Air Force Space Command's SBIRS Wing at the Space and Missile Systems Center, Los Angeles AFB, California is responsible for development and acquisition of the satellites.

The Space-Based Infrared System ( SBIRS ) is a consolidated system intended to meet the United States ' infrared space surveillance needs through the first two to three decades of the 21st century.

The SBIRS program is designed to provide key capabilities in the areas of missile warning, missile defense and battlespace characterization.

SBIRS is an integrated " system of systems " that will include satellites in geosynchronous orbit ( GEO ), sensors hosted on satellites in highly elliptical orbit ( HEO ), and ground-based data processing and control.

SBIRS GEO-2 is expected to be launched in 2013.

SBIRS High ( also now simply referred to as " SBIRS ") is to consist of four dedicated satellites operating in geosynchronous earth orbit, and sensors on two host satellites operating in a highly elliptical orbit.

SBIRS High will replace the Defense Support Program satellites and is intended primarily to provide enhanced strategic and theater ballistic missile warning capabilities.

The prime contractor for SBIRS is Lockheed Martin, with Northrop Grumman as the major subcontractor.

The SBIRS Low contract is now managed by the Missile Defense Agency ( MDA ) and has been subsequently renamed to the Space Tracking and Surveillance System ( STSS ).

SBIRS ground software integrates infrared sensor programs of the U. S. Air Force ( USAF ) with new IR sensors.

In 1994, DOD studied consolidating various infrared space requirements, such as for ballistic missile warning and defense, technical intelligence, and battlespace characterization, and it selected SBIRS to replace and enhance the capabilities provided by the Defense Support Program ( DSP ).

DSP satellites will be replaced by the Space-Based Infrared System ( SBIRS ) satellites.

The primary purpose of SBIRS Low was the tracking of ballistic missiles and discriminating between the warheads and other objects, such as decoys, that separate from the missile bodies throughout the middle portion of their flights.

Two SBIRS sensors hosted on two classified satellites in highly elliptical orbit have already been launched, probably as part of the NROL-22 ( USA 184 ) and NROL-28 ( USA 200 ) launches in 2006 and 2008.

In December 2005, following the third SBIRS Nunn-McCurdy violation, the government decided to compete GEO 4 and 5, with an option to buy the GEO 3 contingent based on the performance of the first two.

The project was originally to have had a life of 25 satellites, but the last two have been canceled, mainly due to SBIRS.

Configuration of SBIRS systems: GEO, HEO and Low components.

A complement of satellites in low earth orbit was planned as part of the program ( SBIRS Low ), but this has been moved into the STSS program.

SBIRS continues to struggle with cost overruns, with Nunn-McCurdy breaches occurring in 2001 and 2005.

Additionally, the government started a potential SBIRS High replacement program, writing out proposals in June 2006.

The first GEO satellite of the SBIRS program, GEO-1, was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral on an Atlas V rocket on May 7, 2011.

SBIRS High GEO 1 was launched on May 7, 2011.

Lockheed Martin also provides the satellite for SBIRS GEO.

The SBIRS Low program was originally expected to consist of about 24 satellites in low earth orbit.

But there is no use causing him to worry at this time ''.

But apart from racial problems, the old unreconstructed South -- to use the moderate words favored by Mr. Thomas Griffith -- finds itself unsympathetic to most of what is different about the civilization of the North.

Only the President is permitted to authorize the use of nuclear weapons.

The sequence is determined by chance, and Mr. Cunningham makes use of any one of several chance devices.

If they avoid the use of the pungent, outlawed four-letter word it is because it is taboo ; ;

This is the rhetoric of righteousness the beatniks use in defending their way of life, their search for wholeness, though their actual existence fails to reach these `` religious '' heights.

Part of the ritual of sex is the use of marijuana.

Holmes is addicted to the use of cocaine and other refreshing stimulants ; ;

But what a super-Herculean task it is to winnow anything of value from the mud-beplastered arguments used so freely, particularly since such common use is made of cliches and stereotypes, in themselves declarations of intellectual bankruptcy.

`` The argument that is cutting most ice is that Hearst is the only candidate who is fighting the trusts fearlessly and who would use all the powers of government to disrupt them if he were elected.

for if this can be proved we shall surely be the gainers -- I mean, if there is a use in poetry as well as a delight ''.

It is even true that some among them use the sheer fact of conformity -- `` everyone does it '' -- as a criterion for conduct.

Without a precise knowledge of Germanic philology, however, it is debatable whether their use was not more often a source of confusion and error than anything else.

Often the historian must consider the use of intuition or instinct by those individuals or nations which he is studying.

Easily the best known of these three novels is The Space Merchants, a good example of a science-fiction dystopia which extrapolates much more than the impact of science on human life, though its most important warning is in this area, namely as to the use to which discoveries in the behavioral sciences may be put.

The narrator is an Alsatian serving with the French Army, and he has the same name ( Berger ) that Malraux himself was later to use in the Resistance ; ;

And by a skillful and unobtrusive use of imagery ( the enclosure is called a `` Roman-camp stockade '', the hastily erected lean-to is a `` Babylonian hovel '', the men begin to look like `` Peruvian mummies '' and to acquire `` Gothic faces '' ), Malraux projects a fresco of human endurance -- which is also the endurance of the human -- stretching backward into the dark abyss of time.