Why Earth Once Had An Artificial Ring Made From 500 Million Needles Project West Ford

The United States completed any number of odd Cold War military experiments. I already talked about one of these odd experiments in which the United States Air Force wanted to drop a nuclear bomb on the moon in a previous video. But did you also know that they launched almost 500 million needles into space during the summer of 1963? Project Westford, as it was known, was a United States Cold War project to create an artificial ring around the world composed of needles. The project was being run out of MIT's famed Lincoln Labs and the project got its name from the neighboring town of Westford, Massachusetts. It is a perfect example of the Cold War paranoia that infiltrated high levels of the Department of Defense and resulted in many crazy proposals like this one. The idea was to use a large amount of needles to create an artificial ring around the earth and essentially create the world's largest radio antenna. This would allow for long-range communication to still be possible in the event of an attack from the Soviet Union. It is important to remember that shortly before this experiment took place, there was no such thing as communication satellites. And as a result, long-range communication relied heavily on just two methods. One being a network of undersea cables, which is pretty self-explanatory, and the other being over-the-horizon radio. This works simply by directing radio waves at an angle into the sky so that they reflect back to the earth from layers of ionized atoms within the ionosphere. By using this method, radio waves can travel beyond the horizon and around the curvature of the earth. However, this can be unreliable as the amount of ionized atoms is highly affected by the time of year, whether it is day or night, and also the sunspot activity. At the time, if both of these methods were somehow disrupted, either by nefarious or other means, the U.S. military would have a major problem as it could no longer communicate over long distances. One potential solution was brought forth by Walter E. Morrow of MIT's Lincoln Labs in 1958. He suggested that if Earth had a permanent radio reflector in the form of an orbiting ring, long-range communications would be immune from any type of solar disturbance or any activity from the Soviet Union. The proposed orbiting ring would be made up of small copper pieces of wire, essentially small needles, that would be 1.8 centimeters in length. This would equate to roughly half the wavelength of the 8.3 gigahertz transmission signal that was to be used on Earth. Essentially, each of the small needles would act as a dipole antenna allowing radio signals to bounce off of them without having to depend on the ionosphere at all. Looking back, it is sure hard to imagine why something like this would have been thought to be a good idea. But at the time, you have to remember that the military generals were generally in charge of most of NASA's rocket launches, and adventures into space were something completely new. This resulted in all sorts of odd experiments, both good and bad. Good ideas, such as Project Diana, which successfully used our own moon as a communications relay, were both ingenious and provided some practical benefits. Other, more notorious projects, such as Starfish Prime, in which the United States decided to detonate a nuclear device 400 kilometers above Earth, were never good ideas. This notoriously bad idea, which was launched from the Johnston Atoll in 1962, delivered a debilitating electromagnetic pulse to the Hawaiian Islands and even destroyed six satellites. As Project Westford continued to forward, several astronomers began to worry about what ill effects a large cloud of metal rotating around the Earth might have. While most still believed that space was so vast that a little debris would not be a problem, the issue of space junk was beginning to be a concern at the time. Astronomers also worried about being able to see the stars and what ill effects this program might have on stargazing. This is in much the same way that some have concerns about the SpaceX Starlink program today. It wasn't until President Kennedy made a compromise in 1961 that the project moved forward when the White House ensured that the needles would be placed in a low enough orbit where they would likely re-enter the Earth's atmosphere within two years. This appeased the astronomy community to some degree, however no one could be sure as to what would happen when 20 kilograms of copper wire were to be launched above the Earth. On October 21st of 1961, NASA launched the first batch of needles into space. However, this launch failed as the needles never did deploy correctly. It did create outrage around the world as Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, claimed that the United States was dirtying space. The next launch came on May 9th of 1963. This time the needles were successfully released roughly 3,500 kilometers above the Earth along an orbit that crossed the North and South Poles. This polar orbit allowed voice transmissions to be successfully relayed between California and Massachusetts. Ultimately, Project Westford was somewhat of a failed experiment. Although transmissions initially worked, as the needles dispersed further and further apart, transmission reliability dropped considerably. A large portion of these needles eventually fell to Earth by entering the Earth's atmosphere and it is likely that today most of these needles lie beneath the snow at the North and South Poles. Not all needles return to Earth, however. It is possible that several hundred or even thousands of clusters of needles still reside in orbit around the Earth. This is because the needles were lumped together in a gel-like substance designed to quickly evaporate once it reached space. But in many cases, it had been found that the substance did not evaporate, creating large clumps of needles hurtling around the Earth. In 2001, the European Space Agency even published a report that analyzed the fate of the needle clusters from the Project Westford payloads and found that these clumps have the potential to remain in orbit for several more decades. There's even a really cool website, stuffin.space, where you can search for the Westford needles to see some of the larger chunks in their current place in orbit. Thankfully, more modern and active communication satellites made projects like Westford obsolete and no more needles were ever launched into space. Communication satellites like Telstar 1, which was launched in 1962, were able to beam television signals back to Earth for the first time, greatly proving their capabilities. Regardless of the This event serves as a reminder of the crazy schemes dreamt up by those in the United States military and NASA during the height of the Cold War. Let me know in the comments below about what your thoughts are on Project Westford and what other crazy engineering ideas you have heard about before. Perhaps I can profile another one of these ideas in a future episode. And as always, thank you so much for watching this video.