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. 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?
    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

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