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."

Comments

Re:Sooo....

[girlintraining]

hat you didn't personally find it valuable doesn't make it so.

Dude, Maxwell's equations predicted this some hundred years before this experiment was done. By the time it was launched, the equations had been thoroughly and rigorously confirmed. By the time they launched, this was on the scale of commissioning a study to test the theory that apples dropped in Texas fall at almost the exact same rate as apples dropped in the middle of the Sahara desert in a vaccum. It's a well duh sort of "success" story. And as far as orbital mechanics... dude... we put men on the moon that year. I think we had the "orbital mechanics" problem sorted by then!

No. I stand by what I said: It was a waste of money. This was a project funded solely and only because we were scared of the Russians having superiority in space, so we were throwing money at anything that could even be remotely construed as giving us the edge over them... and all of that because they launched a baseball into orbit called Sputnick and America collectively shit its pants. Let me reiterate: Paranoia and fear were the only reason this experiment happened. It had exceptionally limited scientific value. It did not, in any appreciable way, contribute either in raw data or in theory, to our body of knowledge regarding electromagnetic effect, orbital mechanics, or any other area of science.