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Almondsetat 15 hours ago [-]
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.
monocasa 14 hours ago [-]
Way longer than that. The first KH-11 satellites that Hubble shares its design with were in orbit in the late 1970s.
> 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.
voidUpdate 4 hours ago [-]
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?
scrlk 1 hours ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
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
iririririr 4 hours ago [-]
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!
sandworm101 3 hours ago [-]
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.
monocasa 8 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
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.
sandworm101 3 hours ago [-]
You assume they are in similar orbits. The spy sats might be higher than Hubble, which itself was very high for a shuttle program.
walrus01 14 hours ago [-]
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"
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 12 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Jtsummers 11 hours ago [-]
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.
onion2k 6 hours ago [-]
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.
15155 9 hours ago [-]
> 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 8 hours ago [-]
Most veterans don’t have security clearances after getting out of the military if their next job doesn’t need it
mbreese 11 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
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.
Whether any of that information would be allowed to go in the reverse direction back to NASA is another question entirely...
walrus01 14 hours ago [-]
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.
beerandt 12 hours ago [-]
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.
dmd 12 hours ago [-]
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.
walrus01 12 hours ago [-]
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.
scottyah 10 hours ago [-]
Prevents a lot of wars and skirmishes.
thrawa8387336 8 hours ago [-]
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?
throwaway456744 13 hours ago [-]
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.
walrus01 13 hours ago [-]
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:
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.
MegaDeKay 11 hours ago [-]
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.
someguydave 2 hours ago [-]
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
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.
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?).
ozim 7 hours ago [-]
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.
TeMPOraL 6 hours ago [-]
It's that cheap?
I mean, it sounds like $4k and maybe again as much on compute could fix OSM for a city?
preisschild 51 minutes ago [-]
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)
buckle8017 12 hours ago [-]
High probability the NSA has satellites intercepting cellular radio traffic world wide with triangulation.
Pocket backdoors.
aorloff 10 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway2037 8 hours ago [-]
Is this traffic encrypted?
buckle8017 52 minutes ago [-]
It's... enciphered.
They rolled their own.
rpcope1 11 hours ago [-]
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.
walrus01 10 hours ago [-]
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.
reacharavindh 5 hours ago [-]
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?
hexapus 5 hours ago [-]
Counterpoint: The people running the government right now are very, very stupid.
easyThrowaway 55 minutes ago [-]
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.
refurb 4 hours ago [-]
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.
preisschild 50 minutes ago [-]
The current admin is waging a war on them (the deep state) and is trying to replace them with loyal MAGAts
idiotsecant 4 hours ago [-]
Yes... The ones who 'run' it. Mid level government employees are worker bees, they aren't setting policy.
pjc50 4 hours ago [-]
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.
scrumper 2 hours ago [-]
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.
asimpletune 5 hours ago [-]
Power just means capabilities not results. Often it just magnifies the wielder’s capabilities to harm themselves and others.
Cthulhu_ 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pjc50 4 hours ago [-]
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.
iririririr 4 hours ago [-]
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
pjc50 5 hours ago [-]
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)
tome 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.)
pjc50 4 hours ago [-]
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.
refurb 4 hours ago [-]
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?”
MeteorMarc 54 minutes ago [-]
Maybe that is the reason the initial Hubble did not have focus on infinity? Ok, very speculative, but the link comes to mind immediately.
someonebaggy 14 hours ago [-]
There's always infinite resources available to defend and expand powerful people's power.
rororoyourboat 14 hours ago [-]
Except in Iran
aetch 8 hours ago [-]
The current U.S. administration doesn’t know what they want in Iran. It’s not a capability issue.
corvad 15 hours ago [-]
I mean NASA's budget was/is minuscule in comparison to defense spending so I am not surprised.
deepsun 15 hours ago [-]
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.
AceJohnny2 13 hours ago [-]
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 13 hours ago [-]
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 9 hours ago [-]
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.
whatever1 15 hours ago [-]
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.
jandrewrogers 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
As a small example of the size/scale of the money spent:
"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.
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 12 hours ago [-]
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 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe so, but the former FLA was NIMA, not NGIA.
T-A 13 hours ago [-]
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:
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:
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 12 hours ago [-]
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)."
r3trohack3r 14 hours ago [-]
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 13 hours ago [-]
Air? I know it's splitting hairs, but there was already a branch with much experience of launching and flying things.
jayGlow 13 hours ago [-]
every branch has experience launching and flying things but we still have an air force.
r3trohack3r 12 hours ago [-]
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.
aetch 8 hours ago [-]
The Air Force does launching and flying over land as well as land based missiles. Flying over water is the navy’s business.
KerrAvon 12 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
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 18 minutes ago [-]
I always liked this description of Marine aviation: The Navy's Army's Air Force.
ornateelephant 12 hours ago [-]
Ain't no air in space.
dmix 14 hours ago [-]
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.
aetch 8 hours ago [-]
The space force doesn’t even go to space
toomuchtodo 15 hours ago [-]
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.
> 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.
kevin_thibedeau 14 hours ago [-]
They gifted solely the mirrors.
shevy-java 15 hours ago [-]
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.)
Procrastes 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
x______________ 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
kulahan 10 hours ago [-]
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.
spartanatreyu 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
wildzzz 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Bluestein 7 hours ago [-]
> 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 ...
someonebaggy 14 hours ago [-]
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.
esseph 14 hours ago [-]
> 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!"
addaon 15 hours ago [-]
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…
r58lf 15 hours ago [-]
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.
zippyman55 10 hours ago [-]
The testing of the mirror was insufficient.
aaron695 12 hours ago [-]
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generuso 10 hours ago [-]
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.
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?
eks391 11 hours ago [-]
Apply for an intelligence job in the USA
clearancejobs.com
Maxion 6 hours ago [-]
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.
wmf 14 hours ago [-]
Starshield is pretty cool.
nofunsir 13 hours ago [-]
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.
sandworm101 13 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
cluckindan 7 hours ago [-]
Ursula Andress, Raquel Welch, Farrah Fawcett?
Boomers been busy naming
ck2 44 minutes ago [-]
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
> 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...
11 hours ago [-]
Toslink 13 hours ago [-]
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shevy-java 15 hours ago [-]
I am more concerned about Facebook's Spyglasses. That one
is quite pertinent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN
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.
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 that's an awesome rabbit hole you pointed out!
Why have i never seen these, is it simply that I wasn't looking for them?
For instance: https://www.thespacereview.com/article/5003/1
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.
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.
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.)
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!)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?).
Much rather contribute that amount one time to OSM and have details from all cities from there.
I mean, it sounds like $4k and maybe again as much on compute could fix OSM for a city?
Pocket backdoors.
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.
They rolled their own.
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?
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.
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.
stop making excuses for people you don't even know
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)
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.)
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.
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?”
> 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.
I propose to compare aerospace with aerospace.
It isn't much different than how the Air Force was eventually carved out of the Army Air Corps.
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...
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.
https://www.nga.mil/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligen...
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?
" "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:
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)."
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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> 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.
I understand your point, just wanted to mention that that civilization would be leading the known world at the time, methinks ...
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!"
But if you were looking at nearer objects…
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...
clearancejobs.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_inform...
Boomers been busy naming
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
> 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...
https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-16172545/us-sp...