The top secret URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH satellites (2025) | Hacker News Reader

The top secret URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH satellites (2025)

thespacereview.com

307 pointsBluestein163 comments

The incredible and futuristic technologies the US managed to deploy decades before the competition reminds me of the story of how the NRO gifted NASA a couple of their old decommissioned satellites in 2012 and they turned out to be basically upgraded Hubble telescopes pointed at earth. The US from the 90s to the 2000s had multiple Hubble-level telescopes just for spying while NASA was fighting for scraps to study the entire cosmos.

I didn't know about this, that's interesting

I am not entirely convinced. Was not Hubble damaged and got an upgrade lateron? I mean it could be possible that NASA is starved, but the repair involved other countries too, and I don't think the USA could keep mega-super-duper technology hidden from others in the long run. And NASA often wants more money - just take the whole search for life on planets. This is so pointless - life exists already here. What is the addiction to want to find life outside of the planet? Other than, of course, getting more money, which is understandable, but it doesn't answer the question. (Not that I am against better technology; the rationale just does not convince me at all here.)

Hubble wasn’t damaged, the mirror was mis-shaped (by design) to be near-sighted, needing a corrective lens.

But if you were looking at nearer objects…

probably what you mean, but to be clear there was an error in manufacturing the mirror. There was a calibration piece that was slightly larger then the design called for.

The testing of the mirror was insufficient.

> I don't think the USA could keep mega-super-duper technology hidden from others in the long run.

The US has a history of keeping vehicles, weapons, and operations hidden for decades, even things in the past decade.

> What is the addiction to want to find life outside of the planet?

Knowledge. Trade. Technology. Weapons. Religion. Science. Sex (lol).

"to explore strange new worlds

to seek out new life and new civilizations

to boldly go where no one has gone before!"

> I am not entirely convinced. Was not Hubble damaged and got an upgrade lateron?

It was made wrong (the mirror was shaped incorrectly).

Luckily the HST was designed to be serviced (it had components within it that would degrade over time, and some components could realistically be upgraded as technology became better), so they swapped out the optics so that it worked with the incorrectly shaped mirror.

---

> I don't think the USA could keep mega-super-duper technology hidden from others in the long run.

The only things being hidden are basically trade secret stuff, e.g. better materials, better software, better sensors, etc...

The US had a geopolitical advantage keeping their sensor tech secret. Other nations didn't know how good they were and only hid their actions to the degree they thought shielded themselves. When the knowledge eventually came out, other nations knew if they wanted their sercets kept, they would have to invest in better obfuscation.

---

> And NASA often wants more money - just take the whole search for life on planets. This is so pointless - life exists already here. What is the addiction to want to find life outside of the planet? Other than, of course, getting more money, which is understandable, but it doesn't answer the question.

Since you're not behind the rationale of curiosity, I'll present you with a utilitarian justification:

Ancient Rome had steam power (see: Aeolipile). But it was basically seen as a useless toy. It took almost 2 millennia until the Industrial Revolution happened and steam power took its rightful place in our history. Humanity got there, but it took a lot longer than it needed to.

Imagine what would have happened instead if Ancient Rome could have looked across an ocean and seen a civilisation harnessing steam power to its fullest. It would not have taken almost 2 millennia for them to catch up. They just needed a hint as to where to focus their attention.

History is littered with missed paths that could have accelerated our progress.

Newton was playing around with shaped glass and investigating optics. What if he heard of someone else seeing weird lines when they left their prism in the sun? He had everything he needed to stumble upon the ultraviolet catastrophe himself and we would have ended up with quantum mechanics centuries earlier.

Going back further, what if the Antikythera Mechanism's gearwork technology became widespread? What if the ancients had their own Babbage and created programming millennia before?

Penicillin could have been discovered even earlier.

All that's needed is a little observation of "Huh, that's weird" and everything spills out of that.

Investigating a line of inquiry doesn't guarantee that we're going to end up with something. So we have to investigate wide, rather than deep.

But imagine if we find an alien civilisation and make another "Huh, that's weird" observation. All of a sudden we have a higher confidence that an investigation down a specific path does lead to something new.

- An exoplanet not moving elliptically or hyperbolically? That'd focus a large amount of attention into overcoming previous assumptions about inertia.

- Lot of lensing effects and bursts of shifted light? That'd focus a large amount of attention into bending space.

- Seeing spectral lines that don't match known matter? That'd focus a large amount of attention into the strong nuclear force, exotic matter, magmatter, etc...

- An impossible star? That'd focus a large amount of attention into the processes powering that star.

- etc...

TL;DR: Finding another civilisation doing something basically changes the rate of return calculation for research.

They actually didn't fix the optics, they swapped out one of the sensor modules for a bunch of extra optics to cancel out the first broken optics.

