Cold War Plan Tried To Put a Copper Ring Around the Earth 184
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."
Re:Aperture Science Was Real (Score:4, Informative)
Cave Johnson was a parody, and any parody has to have a basis in the thing it's making fun of. The Cold War was filled with junk science and grandiose, delusional "engineering" projects to try to one up stuff that we imagined the commies were up to (and vice versa). Cold War threat assessment by both sides essentially ran on games of telephone and urban legends, and by god we would not have a mine shaft gap!
Try these links on for size, this article surprised you:
Nuke the Moon: 5 Certifiably Insane Cold War Projects [cracked.com]
10 Ridiculous Cold War Government Projects [listverse.com]
10 Creative Military Plans to Use Animals as Weapons [listverse.com] (half of which are Cold War era).
Me? There's almost nothing you could say that the US or the Soviets experimented with during the Cold War or thought about doing that I would immediately disbelieve.
Re:Sooo.... (Score:4, Informative)
Close. If we were to launch ALL of the copper found on the earth, every last scrap of it, we could do what they wanted, problem is there would be no copper left to make radios to transmit or receive with. This was the problem, Yes it "worked" but the scale needed would have required global strip mining and launching every ounce of copper that this planet has in it's crust.
Citation needed. From what I read it seams they did a succussfull test that formed a belt. I think your thinking of an actual unbroken wire going around the earth. Instead they launched short segments of wire. There was some distance between each bit.
Early in May, 1963 a package containing 4.8×108copper dipoles, each 0.00178 cm in diameter and 1.78 cm in length, was placed into a nearly circular, nearly polar orbit at a mean altitude of 3650 km
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&tp=&arnumber=1444922&isnumber=31060 [ieee.org]
Re:Your tax dollars at work (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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.
Re:Sooo.... (Score:4, Informative)
The practical realities of the time are they needed to test rockets. They were going to launch a dummy load of some kind for tests. So why not launch something that also tested another cold-war defense theory? It added little to the cost of the launch, other than some small bits of copper. So why the vitriol?
They wasted $10 on copper in a larger moon landing project. The only rational reading of your post is that you think all governmental space launches are a waste of money, and we should never have gone to the moon or built a shuttle.