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Cold War Plan Tried To Put a Copper Ring Around the Earth
Wired has the story of a plan enacted in the early 1960s by the U.S. Air Force and the Department of Defense that had the goal of safeguarding the country's long-range communications from Russian interference. The solution they came up with wasn't easy, but it was straightforward: launch hundreds of millions of thin copper wires into orbit in the hopes of forming an artificial ring around the planet. From the article:
"Project Needles, as it was originally known, was Walter E. Morrow’s idea. He suggested that if Earth possessed a permanent radio reflector in the form of an orbiting ring of copper threads, America’s long-range communications would be immune from solar disturbances and out of reach of nefarious Soviet plots. Each copper wire was about 1.8 centimeters in length. This was half the wavelength of the 8 GHz transmission signal beamed from Earth, effectively turning each filament into what is known as a dipole antenna. The antennas would boost long-range radio broadcasts without depending on the fickle ionosphere. ... On May 9, 1963, a second West Ford launch successfully dispersed its spindly cargo approximately 3,500 kilometers above the Earth, along an orbit that crossed the North and South Pole. Voice transmissions were successfully relayed between California and Massachusetts, and the technical aspects of the experiment were declared a success. As the dipole needles continued to disperse, the transmissions fell off considerably, although the experiment proved the strategy could work in principle."
So what you're saying is, we launched a crap-ton of space junk into orbit to test the theory that our leaders will buy anything as long as it's for the war on terr--er, communism. Sorry. Got my time periods mixed up there for a sec.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Imagine looking to the sky and having a copper needle impale your eye.
When America dreamed big, and the impossible fantasies were based on science, not religion!
Government plans tend to make me wonder if they ever just step back and listen to what they just said before they go and do it.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I bet his brother Edward talked him into it.
To rule them all...
This is Cave Johnson stuff. If we want to launch billions of copper needles into space to show those commies who they're up against then we'll do whatever it takes.
There was quite a lot of bizarre technology pursued/developed in the cold war for communications, among other things. A similar system was meteor burst communications. The idea was you'd bounce your radio signal off the ionization trail of a meteor for the brief time it existed then wait for the next and so on. This way you could communicate way beyond the normal horizon without satellites, ground repeaters, etc. Unlike many crazy Cold War ideas, it was successful and is still used for military, civilian and amateur purposes.
I am not a crackpot.
The politicians just love the planet so much they tried to put a ring on it.
Pro: Awesome radio transmissions
Con: Filling Earth's orbitals with junk that will fuck with spacecraft for centuries.
Hm.
What a stupendous waste of other peoples' (our) money.
the Soviet union also could have used this primitive system of global satellite coverage, somehow that fact got lost on our own boneheaded leaders
How about a Ringworld/Dyson Sphere of these?
Could you string copper wire in such a way the rotation and magnetic field of Earth creates power?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Oh those Russians! However, I don't think Russia is the evil side anymore. We should find a way to block the US spying on the entire world.
When I was a kid we heard a story going around about piping Great Lakes water to Arizona, a couple thousand miles of pipe necessary, and laughed it off as garbage. Reading Cadillac Desert I found it wasn't fantasy, but actively being pursued.
Nowadays our goal seems to sling BS around the world at the speed of light.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Instead of a copper ring, they settled on a virtual one, around the Constitution, around our e-mails, around our cell phones, hmmm.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
We forget how big some of the Cold War projects were. Nowadays, we have nuclear subs, international space stations, generations of supersonic aircraft and no-one against to use it. Back then when there was an arms race against an opponent who had some kind of budget, projects could scale up quickly.
Utterly unneeded, of course but wow, they knew how to think big in those days.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Seriously... it might be out there... but I love it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Why didn't they just invent a radio that could communicate via satellite relays?
