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The top secret URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH satellites (2025)thespacereview.com
164 points•Bluestein•about 7 hours ago•70 comments•
#secret#satellites#ursala#raquel#farrah#farrah satellites#secret ursala#top secret

70 comments

Almondsetatabout 6 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.
monocasaabout 4 hours ago
Way longer than that. The first KH-11 satellites that Hubble shares its design with were in orbit in the late 1970s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN

walrus01about 4 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"

For instance: https://www.thespacereview.com/article/5003/1

underliptonabout 3 hours ago
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.
mmooss2 minutes ago
> 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.

walrus01about 5 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.

beerandtabout 3 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.

somenameforme26 minutes ago
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.

[1] - https://xrtechgroup.com/who-has-the-highest-resolution-satel...

throwaway456744about 3 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.
buckle8017about 3 hours ago
High probability the NSA has satellites intercepting cellular radio traffic world wide with triangulation.

Pocket backdoors.

rpcope1about 1 hour 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.
someonebaggyabout 5 hours ago
There's always infinite resources available to defend and expand powerful people's power.
rororoyourboatabout 4 hours ago
Except in Iran
corvadabout 6 hours ago
I mean NASA's budget was/is minuscule in comparison to defense spending so I am not surprised.
deepsunabout 5 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.
generusoabout 1 hour 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.

[1] https://www.nro.gov/foia-home/foia-declassified-nro-programs...

dbdougabout 5 hours ago
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?
eks391about 2 hours ago
Apply for an intelligence job in the USA

clearancejobs.com

wmfabout 5 hours ago
Starshield is pretty cool.
nofunsirabout 4 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.
Jtsummersabout 6 hours ago
Related submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49914880 - "A Cold War Spy Satellite Named After Farrah Fawcett Just Blew Apart in Orbit"
anonymousiamabout 2 hours ago
Relevance of this information:

https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-16172545/us-sp...

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