Jane Edwards
Rob Zitz, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Space Systems Loral’s government systems business, has said SSL’s parent company MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates aims to provide Earth imagery and analysis services to U.S. intelligence and defense agencies through its pending merger with DigitalGlobe, Space News reported Thursday.
MDA agreed to buy DigitalGlobe through an estimated $3.6 billion transaction in February.
Zitz told the publication at the 2017 GEOINT Symposium that he believes the merger would provide MDA the capability to provide insights to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and other government organizations through extraction of data from disparate information sources.
He cited SSL’s involvement in the in-orbit satellite maintenance and repair demonstration project with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and NASA and said that such work could help support civilian and national security missions.
Zitz, a 32-year federal government veteran and formerly chief systems architect at Leidos, is one of the three executives who joined SSL in April.
