Declassified: The Top-Secret Satellites That Took Electronic Spying to the Battlefield
The top secret URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH satellites
For over 40 years, the NRO launched suitcase-sized ELINT satellites with code names like URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH. Hitchhiking on larger photo-reconnaissance satellites, they evolved from chasing Soviet radars to delivering tactical electronic intelligence directly to commanders in the field. Newly declassified documents reveal how these tiny spacecraft brought the wizard war of space-based spying to the warfighter.
“Back in the early 1970’s the new mission was to get data directly to the commander on the FEBA (Forward Edge of the Battle Area). I had a payload with possibilities if it could be ‘trailerized.’ We decided to go for it but needed a catchy name, so we used DRACULA…Direct Readout and Collection ULA (‘ULA’ was the three-letter shorthand for the URSALA payload).”
- 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.
- 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...
- 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?
- Jtsummers
Related submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49914880 - "A Cold War Spy Satellite Named After Farrah Fawcett Just Blew Apart in Orbit"
- anonymousiam
Relevance of this information:
https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-16172545/us-sp...
- wartywhoa23
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.
- 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...
- cluckindan
Ursula Andress, Raquel Welch, Farrah Fawcett?
Boomers been busy naming