Thread

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

306 points · 162 comments · Bluestein

Almondsetat · 1790809198 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. corvad · 1790809683 · focus · HN ↗
  I mean NASA's budget was/is minuscule in comparison to defense spending so I am not surprised.
  1. deepsun · 1790810217 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    whatever1 · 1790810535 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    dmix · 1790810733 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    jandrewrogers · 1790811615 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    walrus01 · 1790812104 · focus · HN ↗
    As a small example of the size/scale of the money spent:
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NRO_launches" rel="nofollow">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: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-247#/media/File:NROL_39_vector_logo.svg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-247#/media/File:NROL_39_ve...
    T-A · 1790817222 · focus · HN ↗
    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:
    <a href="https://www.nga.mil/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nga.mil/
    walrus01 · 1790817408 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligence_Agency" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligen...
    T-A · 1790818072 · focus · HN ↗
    According to this (from 2004) it's been NGA all along:
    <a href="https://www.nextgov.com/people/2004/02/whats-in-a-name/219505/" rel="nofollow">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:
    <a href="https://www.governmentattic.org/11docs/NGIAoigGAMPC_2007-2013.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.governmentattic.org/11docs/NGIAoigGAMPC_2007-201...
    So more like a common misspelling?
    jandrewrogers · 1790818618 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    walrus01 · 1790819686 · focus · HN ↗
    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)."
    jandrewrogers · 1790818242 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    walrus01 · 1790818892 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    jasomill · 1790829594 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe so, but the former FLA was NIMA, not NGIA.
    jandrewrogers · 1790905348 · focus · HN ↗
    I had completely forgotten about NIMA. That's pretty obscure!
    r3trohack3r · 1790813829 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    Loughla · 1790814780 · focus · HN ↗
    Air? I know it's splitting hairs, but there was already a branch with much experience of launching and flying things.
    jayGlow · 1790816396 · focus · HN ↗
    every branch has experience launching and flying things but we still have an air force.
    r3trohack3r · 1790818035 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    KerrAvon · 1790818229 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    pram · 1790836768 · focus · HN ↗
    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)
    hydrogen7800 · 1790861781 · focus · HN ↗
    I always liked this description of Marine aviation: The Navy's Army's Air Force.
    aetch · 1790834264 · focus · HN ↗
    The Air Force does launching and flying over land as well as land based missiles. Flying over water is the navy’s business.
    ornateelephant · 1790819492 · focus · HN ↗
    Ain't no air in space.
    AceJohnny2 · 1790814268 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    walrus01 · 1790817775 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    deepsun · 1790830952 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    AceJohnny2 · 1790879164 · focus · HN ↗
    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] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
    aetch · 1790834149 · focus · HN ↗
    The space force doesn’t even go to space

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