That isn't a real patch, more of a mission logo. The details are too small. The pink nose, if actually in patch form, would stand out as a pink dot in the middle of a blurry cat.
Fyi, military patches look best when using lines with fixed-width. Anything pointy or jagged doesn't translate well into stitched thread. Avoid shadows too. Yes, there are some all-plastic patches that are carved into 3d shapes but those are evil. Real patches are thread over velcro.
There's a general term for this, designing for manufacturability[0].
I've made something of a hobby of learning new ways to manufacture things. Every time I learn a new manufacturing technique I start to notice things that were made that way in the real world, and I especially start to notice aspects of design that would have been influenced by how the thing in question was manufactured.
Case in point: injection molding. When you injection mold parts, the sides have to be tapered so that the part can detach from the mold easily (the term of art for that is "drafting"[1]). Once you know that, you see it everywhere.
Back to the topic at hand: owning an embroidery machine and learning how to digitize completely opened my mind to all the intricacies of patch design and why all of what the parent comment said is true. Case in point:
> military patches look best when using lines with fixed-width
This is because the thread itself is fixed width, and you can either do a straight stitch for really thin lines (they call that a running stitch[2]) or you can do a sort of zigzag stitch that's so tight that the thread runs horizontally and fills up the line width (they call that a satin stitch[3]). Satin stitches only look good within a certain narrow range of widths; wider and the threads are too loose, narrower and the needle holes are close enough that they impact the structural integrity of the backing the design's being embroidered on to.
Anyway. I could go on for hours, but to wrap up: DFM is a fascinating world to explore.
I'm actually very very interested in this opinionated approach to patch design -- can you tell me more? Or refer me to some useful design guides? I can just google something random too, but it sounds like you might know / have some good resources already
The term you'll want to search for is "digitizing". It's roughly the embroidery equivalent of CAM design in CNC manufacturing.
Depending on how much time you have, this video[0] is a decent in-depth overview[1] of the various ins and outs of embroidery patch digitizing. I'd give it a watch while you're on a walk or something.
There's a lot of in-jokes and humor in the defense contractor community for team morale building and such. Same idea why challenge coins exist within the relationships between big defense contractors and the DoD agencies that buy services and equipment from them.
The "nothing is beyond our reach" and octopus seems like some sinister and scary thing for a military/intelligence agency to be putting out there in public, but it probably has a more specific meaning within the top secret capabilities of that specific program. I have no idea what it is, could be something like listening to all mobile phone traffic in Waziristan, whatever.
Is it just me, but I feel like this being an NRO patch that the placement of the stars isn't just a designer's choice but potentially some cryptic meaning. If not, how boring!
Look up Trevor Paglen's book "I could tell you but then you would have to be destroyed by me". It's a collection of mission patches along with some interpretation as to the meaning and placement of symbols. Fascinating stuff.
My guess: there’s 3 stars that are brighter, and the cat is shown with 3 legs, so it could be part of a constellation of 3 satellites. The swoop of the tail could indicate a molyina orbit. Generally the orbit and where these things are in the sky can, and are, tracked even by hobbyists so that’s not particularly juicy, imo
>Is there a better article available? If so, we can change it again.
Ars has pretty solid space coverage and I think their article [0] is fairly extensive with a few more technical details on aspects specific to DIVH. Also not related to changing the article, but first comment there links a pretty cool little movie [1] (yes absolutely PR completely with dramatic music but still real footage and DIVH is a damn cool, however expensive, rocket) ULA did on the NROL-91 launch which really was dramatic.
I don't think you'll get a whole lot more info other than "this is the mission patch, it's named NROL-70, and it was obviously big and heavy enough to launch on a Delta IV heavy". What the payload is will be totally unknown to people who don't have clearance so there isn't anything for tech journalists/websites/bloggers to write about, other than their own speculation.
