alt Hacker NewsThe top secret URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH satellites (2025)
Comments
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...
Related submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49914880 - "A Cold War Spy Satellite Named After Farrah Fawcett Just Blew Apart in Orbit"
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?
If you have sharp eyes you can look up on a moonless night and see all sorts of shit floating by that you will not find on the sat tracking apps. They orbit too quickly to usefully follow with astronomy binos and a stand no matter how steady you are
It's really picked up these past ~6 months
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_inform...
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.
Ursula Andress, Raquel Welch, Farrah Fawcett?
Boomers been busy naming
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
[dead]
I am more concerned about Facebook's Spyglasses. That one is quite pertinent.
Confirm you have receive 10000 from Nicholas Sparks New mpesa balanc
Relevance of this information:
https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-16172545/us-sp...
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.