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."
Lot's of bizarre Cold War comm tech (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]. 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.
On a related note (Score:4, Interesting)
Could you string copper wire in such a way the rotation and magnetic field of Earth creates power?
Re:Sooo.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sooo.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:On a related note (Score:5, Interesting)
I have been told that wrapping the planet in a loop around the equator will do this. Draw power, slow the planet. Add power, speed the planet. But you could add power anywhere, or draw it anywhere. Problem is, you need room temperature superconductors in order to even think about doing it, let alone to make it practical.
The person who proposed this idea to me sold it as Freeman Dyson's idea, and called it a Dyson Motor, but I haven't been to find a reference that puts that name together with this idea yet.
Millions of little copper bullets (Score:2, Interesting)
How much damage would one of those 1.8cm bits of copper do when hitting a space station travelling at 17,000mph?
EME (Score:5, Interesting)
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.