This article sounds like it was written by ChatGPT. That said, it's wild we were still using expendable rockets like Delta IV Heavy when SpaceX offerings are objectively better & cheaper. What SpaceX has done for the industry is nothing short of incredible.
I think that's a bit overly reductionist. This launch cost about $150m (granted, without competition from SpaceX it probably would've been much pricier). I think the going rate for a Falcon Heavy is around $120m. Not a huge difference, and it's very possible that changing the mission requirements to work with Falcon Heavy would cost more than $30m. In the past SpaceX had limitations like no vertical integration, narrower fairing, limitations with higher orbits, shorter time limits between engine burns, less accuracy in some orbits, etc. I haven't followed the launch industry as much lately so maybe thats not true anymore, but I think those things were still true when this launch was purchased ~5 years ago
Wikipedia says NRO launches are $440m, so the price difference is really really big, which is the reason why this is the last launch - not even the US Government has that kinda cash for launches.
The other reason is there's a lag of several years between when a capability is established (Falcon Heavy) and when large customers can take advantage of it. For example, we really shouldn't expect Starship to make a dent in way satellites and telescopes are designed and built until the 2030s.
Delta IV is notoriously expensive, but USG has plenty of DoD cash for expendable launches in general. The next block (phase 2) NSSL launches are 60% ULA Vulcan. We'll see what phase 3 looks like. I suspect it'll be far more weighted towards SpaceX to try to give ULA a kick in the pants.
DoD and USG learned through the 90s-now how screwy things get when you don't have enough competition or you can't spread your money evenly amongst vendors. They will spend the money now and indefinitely to assure they can get to space when they want to, how they want to.
That doesn't mean they're happy about it though. I'm sure they'd love if everyone was as affordable as SpaceX.
the reference says $1.18 billion just for "launch operation costs" that doesn't include the hardware. Farther down the source cites the hardware + operations as $2.2B/5 launches
The figure would be for just the launch itself (however accurate it may be). Satellite costs for these big missions would be in the "multi-hundreds of millions of dollars" range.
The problem is satellites take a long time to manufacture, upwards of 10 years, and everything is very mass optimized. The industry is too slowly adapting to cheaper more frequent launches.
They have their own launch market keeping them busy. Also, even without Starlink, there has been growth in the launch market, it just happens that with modern electronics, most satellites don't need to be very large, and there are a few sets of orbits most of them want to go to. So you can just have a regularly scheduled trip to an orbit and absorb a lot of the demand in one launch.
The point of overpaying on the 2nd-best choice is that it maintains an independent backup if the 1st-best disappears suddenly. The client (DoD) is willing to pay for that insurance: they do not want a multi-year downtime interval they're unable to launch military hardware.
(This isn't an anti-SpaceX thing, really: the dual-provider system (Atlas/Delta) long predates them).
(And besides, these satellites are orders of magnitude more expensive than their launch vehicle! The NRO's budget alone is around $10 billion per year).
If you stop building anything for long enough you lose the capability to do it. There's reasons why the DoD wants to maintain at least two contractors, so I agree with your point here.
As an example when the UK built the first Astute class submarine about ten years ago they ran into a huge number of delays and technical issues because everyone who had been involved in their previous nuclear submarine construction program in the early to mid 1980s had retired or moved on to new things.
Missing the most important piece of info about any NRO launch, the mission patch! Meow! https://www.nro.gov/portals/135/assets/img/L-70_Snow-Leopard...
That isn't a real patch, more of a mission logo. The details are too small. The pink nose, if actually in patch form, would stand out as a pink dot in the middle of a blurry cat.
Fyi, military patches look best when using lines with fixed-width. Anything pointy or jagged doesn't translate well into stitched thread. Avoid shadows too. Yes, there are some all-plastic patches that are carved into 3d shapes but those are evil. Real patches are thread over velcro.
There's a general term for this, designing for manufacturability[0].
