A week or two ago when HN was discussing the second cable snapping, someone posted this origins history of silicon valley video: https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?t=

A week or two ago when HN was discussing the second cable snapping, someone posted this origins history of silicon valley video: https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?t=2983 https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?t=2983 (the entire thing is about electronics and radar development from the atomic age through the cold war, interesting to watch whole but the timestamp link is the relevant radio telescope part). Short story: before our nuke strategy shifted to basically all ICBM's and submarines, the plan was to nuke the soviets with fleets of long range bombers. To get the bombers in, though, you needed to know where the air defense radars were. The U2's were good at flying too stealthily and too high for missiles, but not great... one or two did go down creating some, er, light international incidents. So eventually someone figured out big air defense radars bounce off the moon when the moon is overhead, and suddenly there was a lot of CIA money funding radio telescopes like Arecibo and the Stanford dish.