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. 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
    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...

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