I've made something of a hobby of learning new ways to manufacture things. Every time I learn a new manufacturing technique I start to notice things that were made that way in the real world, and I especially start to notice aspects of design that would have been influenced by how the thing in question was manufactured.
Case in point: injection molding. When you injection mold parts, the sides have to be tapered so that the part can detach from the mold easily (the term of art for that is "drafting"[1]). Once you know that, you see it everywhere.
Back to the topic at hand: owning an embroidery machine and learning how to digitize completely opened my mind to all the intricacies of patch design and why all of what the parent comment said is true. Case in point:
> military patches look best when using lines with fixed-width
This is because the thread itself is fixed width, and you can either do a straight stitch for really thin lines (they call that a running stitch[2]) or you can do a sort of zigzag stitch that's so tight that the thread runs horizontally and fills up the line width (they call that a satin stitch[3]). Satin stitches only look good within a certain narrow range of widths; wider and the threads are too loose, narrower and the needle holes are close enough that they impact the structural integrity of the backing the design's being embroidered on to.
Anyway. I could go on for hours, but to wrap up: DFM is a fascinating world to explore.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_for_manufacturability
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft_(engineering)
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_stitch
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satin_stitch
I'm actually very very interested in this opinionated approach to patch design -- can you tell me more? Or refer me to some useful design guides? I can just google something random too, but it sounds like you might know / have some good resources already
The term you'll want to search for is "digitizing". It's roughly the embroidery equivalent of CAM design in CNC manufacturing.
Depending on how much time you have, this video[0] is a decent in-depth overview[1] of the various ins and outs of embroidery patch digitizing. I'd give it a watch while you're on a walk or something.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/live/jATHlfz8mtM?si=Lvw-ZTq8tmLg9ij-
[1] Heh, "in-depth overview" sounds like a total oxymoron. Hopefully you get what I meant!
Nothing will ever top NROL-39 with the octopus
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&sca_esv=841...
There's a lot of in-jokes and humor in the defense contractor community for team morale building and such. Same idea why challenge coins exist within the relationships between big defense contractors and the DoD agencies that buy services and equipment from them.
The "nothing is beyond our reach" and octopus seems like some sinister and scary thing for a military/intelligence agency to be putting out there in public, but it probably has a more specific meaning within the top secret capabilities of that specific program. I have no idea what it is, could be something like listening to all mobile phone traffic in Waziristan, whatever.
Is it just me, but I feel like this being an NRO patch that the placement of the stars isn't just a designer's choice but potentially some cryptic meaning. If not, how boring!
Look up Trevor Paglen's book "I could tell you but then you would have to be destroyed by me". It's a collection of mission patches along with some interpretation as to the meaning and placement of symbols. Fascinating stuff.
My guess: there’s 3 stars that are brighter, and the cat is shown with 3 legs, so it could be part of a constellation of 3 satellites. The swoop of the tail could indicate a molyina orbit. Generally the orbit and where these things are in the sky can, and are, tracked even by hobbyists so that’s not particularly juicy, imo
These patches are allowed to leak exactly 0 bits of meaningful non-public information about the payload.
We changed the URL from https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/End_of_an_Era_Final_Delta... to an article that seems to have more background information.
Is there a better article available? If so, we can change it again.
>Is there a better article available? If so, we can change it again.
Ars has pretty solid space coverage and I think their article [0] is fairly extensive with a few more technical details on aspects specific to DIVH. Also not related to changing the article, but first comment there links a pretty cool little movie [1] (yes absolutely PR completely with dramatic music but still real footage and DIVH is a damn cool, however expensive, rocket) ULA did on the NROL-91 launch which really was dramatic.
----
0: https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/03/the-delta-iv-heavy-a-r...
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXifOiq56uw
I don't think you'll get a whole lot more info other than "this is the mission patch, it's named NROL-70, and it was obviously big and heavy enough to launch on a Delta IV heavy". What the payload is will be totally unknown to people who don't have clearance so there isn't anything for tech journalists/websites/bloggers to write about, other than their own speculation.
