The top secret URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH satellites (2025)

Jtsummers

Related submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49914880 - "A Cold War Spy Satellite Named After Farrah Fawcett Just Blew Apart in Orbit"

Almondsetat

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.

shevy-java

I am more concerned about Facebook's Spyglasses. That one is quite pertinent.

dbdoug

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?

walrus01

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(satellite)

sandworm101

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...

anonymousiam

Relevance of this information: https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-16172545/us-sp...

generuso

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...