Tracking objects in space is something China and Russia can do just fine today, it's hard to keep the presence of a satellite a secret. But trying to determine what a satellite is doing is a bit harder. You can infer based on altitude, orbit shape, and inclination. EO birds generally fly at low altitude or in highly elliptical orbits to capture higher latitudes. ELINT and space observation birds fly near adversary satellites. Generally, satellites don't move too much so you don't need to spend a lot of resources tracking them. However, things like the X-37b and the GSSAP satellites are reported to be highly maneuverable which not only allows for flexible missions but also more difficult track and requires more resources to do so.

> Ancient Rome could have looked across an ocean and seen a civilisation harnessing steam power to its fullest.

I understand your point, just wanted to mention that that civilization would be leading the known world at the time, methinks ...

> What is the addiction to want to find life outside of the planet?

Another perspective on this. We currently study life with a planetary sample size of 1. Just a single additional example, especially one with a completely different origin, would almost certainly change many of our most basic assumptions about what life is and how it works.

> Just a single additional example, especially one with a completely different origin, would almost certainly change many of our most basic assumptions about what life is and how it works.

It would also lead to a significant power shift in the religious world where individuals have proclaimed their version god as absolute for thousands of years.

An event like this would end up kicking us out of this era, and into another joint-species belief system... Only time will tell if it'll restart the cycle over again or if something new comes from it.

Are any still-worshipped gods actually still just "really powerful dudes"? I doubt this would have any effect on religions outside of, like, ancient Greece and Egypt... but I'm not up to date on all the non-Abrahamic ones I guess.

I can't think of any religion as a whole that would be impacted by the discovery of life on other planets, but on a sect or individual level I could definitely see friction with certain, specific belief systems that sect or person firmly held.

It would be interesting if a survey existed that linked religious affiliation with belief of extraterrestrial life though. I tried to find one but was unsuccessful finding satisfactory research

I mean NASA's budget was/is minuscule in comparison to defense spending so I am not surprised.

How? NASA budget is around 20-30bn in recent years, same scale as US Space Force department budget (26bn in recent years, 40bn in 2026). Comparable, but not minuscule.

Why is the space force budget relevant? The US has had spy satellites decades before the clown made the space force for his family and friends to feast.

From google:

> NASA's total enacted budget for fiscal year 1996 was approximately $13.9 billion

> a 1996 bipartisan commission report noted that the NRO possessed "by far the largest budget of any intelligence agency," and contemporary experts track the broader military space budget at roughly $10 billion to $11 billion annually for the NRO alone

So pretty similar budgets. The NRO imaging lens used in Nancy Grace was manufactured in 1999 but planning started in 1996.

The Space Force has existed for decades before Trump. It was part of the Air Force and is still organized under that Department. They have been slowly increasing its independence as a branch of the military for a long time.

It isn't much different than how the Air Force was eventually carved out of the Army Air Corps.

As a small example of the size/scale of the money spent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NRO_launches

"Air Force", "Space Force" are maybe well known to the general population, not many people outside of military/government/tech circles even know the NRO or NGIA exists or what the acronym means. The line gets a bit blurry between Air Force money spent, NRO, NSA, in some regards it's just better to think of it as buckets of how things get labeled within the larger DoD.

My personal favorite mission patch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-247#/media/File:NROL_39_ve...

NGIA (Natural Gas Innovation Act? Nursery & Garden Industry Australia? Next Generation Identification and Awareness) had me stumped until I realized it must be a typo:

https://www.nga.mil/

Not a typo despite the domain name, it's been called the NGIA in written documents for a long time. The use of "NGA" is actually somewhat recent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligen...

According to this (from 2004) it's been NGA all along:

https://www.nextgov.com/people/2004/02/whats-in-a-name/21950...

Although the new title is four words long, the agency will officially use a three-letter acronym. This is by design, according to NGA officials, who feel that the new title more accurately reflects the agency's true mission, which is to provide intelligence and analysis rather than simply reproducing maps and imagery.

There is one NGIA on the Wikipedia page, in the title of a document from 2014:

https://www.governmentattic.org/11docs/NGIAoigGAMPC_2007-201...

So more like a common misspelling?

FWIW, I’ve known some of the OG NGA people a long time and they always referred to it as NGA in my experience. If anyone referred to it as NGIA I never heard it.

NGA is of course its correct name but if you Google:

" "NGIA" intelligence mapping"

It'll turn up a ton of results where people external call it NGIA including a number of .edu sources...

In some ways I guess it's a bit of a stylistic choice, putting a letter for each of the four words of its name, much as how BBC News does not always capitalize all acronyms. Copy and pasting from their style guide:

"acronyms

Use the abbreviated form of a title without explanation only if there is no chance of any misunderstanding (eg UN, Nato, IRA, BBC). Otherwise, spell it out in full at first reference, or introduce a label (eg the public sector union Unite).

Where you would normally pronounce the abbreviation as a string of letters - an initialism - use all capitals with no full stops or spaces (eg FA, UNHCR). However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Maga, Sars, Aids, Nasa, Opec, Apec).

