https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-history/us-military-launched-needles-space/
In the early 1960s, international communications were limited to transmissions through undersea cables or occasionally unreliable radio signals bounced off of the ionosphere. As you might imagine from this, many in the Western world weren't too keen on the state of the situation given that were to someone, say, the Soviet Union, cut those cables before launching an attack, international communications with overseas forces and foreign allies would have to rely on the mood of said ionosphere.
[...] Developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Labs, the project was initially called "Project Needles" by Professor Walter E. Morrow in 1958 when he first dreamed up the idea. It was later re-named "West Ford", presumably after Westford, Massachusetts, a nearby town. The idea was to place potentially even billions of tiny (1.78 centimeters 0.7 inches long and microscopically thin) copper antennae or dipoles in a medium Earth orbit to be used for communication signals at 8 Ghz.
The first set of well over a hundred million needles was launched on Oct. 21, 1961, but unfortunately this test failed when the needles didn't disperse as planned.
On a second attempt in May 9, 1963, a batch of 350 million needles was placed on the back of an Air Force satellite and sent into orbit. Once dispersed, properly this time, the needles spread to form a sparsely concentrated belt with approximately 50 dipoles per cubic mile.
[...] early results of the experiment were extremely promising, with communication established using the needle array from California to Massachusetts [...]
An interesting and entertaining read about that Wild West era of the Space Age and how events like this eventually brought us the first Outer Space Treaty.
Going back to the needles, in case you're wondering, despite the planned obsolescence, as of 2019, a few dozen clumps of them remain in orbit and are closely tracked to make sure they don't cause any problems with all the other stuff floating around our little beautiful home space craft known as Earth.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MIRV888 on Saturday June 04 2022, @08:06AM (1 child)
I know it was the early days of reaching orbit, but it seems like someone would have voiced concern about needles hitting other man made objects.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 04 2022, @05:49PM
There were concerns at the time which were downplayed and ignored. There are currently 36 known clumps of needles being tracked, but there may still be hundreds or even thousands of clumps too small to detect but still large enough to be dangerous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Saturday June 04 2022, @09:56AM (2 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure) [wikipedia.org]
The fact that a dipole would resonate at a specific frequency and if illuminated by the appropriate radio frequency would retransmit the signal was realised during the 2nd World War. As radar become a practical proposition it became necessary to have a countermeasure. Thus chaff was developed to obscure radar screens or at least make target identification difficult. Although modern signal processing can limit the effectiveness of chaff against some radars nowadays it still has its uses.
For example an air defence radar may be able to defeat the effects of chaff and thus direct a missile at a target. But if the missile warhead radar is not capable of defeating chaff then it can be made to detonate sufficiently distant from the target thus negating some if not all of the threat it poses. There are many older air defence systems in use today that are still vulnerable to relatively simple counter measures.
Tiny as each individual dipole might be, in space they pose a serious threat and the attempt to use them to bounce communications around the world was very short sighted, even for that time. That they are still there remains a problem even today. The worst thing that could happen is that the remaining clumps are disturbed so that they do disperse, and then each dipole will post a threat to anything it may hit.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/William-Cooke-10/publication/24334849/figure/fig5/AS:668757299052547@1536455573582/Shuttle-window-pit-caused-by-impact-with-a-paint-chip.ppm [researchgate.net] The image shows the damage to a shuttle window caused by a fleck of paint believed to be travelling at 22,000 mph (34,500 km/h).
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 05 2022, @03:59AM (1 child)
Breaking them up would be a short term problem. Collision risk is as much a function of time as numbers, and the smaller the pieces the faster they de-orbit. The clumps as they are could well last another century, and as the number of objects in orbit increases those clumps become more dangerous, especially the ones we can't see.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday June 05 2022, @06:22AM
I don't think that applies here. Those clumps are not massive objects, and if they were, they would be objects with extreme low density, which should make them de-orbit faster than the very dense individual needles.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 04 2022, @12:17PM (8 children)
was involved in war crimes, not even including the environmental issues like space debris or the bombing of paradise to guinea pig inhabitants at the Bikini atoll.
https://www.toptenz.net/top-10-american-war-crimes.php [toptenz.net]
Man, don't get us started on what the US military has done, continues to do and will do in the future.
Makes Russia look like a saint!
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 04 2022, @12:47PM
I pity your kids, putintard. It must be devastating to know that your dad is a whore sucking the dick of one of the most evil genocidal mass murderer of the century.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 04 2022, @01:47PM (6 children)
"Makes Russia look like a saint."
No. The US didn't create mass famines or have gulags. For that scale of damage, you need a govt with greater control. That would be the communist countries like the USSR and China. Make no mistake though, any govt is capable of crimes against the people, and it is limited only by how much power the govt has. The American govt right now has way too much power.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 04 2022, @01:49PM (5 children)
I will add that a govt's power grows whenever it is engaged in war (cold war, hot war, whatever), and that is one reason the govt (American anyway) seems to always be at war.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 04 2022, @05:57PM (4 children)
That should be voted OffMainTopic cause it sure was OnOffTopicMainTopicTopic, that is to say, OnTopic of the comment to OffTopic Main story part.
Is that what you mean?
Can we have some other topics of moderation to help understand what part is offtopic? Or should we assume it is just ALL OFF Topic?
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 04 2022, @06:24PM (3 children)
The "Offtopic" mod is basically BS. Who's to decide how far the discussion can range? "Offtopic" and "Troll" are the two most inconsistently applied mod types. If it were up to me, "Offtopic" would not even exist. Hell, the majority of SN posts are technically "Offtopic."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 04 2022, @11:14PM
This thread is OnTopic again because it discusses the mod words. Offtopic is relevant whenever the comment does not discuss the MainTopic(the Story), where the word is just the reason it got modded down, so not BS at least in quantum terms at this point.
Now whether Disagree should be 0mod score, is probably another thread entirely.
Would be best dscussed in a Journal, where can link to more than one example, it collates mod discussions nicely for editorial team, and most important, shuffles those undesirable journal titles down the list.
Given the mods never remove comments outright, why get so butthurt now, they are just words (and a few more clicks for us AC to view).
Finally, the entire thread is not OffTopic IMHO, as it addresses the poor choice of ClickBaitTitle, given the summary was not along those lines.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 05 2022, @02:41AM (1 child)
I think what is missing is a way to keep the points and not make them negative,
IF the thread has generated a lot of interest, why penalize the first post.
Are we not here for dialogue?
Anyway, I AGREE with you, the Offtopic, Flamebait, Child and Troll mods are subjective and should not be allowed based on someones bias.
And on this site there IS CLEARLY A BIAS!
For proof, just look how many of us are hiding behing AC now.
We should be able to say something positive about Putin for example, to balance the debate...but oooohhhh noossss...not here.
Anti-Vax....ohhhhnnooooo...not here.
There is no balance and thus this site will slowly degrade into a toilet for American propaganda trash.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday June 05 2022, @02:57PM
> Anti-Vax
The problem with Anti-Vax is many of the points made are poorly thought through. The well-constructed points tend to get lumped in with them.