A Collection of Spy Satellite Mission Patches

It's a weird place where top secret spy satellites meet publicly released images.  Living within eyeshot of the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and the Kennedy Space Center, I'm pretty used to the idea of classified launches.  There are many classified launches, but as we say, once they light the engines, the launch isn't secret any more.  They tend to classify the launch time, but publish a launch window.  Everyone knows that, in general, mission planners prefer to launch at the start of the launch window.  If something goes wrong, that gives them the rest of the window to work on fixing the issue.

Still, the people who work on these missions may have extraordinary skills, but they're ordinary people who take pride in their work.  Since virtually all space missions have mission patches, perhaps it's easier to understand that Top Secret satellites might have mission patches, too.  Popular Mechanics does one of their series of image collections on their website, this one, "17 Sinister Spy Satellite Mission Patches". 

It's a fun collection to look at. 

The mission patch from NROL-39.  I always thought this was a little tone deaf because the octopus evokes thoughts of Cthulhu and the launch was close to the peak of the public talk about the NSA monitoring everything (not that the NRO and NSA are technically the same organization). 

New to this? NROL stands for NRO Launch and NRO for the National Reconnaissance Office.  The NRO is an agency that was once so secret, its existence couldn't be talked about.  Among the blackest of the "black agencies" (top secret), NRO is responsible for planning and deploying the nation's spy satellites.  The existence of the NRO was first revealed in a congressional leak in 1973, but they still weren't spoken of until the SALT treaty between the US and USSR, when reconnaissance satellites were referred to as the "National Technical Means".  Today, while the NRO's existence is known, everything else about it is still classified: its missions, its org. chart and even large chunks of its budget.  An excellent overview is contained in a 1986 book called Deep Black (Amazon's link reveals it's out of print, and only available as a used paperback).  The book also discusses the "No Such Agency", CIA and other aspects of the spy satellite programs.