We begin, as we so often do, with a tweet.
Jonathan McDowell @planet4589: Interesting that the NROL-44 patch description makes explicit reference to FVEY, the ‘Five Eyes’ spy alliance of US/UK/Aus/Can/NZ.
Brief explainer: Jonathan McDowell is a certified Harvard x-ray astronomer who also keeps an eye on satellites in space. NROL stands for National Reconnaissance Office Launch. NRO sits somewhere in the murky middle space between the defense department and the intelligence community. Its job is to launch spy satellites. The spy satellites are secret and the NRO doesn’t especially acknowledge them. But the satellites are launched on rockets and rocket launches aren’t subtle and come with warnings to pilots, so NRO acknowledges the launches with a statement and a mission patch. For launch #44, the patch was this wolf. An annotated version of this patch says that those five wolves (note the four lurking in the back) “shows the solidarity across the FVEY community.” The annotation continues: the wolf is howling into space where the satellite is, and the howl is a warning to the wolf pack of signs of trouble.
Well then. Well-a-then. My my my. I have questions, I do.
Jonathan, I saw your tweet about the NRO patch. I have a tiny obsession about these patches because they are so weird and because they give away information. Why do you think they issue the patches?
It’s a tradition, it promotes team bonding which is a big thing in the military. They’ve been told lots of times not to give things away with the patches but after a while it starts happening again.
Indeed it does. A lovely old example, the patch for launch #11:
In 2000 the NRO launched a satellite it wouldn’t describe but issued a patch. One of my beloved, brilliant amateur satellite watchers (they prefer to be called “hobbyists,” and as one scientist told me, she’d stopped thinking of them as amateurs long ago) saw the patch soon after launch and given his long years of watching, thought it belonged to a family of radar imaging satellites. The four little arrow-things were satellites in the same family, he thought, the clue being that one was red because it had de-orbited (dropped out of the sky) since. Based on the arrows’ paths in the patch, he predicted NROL #11’s eventual orbit. The mesh outlining the owl’s eyes looked like the kind of antenna the satellite’s signals used. And “We Own the Night,” though immodest, was obvious.
People have been studying these patches maybe since 1977, and notice certain repeated images – dragons, eagles, owls – and figured out what the images mean. The number of stars in the patch, for instance, is usually the number of satellites in that family. And in fact, they have long articles and books postulating the iconography of these patches. To be honest, I find postulating iconographies tiring in the same way, as a young English major, I found searching for symbols in poems tiring.
So the next question is, do you have any idea whatsoever that could account for the aesthetic in these patches? Why this combination of comics and fantasy? I associate that combination with basement boys, but surely the guys doing the patches are long since out of the basement if they were ever in it?
And are the patches actually sewed on to anything? are they just collected?
I think the crews in mission control probably wear 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 for sure had the sticker versions on our backpacks/briefcases and office doors…
And I think a lot of the engineers in the space program are scifi/fantasy fans
so they are into it
oh, and I admit I have several t-shirts with the STS-93 Chandra patches featured on them
Just googled the STS-93 Chandra patch and realized I have a t-shirt from an astro conference called something like Observing the Dark Ages [the time before the universe universally lit up], and on it is a knight on horseback. Ok. I’m getting it now — a club of people interested in what interests me, my people, and see? I belong.
I have to say though, STS-93 Chandra patch looks pretty normal.
Well Chandra isn’t secret so we didn’t have to be coy
It’s not the coyness that’s weird. It’s all the octopi and ravening eagles and stalwart avengers and ferrety-looking spies, not to mention the ladies whose clothes either start low or end high.
Yeah, I think a lot of comic book fans in DoD
Not reassuring, is it. Alternate realities in the DoD. That would be a good title for an article.
Hah
Hah indeed. Some of my best friends, or rather some children of some best friends, love that comic-book imagery and who’s to gainsay them? But something about the combination of bulging muscles and secret surveillances make me itch. I think of people in the intelligence business as living in a reality that if I but knew, would scare me. I think of them as unrelentingly aware that their knowledge of this reality comes accompanied by responsibility. I think that because of this, they are socially reserved, in fact, flat-out bad at friendly conversation. Surely under that responsible reserve isn’t the soul of a pale but ruthless fantasist with whirling eyes? Surely not?
_________
Patches courtesy of NRO, via Wikimedia Commons