There are a few exceptions:

    The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence is capped up ie NICE
    Special educational needs and disabilities becomes SEND
    The UK Independence Party is capped up ie UKIP
    Strategic Health Authority becomes SHA ("Sha" looks like a typo)
    Seasonal Affective Disorder becomes SAD ("Sad" would be confusing)
    Where a capped-down acronym risks being misunderstood as a word.

For names with initials, we avoid full stops and spaces (ie JK Rowling and TG Jones).

When abbreviating a phrase, rather than a name or title, use lower case (ie lbw, mph)."

FWIW, I think you mean NGA instead NGIA. They added a hyphen between “geospatial” and “intelligence” to avoid the eternal embarrassment of a 4-letter acronym.

The mission scope of the various intelligence agencies has evolved a lot over time as capabilities and requirements have changed. Even the histories of how these independent agencies came to exist is pretty interesting.

And yeah, that mission patch is fire.

Former PMC here - at least within the corporate organization I worked for, we consumed ngia product and we called it ngia. We had a totally unrelated thing that had the acronym nga so we used the longer acronym to be clear, I guess I got in the habit of it.

Maybe so, but the former FLA was NIMA, not NGIA.

I had completely forgotten about NIMA. That's pretty obscure!

We have organizations chartered for land, air, and sea superiority. It seems fairly reasonable to have an organization chartered for space superiority, instead of leaving that adhoc across the other forces.

Air? I know it's splitting hairs, but there was already a branch with much experience of launching and flying things.

every branch has experience launching and flying things but we still have an air force.

This. All services have experience doing most things - they do those things to maintain superiority over their domain. And the way they do them is specialized to that domain.

The navy was up there to maintain superiority over water. The airforce over the air. The army likewise.

But nobody clearly owned maintaining superiority over the domain of space and any operation that needed to ensure uncontested operation in space was a joint agency nightmare.

Space force is chartered to provide superiority in space so the other services can conduct their operations up there. Space is clearly a specialization that is differentiated from the air.

I've known Navy people to make the case that the Air Force shouldn't be separate from the Navy. I have no idea if they're right, but I'm sure there are websites arguing the pros and cons out there.

The Air Force was part of the army, not the navy. You probably mean the marines (which also has its own fixed wing air force lol)

I always liked this description of Marine aviation: The Navy's Army's Air Force.

The Air Force does launching and flying over land as well as land based missiles. Flying over water is the navy’s business.

Ain't no air in space.

Just to spell it out:

> in comparison

The total 2026 US Defense budget is 1.06 Trillion dollars, or ~1,060 Billion dollars. NASA's 2026 budget is 24.5 Billion dollars, or 2% as much as the defense budget.

You chose to single out the Space Force, which has the smallest budget of the 5 branches of the US military. For contrast, the Navy's budget alone is 235 Billion $, close to 10x NASA.

For further comparison, the R&D budget of a single private company, Apple, was $34B in 2025.

It's hard to say specifically that the exact figure of the Space Force budget is the entirety of what the US military spends on "space" annually. Additional large amounts of funds will be committed through programs which are under the umbrella of the NRO or NSA or NGA (aka NGIA) agency budgets.

But why do you compare all the defense budget (e.g. pensions) with NASA? What's the point?

I propose to compare aerospace with aerospace.

For one thing, because the parent you were responding to did not make that distinction, and it wasn't clear why you chose to make it. For another thing, limiting US defense space activity spending to just the Space Force budget is naive. All departments of the military operate space activities, and have not and will not hand all of that over to the Space Force (see also: military intelligence vs CIA). We can't know the exact budgetary amounts of each department, and then there's the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office, managing space-based spying), infamous for donating [1] its obsolete telescopes to NASA, which were of comparable performance to Hubble.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

The space force doesn’t even go to space

One of the NRO optical imaging system gifts (from the canceled NRO Future Imagery Architecture reconnaissance satellite program) is in the recently launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

We see a few bits and pieces released to the public of optical/infrared wavelength mirrors and hubble-like hardware from IMINT systems. One thing that's never really been shown to the public, not even 50 year old 1970s era stuff, are photos/examples of the SIGINT systems that the NSA likely has in orbit. Or good details of other things that also fall within the RF engineering domain like synthetic aperture radar satellites to monitor naval activity, construction activity like digging bunkers, etc.

If you think the public DEM/DSM datasets like the ASTER GDER v3 or SRTM GL1 V3 are pretty good, I would bet that the DoD has things far more accurate than those as digital models of the surface and built environment of the earth's surface.

An RF domain where there seems to be a dearth of information is passive radar. (Kraken passive radar was shutdown.) It makes sense that NRO satellites would be doing passive SAR.

I'm not sure that it needs to be passive, a sufficiently advanced adversary nation-state (Russia, China) is assumed to have their own equivalent of this, and to be aware of the orbits of US satellites:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillan...

Much as the US is aware of the orbits of their satellites.

