The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency will break ground on its new campus in St. Louis Nov. 26, putting it on schedule to be open and operational by 2025.
“The new campus will be a secure, flexible, cutting-edge intelligence facility that will put NGA in the heart of St. Louis’ growing geospatial ecosystem and help NGA take advantage of its biggest strengths, its people and partners,” Vice Adm. Robert Sharp, the agency’s director, said in a statement.
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A key feature of the new 712,000-square-foot campus will be its ability to facilitate both classified and unclassified work. The agency wants to have space that can be transformed quickly from classified to unclassified environments, allowing the intelligence organization to temporarily open up more of the building to contractors and visitors that aren’t cleared for more classified work and increase collaboration.
The agency is also working to enable wireless connectivity in the campus, a technology largely unprecedented in the intelligence community due to security difficulties.
“NGA’s new campus will be built with spaces that will facilitate information-sharing and collaboration among NGA’s and St. Louis’s talented innovators,” Sharp said. “Working together, we can better achieve NGA’s mission of providing world-class geospatial intelligence to U.S. service members and leaders to keep our nation secure.”
The new campus will replace NGA West’s current facility in St. Louis, which was built in the 1840s. The NGA announced the site of the new, updated campus in 2016 and officially acquired the land in 2018.
Nathan Strout covers space, unmanned and intelligence systems for C4ISRNET.
