Slashdot Mirror
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!
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
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."
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
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.
That's the difference between the rigidity of their planned economy and slightly-organized chaos that makes up the capitalist system. Had the Kremlin stayed within their budget in Afghanistan it's likely that the Soviet Union would have been around longer. When combined with a couple years of bad harvests that necessitated importing expensive food it killed their currency.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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.
I've recently been reading that, from a systemic standpoint, the Soviet Union wasn't doing much worse in the 80s than it had been in the 60s or 70s. Gorbachev really did seem to want to reform the Soviet Union just because he thought it was the right thing to do. But once there was limited political freedom and limited economic freedom, the system just kind of caved in on itself. Half-totalitarianism doesn't work.
Internal accounts of the Soviet collapse make for interesting reading. Gorbachev and Yeltsin really deserve a lot of credit as humanitarian liberals who took brave stances against domineering military and surveillance powers. America could use a Gorbachev right about now.
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.
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