If you already assume that it's hard to 'hide' the existence and orbits of your satellites from an advanced observer with good telescopes and ground radar and ways of correlating the data, the fact that your ocean surveillance satellites emit radar might not be a problem. No need to be passive about it.

And passive SAR is a lot less accurate than active SAR.

There isn't much need for stealth in all this the same way there isn't for an optical spy satellite. The adversary knows it is there and what it is looking at. The adversary just doesn't know its exact capabilities, and there's not much they can do about it being up there that doesn't lead to a sudden military escalation of some kind.

https://github.com/30hours/blah2

This is because it is essentially illegal to work on proprietary VHF/UHF passive radar (you need a government license to talk about your work with foriegners) in the US due to itar laws

That doesn't make it illegal at all. Lots of what SpaceX does is covered by ITAR and they have no issues building rockets.

yeah by "illegal" i mean "there are many laws restricting who you are allowed to employ and with whom you are allowed to share nonpublic information"

The SAR stuff is crazy good and and scary- the publicly released stuff from drones sort of hit a ceiling in quality over a decade ago. And it seems to be rarely released at all now.

It was good enough then to track individuals movement and 'replay' where they had been over the last few days to figure out where they came from and associate them with other people/ vehicles/ rf signatures.

I think it's safe to assume that the quality kept quietly improving from orbit since then- it's just too good to publicly release / declassify.

If it's so good - who is using it, and to what effect? Because it sure doesn't seem like it's doing much for the US.

You wouldn't see the results when the data is applied successfully, like, a tomahawk cruise missile that goes over a mountain pass at only 20 meters altitude over the terrain and trees and structures on its way to a destination.

Prevents a lot of wars and skirmishes.

High probability the NSA has satellites intercepting cellular radio traffic world wide with triangulation.

Pocket backdoors.

Cell triangulation is practically consumer grade technology now

For a while just before smartphones, at least 15 years ago now, carriers were experimenting with APIs that allow opted-in dumbphones to be triangulated (via cell tower) and tracked via API.

Trilateration is an inherent requirement for beamforming which is the only way they've been able to squeeze in more bandwidth for the low bands.

Is this traffic encrypted?

It's... enciphered.

They rolled their own.

Honestly I'm sure if they're releasing stuff as good as 3DEP (which is extraordinary, by the way), the spooks probably have every leaf, pebble and dirt mound mapped out across the entire face of the earth.

Probably good enough to tell by its shape if the car parked in your driveway is a Toyota Corolla or a Nissan Sentra or a Honda Civic.

What would be the point of going much more high tech than what's already commercially available? You can buy commercial satellite footage at a native resolution of 25cm, optionally upscaled to 15cm, for $20/km^2. [1] A bit of processing and you could certainly do high precision geographic mapping. In either case that's already enough to track individual people from space.

I suppose even higher and you could start resolving things like license plate numbers from space, but it just seems like sharply diminishing returns in general.

[1] - https://xrtechgroup.com/who-has-the-highest-resolution-satel...

I was referring to radar for building a point-cloud or three dimensional digital elevation model/digital surface model of the terrain, buildings, vehicles, trees, not photogrammetry or direct overhead visual spectrum or IR imagery.

Different thing. But in answer to your question, revisit time and immediate availability of data would be a major thing. The size/scale of the commercial earth observation satellites that have been launched are quite small and likely nowhere near as capable as even what 'black' programs had 20 years ago. Or even having the capability to get near-realtime live visual spectrum imagery for military command/control purposes (e.g: Is that long boxy vehicle rolling out of a warehouse right now a regular semi truck or a transporter-erector-launcher?).

Can't wait for Flock 2 - "This time it's everywhere"

Can you imagine the false positive rate and creepy stalker cop capabilities if they had global live 4d-gaussians?

Still far from cheap, decent sized city is 200km^2 that’s like $4k.

Much rather contribute that amount one time to OSM and have details from all cities from there.

It's that cheap?

I mean, it sounds like $4k and maybe again as much on compute could fix OSM for a city?

One recent theory I heard is that Starlink works as a synthetic aperture radar. I mean surely space internet is an ok business but how profitable can it be?

> space internet is an ok business but how profitable can it be

"Space internet?" It's regular internet from space available anywhere open to the sky. Seems like it would be incredibly profitable.

Very. In most places in the world starlink is the fastest internet available. The global internet business is VERY big. In developing countries most people do whatsapp/ott calling over internet so their only cost is wifi.

The Soviets also had passive and active naval radar satellites during the cold war (RORSAT), which could downlink directly to cruise missiles (SS-N-19 Shipwreck)

>One thing that's never really been shown to the public, not even 50 year old 1970s era stuff, are photos/examples of the SIGINT systems that the NSA likely has in orbit.

See High Jump: the JUMPSEAT signals intelligence satellite

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/5151/1

There's always infinite resources available to defend and expand powerful people's power.

