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NROL-44 is a huge signals intelligence, or SIGINT, satellite, says David Baker, a former NASA scientist who worked on Apollo and Shuttle missions, has written numerous books, including US Spy Satellites and is editor of SpaceFlight magazine.

"SIGINT satellites are the core of national government, military security satellites. They are massive things for which no private company has any purpose", says Baker.

"It weighs more than five tons. It has a huge parabolic antenna which unfolds to a diameter of more than 100 meters in space, and it will go into an equatorial plane of Earth at a distance of about 36,000 kilometers (22,000 miles)", Baker said.

It can "hoover up" of hundreds of thousands of cell phone calls or scour the dark web for terrorist activity. 

Apparently the move from wired communication to digital and wireless is a godsend to governments because you can't cut into wires from a satellite, but you can literally pick up mobile phone towers which are radiating this stuff into the atmosphere. It takes a massive antenna, but you're able to sit over one spot and listen to all the communications traffic, said Baker.