walrus01

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?).

I have a personal theory that making first or second cousin marriage illegal would result in a great deal of complaining and likely legal challenges from certain groups that they're being discriminated against on the basis of racial/ethnic origin. Take a look at a global map of the percentage prevalence of first-cousin marriage.

I say this having discussed the phenomenon with friends who immigrated from Pakistan and all of whom have met first-cousin married couples that had one or more children with birth defects or mental disabilities that could very well have been the result of it.

It wasn't mean to be a "lol red state" thing, for instance, California law still allows first cousins to marry. What in tarnation.

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.

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.

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...

Still allowed at age 16 in Alabama.

Roll tide...... I guess....

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.

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.

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)."

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.

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.

Not a typo despite the domain name, it's been called the NGIA in written documents for a long time. The use of "NGA" is actually somewhat recent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligen...

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:

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.

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

If you think the US doesn't have a plethora of DoD things in geostationary orbit you would be extremely, terribly wrong. In addition to well known programs like AEHF, WGS for two way military satcom purposes, a person with an amateur grade telescope can literally spot the satellite that keeps station near an existing commercial Thuraya satellite:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-202

https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/thuraya-2.htm

https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/thuraya-4.htm

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.

As a small example of the size/scale of the money spent:

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...

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

> LLM hitting epic one liners and I thought he was just a coke addict.

sufficiently advanced coke addict is indistinguishable from LLM "one shot this project make no mistakes" true believer

or is it vice versa?

I was referring to the rq180 or similar design which is very much not a supersonic aircraft.

I was replying to a comment where the person was talking specifically about LEO. Interfering with things in geostationary orbit is a whole other question.

I was replying to a comment from a person who was talking about satellite ISR, referring to 'can loiter over an area' for why the RQ180 or similar exists and is used in certain tactical scenarios instead of satellite, not to justify some absurd reactivation of the SR71. Please read the comment I replied to and what I wrote again.

The RQ9 is fine to loiter over and watch an area that has little to no air defenses, more stealthy things are needed if there's some form of credible air defense. There's a number of non faked photos of downed rq9 in yemen in the past couple years that were shot down by fairly basic air defense systems the Houthis acquired from Iran.

An Iridium 9555 handheld phone talking to Iridium satellites in LEO with its antenna extended transmits in approximately the same frequency range and about the same tx power as an inmarsat isatphone 2. The former is LEO, the latter talks to geostationary.

Same concept for an Iridium 9555 or its successor in a dock plugged into the small coaxial cable that goes to the external hockey puck sized antenna. This is all happening between approx. 1400 to 1700 MHz in either system.

Look up the detailed RF specs for the isatphone 2.

Both of these only work because the channel size is extremely narrow.

The antenna on the commercial satellites that do two way S/L-band to handheld stuff (or INMARSAT BGAN size terminals) from geostationary is massive, I've no reason to believe that a high budget billion dollar NSA satellite at MEO or higher altitudes wouldn't have a similarly gargantuan unfolding antenna.

Very possible. Once you've gone to the massive engineering effort/budget to produce something like an RQ180, I'm sure someone will come up with an idea boiled down to essentially "hey what if we took the radar-resistant bay door design and internal munitions bay mounting from the F22 and shrunk it a bit, we could fit at least four 500 lb JDAMs in this bad boy"...

Things get re-used in weird ways with other stuff grafted onto them, I'm pretty sure the people who originally designed the F-A/18 never imagined it would be turned into the EA18 growler.

> Maneuvering for a rendezvous (intercept), given 5-40 hours time, is very cheap in terms of ∆V (fuel used).

Only if you're in approximately the same orbital inclination. Plane change maneuvers once in LEO are very expensive in delta V.

Handheld S/L-band things like Thuraya, Iridium, Globalstar, Inmarsat phones don't transmit in a very directional way at all. Or things like a Garmin inreach that have an Iridium modem in them. They're omnidirectional enough that the broad requirement for a user is to be outdoors with a good view of the sky.

If you have a NSA-type geostationary satellite somewhere in approximately a 1/5th arc of azimuth along the equator of the earth that can 'see' an area on the ground, with antenna systems aimed at the area of interest (let's say, Afghanistan), it's not necessary for your NSA satellite to be anywhere close to the actual service provider's satellite.

Note that Thuraya BGAN-like devices and handheld phones talk to geostationary, Iridium is LEO (but likely some combination of LEO, molniya orbit and geostationary can "sniff" it), Globalstar is similarly LEO in its service provider architecture, and Inmarsat is geostationary.

Also lots of conjecture out there that sigint platforms exist which are good enough to capture ordinary handheld device cellular traffic or VHF/UHF radio traffic that's not intended by its users or terrestrial operators to go into space at all. This is probably done from a combination of low earth orbit platforms and more complicated orbits or what we would call MEO (maybe about the same height as an o3b satellite?) to achieve longer dwell times over an area of interest.

In strictly military technology terms, an ISR platform isn't a kinetic anything, though it would enable the targeting of something kinetic.

> It really is hard to figure out where to do a thing and it's also very easy to get phished

Maybe the federal government could use some of its powers to prevent literal phishing and scam sites from showing up in the advertising for the first, top listed results from search engines when non-technical boomers (or technical knowledge equivalent of) search for certain basic services. It seems there's very little actual evaluation by the ad-serving-entities of whether the destination of an ad is a legitimate thing these days.

Until very recent price changes, at the scale that they purchase hard drives, I don't think that there would have been significant cost savings in purchasing SMR drives. Particularly after taking into account the additional hours of software development required to write custom host managed SMR stuff to deal with the performance problems.

Political scientists are well acquainted with madman theory, but have we defined "dementia theory" yet?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory

Irrational and volatile as a play-act is one thing, actually being irrational and volatile is a whole other ball game...