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walrus01 • yesterday at 11:48 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

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...


Replies

jandrewrogers • today at 1:30 AM

FWIW, I think you mean NGA instead NGIA. They added a hyphen between “geospatial” and “intelligence” to avoid the eternal embarrassment of a 4-letter acronym.

The mission scope of the various intelligence agencies has evolved a lot over time as capabilities and requirements have changed. Even the histories of how these independent agencies came to exist is pretty interesting.

And yeah, that mission patch is fire.

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T-A • today at 1:13 AM

NGIA (Natural Gas Innovation Act? Nursery & Garden Industry Australia? Next Generation Identification and Awareness) had me stumped until I realized it must be a typo:

https://www.nga.mil/

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