Except in Iran

The current U.S. administration doesn’t know what they want in Iran. It’s not a capability issue.

Way longer than that. The first KH-11 satellites that Hubble shares its design with were in orbit in the late 1970s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN

For historical details of some of the subsystems/stuff that ended up in this category of craft, google "history of Ball aerospace" or "eastman kodak NRO history"

For instance: https://www.thespacereview.com/article/5003/1

It occurs to me that projecting the image of NASA struggling (but always successfully) to deploy this kind of tech might intended be a part of the cover.

I doubt it. The NRO was a classified department until very recently, and NASA doesn't classify its programs, so there's no reason for NASA's employees to have clearances. Therefore, NASA leadership and strategists wouldn't have even known that the NRO existed, and independently came up with their lesser satellites, no agenda needed to pretend to have an inferior space sector

People knew the NRO existed a long time before it was publicly acknowledged, you can't have an office building of that size, parking and sheer number of people commuting to it daily in a regular pattern in a Washington DC suburb without some people starting to talk.

It was kind of a "yeah of course, what do you expect, we don't have this capability?" rhetorical question.

It was known in much the same way Janet flights are known.

Thinking that nasa leadership wouldn't be aware of its existence at all is not accurate, I think, any more than thinking people at certain aerospace contractors didn't know it existed... More like, it was metaphorically over on the other side of a fence that people were not allowed to touch.

Most NRO employees are imagery analysts. Most of the satellite development is done by contractors.

It’s easier to draw the connection than that.

Hans Mark

Director of NASA Ames 1969-1977

Director of the NRO 1977-1979

Deputy Director of NASA 1981-1984

There’s plenty of other examples, Hans Mark is the most obvious highest up one. “Leadership at NASA doesn’t know about the NRO” is a hilarious concept to me. Did they forget they own jobs?

It was accidentally revealed in 1973 (though known since 1971, just not acknowledged), and officially declassified in 1992. It's been around for 66 years now, so more than half its existence was declassified, and realistically it's been known for 55 of its 66 years.

I think you are missing the point they were trying to make.

If NASA was having visible issues and difficulty in trying to get something like Hubble working in space, then perhaps the US’s spy agencies (known or not) also had the same difficulties. NASA employees wouldn’t need to have known about the NRO to help provide cover for their capabilities. Just publicly showing their struggle - for transparency - would have been enough.

(If NASA had a clue about the NRO capabilities or not, I doubt they would have cared. They still got their space telescope!)

It's not a question of "If", the Hubble mirror was made by Perkin-Elmer which had a long history with the NRO. Meaning that the TS or TS/SCI level program-cleared executive leadership at NRO's contractor knew exactly what was going on in both worlds.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=perkin-el...

Whether any of that information would be allowed to go in the reverse direction back to NASA is another question entirely...

It's more, "Hey, if NASA is having trouble with this, with their big brains and frontier research, no way military capabilities exceed theirs at any real capacity." It's one thing to say they're a few years ahead, it's another thing to say that the military was working on a Hubble when the people who would eventually work on THE Hubble were still in grade school.

It makes me wonder about things like AR/VR, where, likewise, things are just starting to hit the lit sphere, with great difficulty; does the military already have tech that's 3 or 4 generations ahead?

> NASA's employees to have clearances.

Launch vehicles are effectively ICBMs and a significant body of NASA staff is former USAF. I wouldn't say there's "no reason" A huge number of NASA employees and contractors absolutely have clearances (even if just incidentally.)

Most veterans don’t have security clearances after getting out of the military if their next job doesn’t need it

Therefore, NASA leadership and strategists wouldn't have even known that the NRO existed, and independently came up with their lesser satellites, no agenda needed to pretend to have an inferior space sector.

That seems unlikely because they'd have been recruiting from the same pool of talent. They'd have been wondering where the best people from specializing in space tech, optics, etc went, and being leadership at NASA means you're probably not stupid, and you go to the same events as them. Also as NASA leadership, it would have been a pretty logical next step for your own career.

I don't doubt that people outside of the NRO had no idea what they do there, and that people lower down the hierarchy didn't know about it, but NASA leadership must have known there was a shadowy org working on cool satellites.

You are the comment in this thread of BS speculation that is closest to nailing the truth.

Hans Mark

Director of NASA Ames 1969-1977

Director of the NRO 1977-1979

Deputy Director of NASA 1981-1984

I’ll let you take that piece of information and decide if NASA leadership knew about the NRO or not when Hubble launched in 1985.

???

Hans Mark

Director of NASA Ames 1969-1977

Director of the NRO 1977-1979

Deputy Director of NASA 1981-1984

Plenty of other similar examples.

How is NASA leadership not supposed to know about the NRO when they worked for the NRO?

> Way longer than that. The first KH-11 satellites that Hubble shares its design with were in orbit in the late 1970s.

