YEAH, FOR YEARS THE SPY SATELLITE FOLKS SNICKERED AT NASA/JPL’S EFFORTS TO IMPROVE THEIR OPTICS: The spy agency origins of NASA’s next powerful planet-hunting observatory. “To give you a sense of just how surreal this is, imagine all of the time, money, and engineering that went into designing and launching the JWST. Now imagine that a spy agency not only had two more JWST-class instruments, but didn’t even need them anymore.”

A spy satellite is mostly just a space telescope pointed in the opposite direction, and vice versa.