In The '60s, The US Launched Millions Of Needles Into Space & Didn't Expect What Happened Next

Launching over 400 million needles into orbit sounds like a questionable move to say the least, but amidst the Cold War paranoia of the 1960s, no idea felt too outlandish. As tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union mounted, the U.S. Department of Defense developed serious concerns about its telecommunications abilities. At the time, before the bulk of modern satellite infrastructure existed, communications were transmitted via undersea cables or by bouncing radio signals off the ionosphere, the highly energized layer of Earth's atmosphere that can reflect radio waves. Undersea cables can be cut though, and the ionosphere is subject to solar energy's effects on the atmosphere, which can disrupt signals. That simply wouldn't do, so the military decided to add a new reflective layer around Earth.

The initiative, dubbed Project West Ford, was the brainchild of engineer Walter E. Morrow at MIT's Lincoln Labs. He proposed creating a belt of copper needles around the planet, which would spread out like the particles of the rings of Saturn, creating a reflective loop that could reflect radio signals without interruption. Each needle was a mere 1.8 centimeters long, which is half the wavelength of an eight gigahertz radio signal. Thus, each needle served as a dipole antenna. The needles were planned to be launched in bulk, after which they would spread out around the Earth. However, things didn't go as planned, and instead of a groundbreaking new technology, the project just created a big batch of space junk.

Project West Ford was officially launched on October 21, 1961 aboard a launch vehicle called Atlas Agena. When the vehicle reached the intended orbital height, it attempted to release the needles, but it didn't work as planned. The payload failed to deploy, with just a few clumps of the copper falling out, and the Atlas Agena became a hunk of orbiting space junk. The failure was a blessing to the USSR, which mocked the Americans in its state publications. However, Morrow and his colleagues were not to be dissuaded, and they arranged for a second attempt, this time with a modified version of the Atlas Agena. This launch went off on May 9, 1963, and the payload of 480 million needles was successfully released 3,500 kilometers above Earth's surface.

The project seemed like a success at first. Engineers were able to transmit a radio signal from Massachusetts to California by bouncing it off the copper needles shortly after their deployment. The plan was for the needles to gradually spread out evenly in a belt around the planet, but that isn't exactly what happened. Some of the needles dispersed as intended, and eventually fell back to Earth, but a lot of the needles ended up clumping together, creating little chunks of copper that are still orbiting the planet to this day. The West Ford project was a spectacular failure in the end, but it wasn't unforeseen. In fact, most scientists were against it from the outset.

Project West Ford began years before the Apollo programs, when the United States viewed space strictly through the eyes of its Department of Defense. Scientific matters were not of particular concern, but if they had been, the mission would have been hard-pressed to find supporters. Outside of Lincoln Labs, the scientific world viewed Project West Ford with a deeply critical eye. The main point of concern was that the copper needles could interfere with astronomic observation equipment. There was also a new fear afoot: space debris.

The Department of Defense, as well as NASA in its early days, operated on a belief known as the "Big Sky Theory," the basic premise of which was that space is so big, the odds of any two objects colliding with each other is minimal enough to ignore. Many scientists saw a flaw in this reasoning, anticipating an accumulation of space junk in orbit. The incredible amount of space debris that rains upon Earth today shows how right they were.

Despite warnings from the scientific community, the Department of Defense went through with Project West Ford and ultimately failed. This pointed to yet another concern scientists had. The mission was so driven by a military mindset that sound science had been put aside. If officials had not been so fixated on their Cold War fears of sabotaged cables and jammed radio signals, and had really thought things through, there might be a little less junk in space today.