Because of revelations like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon

Big reason why this is advanced also was no one other than the military ever had a need for this kind of tech. Sometimes private sector is more advanced like when it comes to silicon fabrication, but those advancements will usually get incorporated very quickly if they are applicable.

Granted, it's pretty wild that they fixed some film cameras to a rocket and sent it to space. But neither the delivery vehicle (Titan 3) nor the film cameras attached to parachutes was some super secretive ground-breaking tech.

The entire existence of the NRO was a secret until an unredacted congressional budget report accidentally was entered into the record in ~1990. The NRO donated two unlaunched, out-of-date satellites to NASA in 2011 and the sensors/mirrors were well ahead of anything NASA had, including the Hubble telescope. And these were the satellites that were operational decades previously some estimates saying the model was launched originally in the mid-70s.[1]

Don't underestimate what's up there. It's provably ahead of the civilian world by a long ways.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

How is the existence of the NRO a counter to "Why is this such a persistent meme that governments always have some crazy tech up their sleeves"? Like why would it matter if it was the Air Force buying satellite or some other agency like the navy or NRO?

> the sensors/mirrors were well ahead of anything NASA, including the Hubble telescope.

Hubble was designed in the 70s and launched in the 90s. So what if the NRO can spend more money and get something slightly better, how is that surprising?

> How is the existence of the NRO a counter to "Why is this such a persistent meme that governments always have some crazy tech up their sleeves"?

The NRO had crazy secret tech up its sleeves. It is a part of the U.S. government. It is far from the only such example.

I was looking at KH-11 imagery in Janes and Aviation Week in 1984.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN#/media/File:Janes...

The NRO farms out most of it’s work product now to commercial firms.

Or maybe, just maybe, the whole 'donation' thing was a plant, a mockup using then-current tech, to make people believe exactly that: that the NRO somehow was decades ahead in their sensors/mirrors game.

Probably because we get glimpses into how this is still true every once in a while. The gap might not be as large as it has been, but it's definitely still there in certain fields.

Some examples that immediately come to mind are the stealth Black Hawks used in the Bin Laden raid, Stuxnet, and the NSA's TAO.

F-117 also comes to mind. Amazingly the first prototypes were complete in 1977, There were rumors about it but details about the plane and program were pretty well guarded for another decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Backg...

It’s not a meme, it’s simply following history and reading declassified materials. The US government has a track record of developing advanced aircraft and weaponry in secret.

Lol without outting myself i worked in defense and although it could be mind numbingly slow we deff have tech at least a decade more advance than commercial sector. Mainly for the fact that there isn't a commercial market yet for the advanced stuff yet.

I was going to comment exactly this... There is a reason Google X and Microsoft R&D hire so many former DARPA PM's.

Because they'll invest heavily in technical areas nobody cares about commercially. So their stuff will sometimes be surprisingly advanced.

Very true, the commercial sector has almost no need for things like advanced optics, radiation hard electronics, RF absorbing materials etc.

> Highly advanced military tech is mostly about intimidation so there's little benefit in keeping stuff secret for decades

That's probably true for weapons tech. It's probably very wrong for surveillance tech. I think the Snowden docs make it quite clear that the NSA does not "tend to oversell their capabilities" (at least not externally).