I'm not sure if it actually "shares its design" with KH-11, but has a more indirect connection, e.g.:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23150092:

> My favorite KH-11/Hubble story is that during the design of the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA originally wanted a 3 meter mirror. However when they began to design and budget the satellite they were quietly told they should reconsider and use a 2.4 meter mirror, as this would be significantly cheaper since they would be able to leverage existed machinery capable of created mirrors of that size and precision. That infrastructure and manufacturing process had already been created a decade earlier for Keyhole.

Except that's not the only connection. Which is why a lot of the pictures in the wiki page I posted are actually of Hubble.

I often see Hubble in the twilight, it's one of the few big satellites you can readily see with the naked eye - not quite as bright as the ISS but pretty close.

Why have i never seen these, is it simply that I wasn't looking for them?

If I was to repurpose Hubble to be a spy satellite I would paint it black... I know it's not that simple due to sun radiation (including heat), they where probably coated with some mat black material or something to avoid this kind of detection. I'm just guessing since Hubble looks like it's wrapped in aluminum foil.

Yeah, and block v also have straight up stealth coatings in addition to not being as bright.

You assume they are in similar orbits. The spy sats might be higher than Hubble, which itself was very high for a shuttle program.

I have also wondered about similar questions.

One is that Hubble's mirror is not expected to burn up on re-entry and may therefore hit the ground.

How is this managed with similar spy satellites? Presumably the problem is more acute, because not only do you need to avoid killing someone, but you also want to avoid any chance of falling on hostile territory. Are they actively steered into known parts of the ocean? Or does something else happen (one suggestion with Hubble was actually to fire a missile at it just before entry in order to break the mirror in space).

Yeah, they're deorbited into a known part of the ocean.

And just because the mirror won't technically completely burn up in reentry doesn't mean it'd leave anything useful for adversaries.

see the part here about Point Nemo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility

Both an incredibly different orbit, the fact that the location of NRO satellites aren't nearly as published, as well as the newer ones using simple stealth coatings so they don't shine as bright.

If the manufacturing for the 2.4 meter mirrors existed a decade earlier, and Hubble used the existing processes, does that mean all the KH-11 satellites also have the spherical aberration problem that Hubble has?

or hubble has the aberration because the design optimized for cost on that bandwidth, because nobody would ever need to zoom individual fibers on a newspaper page? remember those where pointed the other way around.

but that's an awesome rabbit hole you pointed out!

The spherical aberration of Hubble's main mirror was caused by a manufacturing defect.

Perkin-Elmer designed a new null corrector to verify that the mirror was made to spec, but the null corrector was incorrectly assembled (one of the lenses was out by a few mm). They also used the previous null corrector to test, which showed that the mirror was incorrectly ground, but decided that the new null corrector's measurements was correct.

But wouldn't they have needed to do that for KH satellites too? If they're making new equipment and processes, they'll be saving a lot less money from using KH mirrors

It was a new piece of test/validation equipment used on Hubble first. Reread it, they used the new equipment to test Hubble that had an error during assembly, they also crosschecked against the old machine which showed the mirror was flawed, and incorrectly decided that the newer machine was correct when it passed the Hubble mirror.

The test equipment is a much smaller part of the cost than developing, building and testing the machines required to actually grind the mirrors to spec in the first place.

The mirror/sensor package is just the payload. The rest of the bird, from power and communications to navigation and pointing, could have been lifted directly from a spysat program.

> Way longer than that. The first KH-11 satellites that Hubble shares its design with were in orbit in the late 1970s.

That's all fascinating stuff! What are some books that cover the start of the pursuit of those advanced machines? Can I say warfare machinery? Was it the end of WWII and a race to self-protect, was it the start of cold war, establishment of NATO, or a particular administration?

There is likely something more recent or more specific, but I read and enjoyed 'This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age', Burrows when it came out in the 90's.

They gifted solely the mirrors.

> technologies the US managed to deploy decades before the competition

We don't know that. The competition (USSR/Russia) also keeps secrets, and not being a free society, has much less reason to publish them later.

The thing that always leaves me flabbergasted when I read such fascinating facts of such great technological power held by the US is that they seem to always waste it.... :-(

If they had such "eyes" on our earth, couldn't they have clearly spotted those Methane emissions from Turkmenistan well earlier than the UN MARS program did? or many "beneficial" to humanity things I cannot even think of right away.

Even militarily... US wanted to avoid the Hormuz Strait closure.. I think that was a clear enough military goal. Could nt they spot where the mines are, and where the attacking positions are from their mighty tech instead of this prolonged war? As in, the strikes they did already - couldnt they have taken out all attacking capacity right away if they had such powerful tech eyes?

Counterpoint: The people running the government right now are very, very stupid.

The people running the government are the same ones running it 4 years ago. It’s only a handful at the very top that change.

Yes... The ones who 'run' it. Mid level government employees are worker bees, they aren't setting policy.