Where have I heard this before? Oh yeah...
http://www.thecomicstrips.com/store/add_strip.php?iid=83812
The nice thing about the plan is that, unlike active retransmitting satellites, there are no controls on it. A better design is the large mylar balloons also mentioned in TFA. What happened to those? I can think of many amateurs who would love to be able to bounce signals off of something like that for cheap, reliable international communications.
Think of the possibilities... Some have played with receiving TV signals from the other side of the planet via moon-bounce. A signal reflector so much closer would offer many more possibilities. It's an electromagnetic gateway to the other side of the planet. These days, it would probably get adapted to laser communications as well, while no current satellites have that option. Just as a test-bed for experiments like this which can't be performed economically any other way, it sounds like a great project to fund. Why haven't we even attempted any such thing, since active satellites became possible?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
At one time this would have sounded crazy....then came Hyperloop.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Unfortunately the government now funds NASA to find better ways of finding ever smaller pieces of space junk so that important items like the ISS don't get hit by stray debris.
How pissed would you be, to be one of the people at NASA or US Air Force on the project and then reading this story.... or would you be thinking "Hey,.. job security"
But it worked
Just as war on terrorism!
Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? There are none now!
(Well, what do I know, at least there aren't any which isn't property of the U.S. or their allies I suppose.)
Planes ran into WTC? Haven't happened since the previous time.
And there's no Obama bin Ladin or Saddam Hussein!
Success!
This is "Men who stare at goats". In space. With copper.
while (true != false) process_more_stupid_code();
Hello, all you honored copper thieves across the world! I'd like to offer you once in a life time opportunity for rocket assisted travel to a copper laced place of a Cold War proportions. Why destroy historical architecture and cause significant power failures when there is a much better way for fulfilling the thirst for copper? The trip shall be one way only, but the benefits of easily accessible copper overrides any concern for anything. For those who lack the means for this enormous opportunity, we have the classical Persian solution available, which was suitable even for the Roman nobility!
How much damage would one of those 1.8cm bits of copper do when hitting a space station travelling at 17,000mph?
Out of reach of the the Soviet Union? Everything else aside, the fact the Soviet Union could reach it as easily as Americans apparently never crossed their minds.
Project Pluto, a missile that would destroy the territory of the nation launching it.
How would that even conceivably work? How would you change the rotation or movement of the Earth without imparting momentum on something else? Does the Earth's magnetic field change relevant scale, as opposed the fluctuation from the solar magnetic field that would not require the ring to be at any particular location (neither at the equator nor required to encircle the Earth)? Why the equator, since if you wanted to impart a torque say on the magnetic core relative to the surface, a ring perpendicular to the magnetic equator would be more efficient? Likewise, if you wanted to capture variations of the Sun's magnetic field, perpendicular to the rotational equator would give you the most variation in flux.
That is similar to EME - Earth-Moon-Earth communications, where signals are bounced off of the moon. Amateur radio operators still practice this for the exotic / novel QSOs to be had. This is one of the few instances Amateur Radio operators actually need to make use of the maximum allowed 1,500 watts of transmitting power. An interesting side effect is the transmission takes over 5 seconds to reach the moon and return. thus the operator can hear the last 5 seconds of their own transmission.
Better known as 318230.
circumference of the earth: 40,075 Km
diameter of the earth: 12756 Km
orbit distance: 3650 km
New diameter: 20056(157.22% bigger)
New circumference: pi * D = 63007.78(157.22% bigger)
Number of dipoles released in 1963: 480000000
Number of dipoles per Km: 7618
Number of dipoles per meter: 7.618
The experiment worked untill the dipoles started to drift east and west away from the perfect circle. This increased the distance between the dipoles.
Right now!
diameter of dipole: .000178cm .000089cm
radius:
length: 1.78cm
volume of each wire: pi * r^2 * h = 4.42 * 10^-8 cm^3
number of wires: 4.8 * 10^8
volume of all wire: 4.8 * 4.42 = 21.216 cm^3
density of copper: 8.96 gcm^3
mass of all wire used in 1963: 190.095 grams