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. monocasa · 1790813494 · focus · HN ↗
  Way longer than that. The first KH-11 satellites that Hubble shares its design with were in orbit in the late 1970s.
  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN
  1. walrus01 · 1790814039 · focus · HN ↗
    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: <a href="https://www.thespacereview.com/article/5003/1" rel="nofollow">https://www.thespacereview.com/article/5003/1
  2. underlipton · 1790817465 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    eks391 · 1790820736 · focus · HN ↗
    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
    walrus01 · 1790821222 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    throwaway85825 · 1790870653 · focus · HN ↗
    Most NRO employees are imagery analysts. Most of the satellite development is done by contractors.
    jychang · 1790887534 · focus · HN ↗
    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?
    Jtsummers · 1790821648 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    mbreese · 1790824326 · focus · HN ↗
    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!)
    walrus01 · 1790825269 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    <a href="https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=perkin-elmer+NRO+mirror" rel="nofollow">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...
    underlipton · 1790866337 · focus · HN ↗
    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?
    15155 · 1790831585 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.)
    aetch · 1790833912 · focus · HN ↗
    Most veterans don’t have security clearances after getting out of the military if their next job doesn’t need it
    onion2k · 1790840235 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    jychang · 1790887740 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    jychang · 1790887442 · focus · HN ↗
    ???
    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?
  3. palmotea · 1790830542 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.:
    <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23150092">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.
    monocasa · 1790833328 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    ra · 1790838309 · focus · HN ↗
    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?
    stanac · 1790840843 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    monocasa · 1790873524 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, and block v also have straight up stealth coatings in addition to not being as bright.
    sandworm101 · 1790851679 · focus · HN ↗
    You assume they are in similar orbits. The spy sats might be higher than Hubble, which itself was very high for a shuttle program.
    verzali · 1790871234 · focus · HN ↗
    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).
    monocasa · 1790873417 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    walrus01 · 1790905291 · focus · HN ↗
    see the part here about Point Nemo: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility
    monocasa · 1790873268 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    voidUpdate · 1790849249 · focus · HN ↗
    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?
    iririririr · 1790850032 · focus · HN ↗
    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!
    scrlk · 1790857594 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    voidUpdate · 1790858602 · focus · HN ↗
    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
    rtkwe · 1790870968 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    sandworm101 · 1790851836 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  4. mandeepj · 1790869957 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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?
    pjmorris · 1790871937 · focus · HN ↗
    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.

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