If they don't want it they slow roll it a different policy is stated. If they want it they do it immediately, maybe it's illegal or unconstitutional, but it will take 20 years for the court to eventually rule on it and by then it's a forgone conclusion.

Dunno, I think Hegseth is changing more than a handful of top brass in a very Stalinesque ideological purge. 20% of generals feels like a lot.

Yes it's quite bad what that muppet is up to but it's not Stalin level yet.

Decades ago I wrote a paper, lost to time now, on the effect of his military purges on the fighting effectiveness of the Red Army during the back half of WW2. He purged not just senior commanders but mid ranks and up, think like down as far as their equivalent of majors. A vast amount of battle-relevant experience was swept away, much more damaging in the day-to-day grind than simply disappearing a few field marshals.

My point is, hope is not lost for the US military. Yes lots of irreplaceable senior experience is being tossed aside for unforgivably stupid and pointless reasons, but there's a lot of recent, hard-won, actual shooting war experience in the officer corps which, if they don't all bugger off in disgust, will serve us well in future. Today's captains and majors are well aware of how drones in Ukraine have changed battle[1], to give one example, and the career-minded among them will be in doctrine-influencing and development positions before too long.

I'm aware this is to some degree wishful thinking.

[1]I chose this example because it's going to be one of that drunken fool's more consequential errors: re-tasking the Army unit charged with developing drone capabilities for the US.

Russia won not because of tactical brilliance, but because they simply threw biomass at the problem.

Just throw enough barely armored tanks and bodies at the problem, and the germans eventually run out of resources. It only took about 9M soldiers. Glorious sacrifices for the benefit of Stalin.

Consider how many lives would have been saved with a shred of tactical brilliance.

The current admin is waging a war on them (the deep state) and is trying to replace them with loyal MAGAts

They are not - at least not in the way we commonly think; they simply have other priorities. They simply couldn't care less anymore about telling better lies than their predecessors.

> They simply couldn't care less anymore about telling better lies than their predecessors.

4 years ago, people didn't fill their pockets on the current scale, and they also didn't pitch their own businesses under the cover of national interests.

They absolutely did and have been doing so for centuries. Spoils system and all that. For a while they just got better at hiding it.

Mines are underwater and have no clear visibility from space. Shaheds require very little launch infrastructure - basically any airstrip will suffice.

I think the war has been a lesson that the technological capacity isn't magic and US strike capability is not unlimited. Everyone assumed they were going to do a Venezuela or Ukraine "special military operation", decapitate the leadership, strike a few barracks and declare victory. Now the US leadership seem surprised that the Iranians are continuing to fight.

(The definitive film on insane US leadership is of course Dr Strangelove, a film that came out when Trump was 18 years old. The character of General Jack D Ripper is shown to be an insane conspiracy theorist babbling about commies and fluoride who starts a world-destroying nuclear war on his own initiative)

> Everyone assumed they were going to do a Venezuela

When you say "everyone" do you mean "everyone in the US military establishment"? I remember very few independent commentators who suggested the US intervention in Iran was a good idea. (Personally I think it's too early to say.)

Yes, sorry, everyone in the decision-making bubble. Of course anyone watching could tell it was a bad idea.

The last US troops withdrew from Iraq this week. I wonder how long the US will be able to tolerate not having an overseas ground war.

This is a space-focused post but you really think we don’t have underwater intelligence? What with the nuclear triad and all? What with threats something like a nuclear-armed P-700 being dropped by a merchant submarine secretly on the bottom of the ocean a few hundred meters from DC only to be launched remotely at a determined point in time?

Power just means capabilities not results. Often it just magnifies the wielder’s capabilities to harm themselves and others.

You’re falling for the fallacy of “if I can’t see it must not be happening”.

Not to mention if it were made public, how could it be done without exposing the technology?

“US govt sees massive methane emissions”

“How?”

“Uhh, satellites.”

“Which ones?”

> If they had such "eyes" on our earth, couldn't they have clearly spotted those Methane emissions from Turkmenistan well earlier than the UN MARS program did?

Yes, but that would "show their hand" - secrecy has always been paramount.

Of course, then Trump came in and freely shared sattelite photos of idk, an Iranian launch site or something which revealed the US's current day spy sattelite capabilities.

See previously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair : the state department didn't like someone disrupting the Iraq narrative construction, so they exposed her CIA status.

huge BS. they have no problem doing alternate discovery hacks for information, that was often wrong, acquired via torture in dark sites.

stop making excuses for people you don't even know

You're right in a sense, but that's not necessarily how this works. Sources and methods are classified, but information is not necessarily so. If it could theoretically be obtained in multiple ways, you can release it without showing your hand. The USAF's Office of Special Investigation (used to, at least) informs companies and orgs of the fact that they were hacked, often before the company/org knows itself.

This might sound dramatic but you have it a bit backwards.

You can call back to Major General Smedly Butler and his "War is a racket".

