satellites for the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.
One benefit of proliferated satellite architecture is increased network resilience against US-designated enemies. National Reconnaissance Office director Chris Scolese explained this viewpoint at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC last October: ‘there are countries—you know, Russia and China are examples—that have developed ASATs [anti-satellite weapons] that can take out satellites. Well, if you have a hundred satellites up there … that gets to be much, much more complicated’.
Towards a ‘FVEY federated space system’
The NZDF monitors and interacts with Korimako and Tui from a UHF, S-, and X-band ground station on the Whangaparāoa Peninsula, north of Auckland. While UHF covers frequencies from 300 MHz to 3 GHz, S-band handles from 2 to 4 GHz and X-band covers from around 8 to 12 GHz.
Likely located at the NZDF training facility in Army Bay, the station is part of the Five Eyes International Smallsat Command and Control Network (ISC2N). The network includes a UHF and S-band station at a Defence Science and Technology Group site in Adelaide, Australia and an S- and X-band station at Defence Science and Technology Laboratory Portsdown West in Portchester, United Kingdom. A ‘major participant’ with the International Smallsat Network is the US Department of Defense-sponsored and Naval Postgraduate School-operated network of ten ground stations for small satellite missions spanning the United States called MC3 (Mobile CubeSat Command and Control).
The ‘mission objective’ of Mola and Otter is to ‘demonstrate through research and development … a FVEY federated space system by 2025 that enhances coalition advantages in an increasingly contested space environment’ (original emphasis). According to Minelli, ‘the grand vision’ is for Five Eyes countries to develop ‘mutual space-based … and ground-based infrastructure’.
Of course, the Five Eyes countries already maintain mutual infrastructure. For example, as the Snowden documents revealed, in 2009 the Government Communications Security Bureau surveillance station in the Waihopai Valley began large-scale collection of content and metadata from intercepted communications transmitted between satellites. This ‘full take’ data from the Asia-Pacific region was fed into the NSA’s XKEYSCORE system, which was accessible to spies across the Five Eyes alliance.
However, New Zealand’s research for the National Reconnaissance Office suggests that the country is moving beyond shared signals intelligence infrastructure towards collecting, sharing and analysing satellite imagery for the US military.
About the author
Samuel Hume
Samuel Hume is an independent journalist and teacher based in London. His collected articles can be found on his Substack.
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