Who can't love the commemorative poster as well!!
https://www.nro.gov/Portals/135/Images/Social%20Media%20grap...
This article sounds like it was written by ChatGPT. That said, it's wild we were still using expendable rockets like Delta IV Heavy when SpaceX offerings are objectively better & cheaper. What SpaceX has done for the industry is nothing short of incredible.
I think that's a bit overly reductionist. This launch cost about $150m (granted, without competition from SpaceX it probably would've been much pricier). I think the going rate for a Falcon Heavy is around $120m. Not a huge difference, and it's very possible that changing the mission requirements to work with Falcon Heavy would cost more than $30m. In the past SpaceX had limitations like no vertical integration, narrower fairing, limitations with higher orbits, shorter time limits between engine burns, less accuracy in some orbits, etc. I haven't followed the launch industry as much lately so maybe thats not true anymore, but I think those things were still true when this launch was purchased ~5 years ago
Wikipedia says NRO launches are $440m, so the price difference is really really big, which is the reason why this is the last launch - not even the US Government has that kinda cash for launches.
The other reason is there's a lag of several years between when a capability is established (Falcon Heavy) and when large customers can take advantage of it. For example, we really shouldn't expect Starship to make a dent in way satellites and telescopes are designed and built until the 2030s.
Delta IV is notoriously expensive, but USG has plenty of DoD cash for expendable launches in general. The next block (phase 2) NSSL launches are 60% ULA Vulcan. We'll see what phase 3 looks like. I suspect it'll be far more weighted towards SpaceX to try to give ULA a kick in the pants.
DoD and USG learned through the 90s-now how screwy things get when you don't have enough competition or you can't spread your money evenly amongst vendors. They will spend the money now and indefinitely to assure they can get to space when they want to, how they want to.
That doesn't mean they're happy about it though. I'm sure they'd love if everyone was as affordable as SpaceX.
I think Wiki is wrong, IIRC this was part of a block buy of three launches for $450 million
Yes, Wikipedia says $2.2 billion for 5 launches, but the reference says $1.18 billion for 5 launches, where NROL-70 was part of a three launch buy for $467.5 million. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Delta_IV_Heavy_launc...
the reference says $1.18 billion just for "launch operation costs" that doesn't include the hardware. Farther down the source cites the hardware + operations as $2.2B/5 launches
Does that Wikipedia figure include the satellite?
The figure would be for just the launch itself (however accurate it may be). Satellite costs for these big missions would be in the "multi-hundreds of millions of dollars" range.
Is SpaceX running out of patience with slow, or near nonexistent growth of so-called launch market?
The problem is satellites take a long time to manufacture, upwards of 10 years, and everything is very mass optimized. The industry is too slowly adapting to cheaper more frequent launches.
They have their own launch market keeping them busy. Also, even without Starlink, there has been growth in the launch market, it just happens that with modern electronics, most satellites don't need to be very large, and there are a few sets of orbits most of them want to go to. So you can just have a regularly scheduled trip to an orbit and absorb a lot of the demand in one launch.
The point of overpaying on the 2nd-best choice is that it maintains an independent backup if the 1st-best disappears suddenly. The client (DoD) is willing to pay for that insurance: they do not want a multi-year downtime interval they're unable to launch military hardware.
(This isn't an anti-SpaceX thing, really: the dual-provider system (Atlas/Delta) long predates them).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Space_Launch
(And besides, these satellites are orders of magnitude more expensive than their launch vehicle! The NRO's budget alone is around $10 billion per year).
If you stop building anything for long enough you lose the capability to do it. There's reasons why the DoD wants to maintain at least two contractors, so I agree with your point here.
As an example when the UK built the first Astute class submarine about ten years ago they ran into a huge number of delays and technical issues because everyone who had been involved in their previous nuclear submarine construction program in the early to mid 1980s had retired or moved on to new things.