WWII got the US out of the remnants of the great depression. The massive industrial push for both our equipment and the lend-lease model was a massive infusion into our economy. It was so huge, that it never really stopped. Our economic model and system was sick, and the military industrial complex(dramatic but apt term) was a large-scale make-work endeavor that would double as an expression of global power and propaganda both home and abroad.

One could take this and begin to see that conflict may be instigated for the sake of the MIC. Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq, but it didn't stop us from invading, making up claims of WMDs that couldn't be substantiated, then destabilizing the region. The power vacuums then create later conflicts, for more military machinery to be built for.

The HMMV was continued to be sent to the middle east long after we all acknowledged they were death traps for soldiers. Same thing for certain tanks, they kept making them to keep people employed.

The big thing now, is the propaganda worked too well, and we became too focused on giving as much taxpayer dollars to lockheed and raytheon as we could.

We didn't win Afghanistan, Iraq left ISIS in it's wake. But the point wasn't to win, it was to brutalize(externally facing propaganda) and sell weapons. Since the purpose of conflict was so extremely warped to enable the MIC, winning didn't matter, and our ability to win corroded greatly. We won WWII because of our logistics. Those logistics have broken down as we deindustrialized and moved to more and more expensive "smart weapons". Those smart weapons made promises of warfare so advanced, you only need a handful. So we pay millions per missile. Then we use them all up defending against dumb weapons, and we lack the capacity to make more.

Our military is in effect a paper tiger. The real threat of the US military is mass civilian casualty. If we can't take them out with drones, land invasion would be a catastrophe, and then actual WMDs would be deployed to save face. Nuclear genocide is the US military's only real remaining card, as we've devoured the propaganda and rested on our grandparent's laurels while losing sight of what earned the respect.

Maybe that is the reason the initial Hubble did not have focus on infinity? Ok, very speculative, but the link comes to mind immediately.

That's where the new Roman Space Telescope came from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...

I can't find great sources for the story, but I saw a claim that the NRO purchased NeXT stations through backchannels in a quantity that was financially significant for NeXT's survival.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49368886

A while ago, NRO put on-line a bunch of declassified documents [1], including their internal books about the history of satellite reconnaissance. But it was all in one unsorted pile, often scans of barely legible pages. I think this was the original source of some of the documents shown in this article.

Although one could randomly stumble on some interesting anecdote here and there in the NRO archive, overall that collection was not made to be easy to navigate, and one would have to be very patient to sift through it thoroughly. Maybe the situation is better now.

[1] https://www.nro.gov/foia-home/foia-declassified-nro-programs...

This is a task worth giving to ai

Small error. In the 1960s TALENT and KEYHOLE were different things. TALENT was data from the U2 programs, KEYHOLE was satellites. The "TALENT-KEYHOLE" name today is a generalized classification ("TK") but in the 60s they were distinct programs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_inform...

Related submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49914880 - "A Cold War Spy Satellite Named After Farrah Fawcett Just Blew Apart in Orbit"

I’m not going to be alive in 40 years, but I would like to have known what classified information will be released in 2066 dealing with satellites in orbit now?

Starshield is pretty cool.

You'd think a star shield would be pointed toward the cosmos. Less of a shield and more of a planet-wide real-time inward-pointing "cool" device.

Apply for an intelligence job in the USA

clearancejobs.com

I mean even if you'd get a job close to something satellite related I can only assume that all info is highly compartmentalized. Very very very know anything more than the exact specifics of what they're working on. So yeah, you might get to see some cool stuff, but it'll be of very narrow scope.

If you have sharp eyes you can look up on a moonless night and see all sorts of shit floating by that you will not find on the sat tracking apps. They orbit too quickly to usefully follow with astronomy binos and a stand no matter how steady you are

It's really picked up these past ~6 months

Starlink is litter in the sky

Definitely not talking about those, which are much brighter than these small low fast ones that move around far more than anything like that would be able to

Now imagine what the military have up the sleeve and for how long in regard of AI. They had all the supercompute at hand long before nvidia commodified it.

Especially this

> USA-223 (NROL-32), which is seen as the fifth satellite in the series, is according to NRO director Bruce Carlson "the largest satellite in the world."[3] It is believed that this refers to the diameter of the main antenna, which might be well in excess of 100 m (330 ft).

This thing probably picks up Putin's nintendo wii controller...

Not for long - AST Spacemobile Bluebird Block 2 will be much larger.

Ursula Andress, Raquel Welch, Farrah Fawcett?

Boomers been busy naming

just a reminder that despite the endless billions spent on spy and war nonsense

US somehow felt empowered yet lost Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and within 800 more days Iran wars

oh and North Korea built an entire nuclear + missile program

you'd think there would be a change of spending/priorities, it's clearly pointless

> it's clearly pointless

That depends what the aim of the war is. Is it to win, or just a distraction?

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I am more concerned about Facebook's Spyglasses. That one is quite pertinent.

Relevance of this information:

https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-16172545/us-sp...

Automatic downvote for linking to that worthless shit heap.

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