The political dance around this will be predictable. Now Trump has revealed some of the USA’s cutting-edge spy capabilities, all for the sake of a tweet poking fun at a rival nation. The original can be found here: /shared/media/photodb/photos/110120-F-0000D-001.jpg., Public Domain, Image: By US Air Force/Joe Davila – This is a retouched picture, which means that it has been digitally altered from its original version. USA 224 was launched in 2011 onboard a Delta IV Heavy. Details of USA 224’s capabilities, mission, and orbit are classified. Nations like to keep their capabilities secret, sharing them with allies only when needed, and obfuscating and denying to their adversaries. Normally, there’s a certain sobriety to intelligence gathering and surveillance. Unclassified satellite images showed a plume of smoke rising from the facility, and not much else. At the end of August, a launch attempt failed on the pad. They’ve been testing rockets at their Imam Khomeini Spaceport in norther Iran. Iran has been developing launch capabilities for years now. Since then, things between the USA and Iran have heated up again. Things calmed down when Iran signed a deal under Obama limiting their nuclear technologies in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. Iran accuses the USA of sponsoring terrorism by supplying Israel with billions of dollars worth of high-tech weaponry. The USA accuses Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons and of sponsoring terrorism.
Iran and the USA have a fractious relationship going back decades. Stamos/Helodriver AugSome people were immediately critical of the President’s tweet. Nice job giving away NTM sources and methods.- D. The combination of orientation and time can be used to determine what satellite and details of the imaging system used. That is a photo taken of a screen during an intelligence presentation with the classification tag covered over.