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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
When America dreamed big, and the impossible fantasies were based on science, not religion!
To rule them all...
No they make the determination that they don't have to make a determination.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
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.
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.
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.
It's not the elected leaders who come up with this stuff, it's the promoted leaders in the DoD. Internet was a good thing, but it probably started as some plan to wipe out communism using university research.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
dunno, this sounded like pretty interesting research. had it worked a bit differently, it might have made communication link satellites obsolete for a lot of stuff.
certainly a lot better use of money than paying it off to private contractors to warehouse data that you had no business of getting in the first place.. or better use of money than half the aircraft carriers in US fleet. but you know, there used to be a time when they did actual research and trying out new stuff and this was part of that, like the nuke powered greenland base..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Where have I heard this before? Oh yeah...
http://www.thecomicstrips.com/store/add_strip.php?iid=83812
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.
Given the problem and the technology available at the time, how would you have attempted to solve it? Many at the time thought war with the Soviets inevitable. Satellites were being developed but their feasibility never tested, and the scale we have deployed today was almost unimaginable then. An entire satellite network for people just to watch television? Preposterous! Space-based communication relays were completely and totally non-existent.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
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"
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.
It's not the elected leaders who come up with this stuff, it's the promoted leaders in the DoD. Internet was a good thing
Past tense, well maybe depending on your point of view...
...but it probably started as some plan to wipe out communism using university research.
People are so cynical these days... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them.
Of course the military wasn't to be left out of any hi-tech toys so they later created their own MILNET (in '83) that used the same ARPANET technology, but was totally under their control. In this case (as is often the case) the egg came first, then the chicken was adopted by the military.
This is "Men who stare at goats". In space. With copper.
while (true != false) process_more_stupid_code();
How much damage would one of those 1.8cm bits of copper do when hitting a space station travelling at 17,000mph?
Project Pluto, a missile that would destroy the territory of the nation launching it.
Because they didn't have any satellites?
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.
You are a moron. You are completely glossing over the fact that the experiment worked.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
That would never happen. By the time it got anywhere near deorbiting, it would be hot enough to vaporize. But next time I look up, this is going to be in the back of my mind. Thanks a lot, asshole.
My mother had to have a small strand of copper wire about 1 cm in length (or was it 1.78 cm?) surgically removed from her hand several years ago. Odds are incredibly low that this was the source, but it does make you wonder. I don't know if the strands are guaranteed to burn up upon reentry, as implied by the above poster. Perhaps they are.
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.
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