Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

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> What’s more amazing is that the NRO has multiple more capable telescopes in orbit as we speak and we’re celebrating that NASA doesn’t have to spend money

I have zero problem with the NRO's budget or its existence and mission statement, undoubtedly its data products are proving extremely helpful right now in a behind-the-scenes way stopping the Ukrainians from being overrun by the Russian army. In addition to the well publicized equipment (HIMARs, etc) provided by the US and NATO states there is certainly a large amount of data on russian armor movements, ammo dump locations, logistics depot locations etc being funnelled from the US into the Ukrainian military command.

Just because a project or budget is black doesn't necessarily mean it's useless or nefarious.

In addition to the above of course NASA should have a much higher budget. I would like it if they could spend it on things that aren't flying pork barrels like the SLS. If they want to launch huge heavy things to orbit, designing something in two pieces that can attach together and using two fully expendable Falcon Heavy launches right now would be a tiny fraction of the cost. Not even counting the theoretical capability of Starship.

> Just because a project or budget is black doesn't necessarily mean it's useless or nefarious.

Of course not, it does mean that we don't have the ability to know if it is useless or nefarious or not.

Theoretically the idea is you're supposed to elect trustworthy people with good judgment to the positions that sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee and other persons in the US government who approve the budgets of TS/SCI and similar programs....

In reality maybe this doesn't work so well.

Something like the Church committee would be nice every decade or so.

Snowden showed they desperately need some light to shine on them once in a while.

Otherwise intelligence agencies have a historically consistent tendency to get a little too laissez faire with people's right.

NRO is probably the most secretive of all of them, but I'm assuming looking at pictures of Russian tanks and Chinese missile silos all day isn't the most civil-rights threatening thing vs storing billions of peoples emails, text messages, and phone calls like the NSA.

False, though common, misunderstanding of responsibilities. The NRO is the operator/owner of the space asset. The NSA is (one of) the customer getting data from the NRO space asset. (along with many other sources)

Though I would bet good money that a vastly greater percentage of what the NSA does for traffic interception, storage and analysis is related to terrestrial based networks (or terrestrial-to-local wireless like LTE) rather than space based, these days.

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