I’m still slightly obsessed (a nice state to be in) with the mission patches released by the National Reconnaissance Office, which if you’re obsessed enough you can find out which satellites the NRO just launched. Some of those satellites are, you know, secret. Like this one: It’s for recently launched constellations (a ton of linked satellites) that are a secret version of Starlinks. They are called Starshield. This post was first published on March 5, 2021. My slight obsessions are long-standing.
We start, as we do so many times, with a tweet.
Jonathan McDowell @planeta4589: It’s interesting that the NROL-44 patch description explicitly references FVEY, the ‘Five Eyes’ spy alliance of the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Brief explainer: Jonathan McDowell is a Harvard-certified X-ray astronomer who also monitors satellites in space. NROL stands for National Reconnaissance Office Launch. The NRO sits somewhere in the murky middle space between the defense department and the intelligence community. Their job is to launch spy satellites. Spy satellites are secret and are not particularly recognized by the NRO. But satellites are launched on rockets and rocket launches are not subtle and come with warnings to pilots, so the NRO recognizes the launches. with a statement and a mission patch. For release #44, the patch was this wolf. An annotated version of this patch says that those five wolves (note the four lurking in the back) “show solidarity across the FVEY community.” (FVEY is slang for five eyes5 countries that cooperate in espionage.) The annotation continues: the wolf howls into space where the satellite is, and the howl is a warning to the wolf pack about signs of trouble.
Well then. Well then. My my my. I have questions, I do.
Me: Jonathan, I saw your tweet about the NRO patch. I have a little obsession with these patches because they are very rare and because they give information. Why do you think they issue the patches?
Jonathan: It’s a tradition, it promotes team bonding, which is very important in the military. They have been told many times not to give things away with the patches, but after a while it happens again.
In fact it does. A beautiful old example, the patch for release #11:
In 2000, the NRO launched a satellite that it did not describe, but issued a patch. One of my beloved and brilliant amateur satellite watchers (they prefer to be called “hobbyists” and, as one scientist told me, she had stopped considering them amateurs a long time ago) saw the patch shortly after launch and, given his long years of observing, thought It belonged to a family of radar imaging satellites. The four little arrows were satellites from the same family, he thought, and the clue was that one was black because it had since deorbited (fell from the sky). Based on the arrow trajectories in the patch, provided The Final Orbit of NROL #11. The mesh that outlined the owl’s eyes looked like the type of antenna used by satellite signals. And “We Own the Night,” though immodest, was obvious.
People have been studying these patches since perhaps 1977, and have noticed certain repeating images (dragons, eagles, owls) and figured out what they mean. The number of stars in the spot, for example, is usually the number of satellites in that family. And in fact, they havelong articlesandbookspostulating the iconography of these patches. To be honest, I find positing iconographies exhausting in the same way that, as a young English student, I found searching for symbols in poems exhausting.
Me: So the next question is: do you have any ideas that could explain the aesthetics of these patches? Why this combination of comics and fantasy? I associate that combination with the guys in the basement, but surely the guys who make the patches have long since left the basement, if they were ever in it.
And are the patches actually sewn onto something? Have they just been collected?
Jonathan: I think the crews in mission control probably use them.
For the Chandra [an orbiting x-ray telescope] mission, we scientists for the most part didn’t wear patches on our clothes, but we sure had the adhesive versions on our backpacks/briefcases and office doors…
And I think a lot of the space program engineers are fans of science fiction and fantasy.
so they like it
Oh, and I admit that I have several t-shirts with STS-93 on them. chandra patches presented in them
Me: I just Googled the STS-93 Chandra patch and realized I have a t-shirt from an astronomical conference called something like Observing the Middle Ages. [the time before the universe universally lit up]and above him is a knight on horseback. OK. I’m understanding it now: a club of people interested in what interests me, my people, and see? I belong.
However, I must say that the STS-93 Chandra patch looks pretty average.
Jonathan: Well, Chandra is no secret, so we didn’t have to be shy.
Me: It’s not shyness that’s weird. They’re all the octopuses, the rapacious eagles, the stalwart avengers and the ferret-like spies, not to mention the ladies whose clothes start at the bottom or end at the top.
Jonathan: Yeah, I think a lot of comic book fans in the Department of Defense
Me: It’s not reassuring, is it? Alternative realities in the Department of Defense. It would be a good title for an article.
Jonathan: Haha
Ha, indeed. Some of my best friends, or rather some children of some of my best friends, love those comic book images and who can contradict them? But something about the combination of bulging muscles and breasts and secret surveillance makes me itch. I think people in the intelligence business live in a reality that, if I knew it, would scare me. I think they are fully aware that their knowledge of this reality is accompanied by responsibility. I think because of this, they are socially reserved, in fact, absolutely bad at friendly conversations. Surely beneath that responsible reserve does not lie the soul of a pale but ruthless fantasist with rolling eyes? Surely not?
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Patches courtesy of NRO, viaWikimedia Commons
#Alternative #realities #NRO
