Posts: 4437 From: Sierra Vista, Arizona Registered: Nov 1999
posted 08-14-2013 10:40 PM
Wired Magazine reminds us of Project West Ford, a forgotten successful U.S. Military cold war initiative to disperse copper wire needles in a ring around the earth to support long range communications:
The same year that Martin Luther King, Jr. marched on Washington and Beatlemania was born, the United States launched half a billion whisker-thin copper wires into orbit in an attempt to install a ring around the Earth. It was called Project West Ford, and it’s a perfect, if odd, example of the Cold War paranoia and military mentality at work in America’s early space program.
The Air Force and Department of Defense envisioned the West Ford ring as the largest radio antenna in human history. Its goal was to protect the nation’s long-range communications in the event of an attack from the increasingly belligerent Soviet Union.