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The mission logo, or patch, from the launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California is of a giant, orange-ish-colored octopus sitting atop Earth. "Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach," read the logo for the NROL-39 mission. The office of the Director of National Intelligence published a picture of the logo-patch on Twitter hours before launch, tweeting that the "Atlas 5 will blast off just past 11PM, PST carrying an classified NRO payload (also cubesats)."

The launch came as the Guardian was publishing one leak after the other from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The leaks detailed that the US National Security Agency was, among other things, exercising digital domination across the world's fiber optic lines. So a spy agency's cartoon depicting total world domination was an untimely public relations failure given the focus Snowden was bringing to the US surveillance state.

As it turns out, other NRO launch logos (often painted directly on the space craft) typically depict a scene of scary world domination too. But that's not to say all of the patches present the US as the Evil Empire. There's the "Great Bear" patch of the NROL-10 launch in 2000—essentially a cute, cuddly teddy bear that an elementary school student came up with. And let's not forget the NROL-33 patch from 2004, which depicts a big-breasted redhead with giant wings and sword.

These mission patches have been around for decades, long a military tradition. NASA has them for its space missions, but those are more of the vanilla type. The mission logos of the NRO—established (PDF) in 1960 to oversee US reconnaissance efforts—depict devils, fire, dragons, raging bulls and, among other things, strange animals like an eagle on a lion's body with wings.

Not too much is publicly known about the internal machinations on how each NRO patch comes to life, but many space nerds out there attempt to decode their meaning. So it was a pleasant and welcomed surprise the other day when Muckrock published the results of a Freedom of Information Act request to the agency from security researcher Runa Sandvik. Sandvik asked the agency for documents about how the controversial NROL-39 octopus patch came to fruition.

The "Logo Description" in the documents describes the patch as follows:

The NROL-39 mission is represented by the Octopus. Throughout the animal kingdom, few animals are as versatile and adaptable as the Octopus. Highly intelligent, the octopus uses its tentacles to reach prey in even the most intricate spaces. Emblematically, our enemies can be reached no matter where they choose to hide. "Nothing is Beyond Our Reach" best defines this mission and the value it brings to our nation.

The mission manager, whose name was blacked out as were several words and passages in the documents, said "It's really neat to me. It's kind of saying the enemy has no where to run."

"We're putting capabilities up in the sky that can (blacked out)," the manager continued in one document. "And the octopus kind of to me represents the idea that we are (blacked out.) We got our fingers everywhere at any given time."

On the approval document for the patch, written in blue pen, is the phrase: "A little sinister."

Listing image by National Reconnaissance Office