That Time the US Military Launched a Half a Billion Needles Into Space

owl brings us an interesting bit of space history for your weekend enjoyment:

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.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.