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The US military launched 500M needles into space (2019)
- cleerline 4y agohalf a billion needles put in orbit without consultation? pricks.
- mandmandam 4y agoAll those needles, and not a single moral compass.
- AaronFriel 4y agoI'm surprised the article doesn't mention the potential fast track to Kessler syndrome, the name for a phenomenon in which it becomes impossible to safely put things in orbit because every object placed in orbit is rapidly impacted and disintegrated into more debris in orbit. Purposely injecting debris into orbit, even if it's at a low orbit, seems not good!
- H8crilA 4y agoThis will really go out of hand when WW3 starts and all the intelligence gathering satellites will become targets. Not that it's the most important thing in a global war, but we might also successfully block all exit paths from this planet with large amounts of very fast and deadly debris.
- yodon 4y agoWW3 almost certainly also means no more communications satellites and no more weather satellites, in addition to no more humans in space. It would likely also mean nuclear winter and many other bad things, but permanently denying use of satellites is likely the first global cost of WW3.
- robonerd 4y agoNuclear Winter has been generally discredited by modern modelling. The whole premise was likely politically motivated by scientists who wanted to make nuclear war less likely to occur, by dissuading politicians with this yarn. (A true noble lie.) Criticism of the hypothesis was muted by few scientists wanting to risk the perception of supporting nuclear war. As for "permanently denying use of satellites", this is only partially true. High orbits would be fucked for millennia, but LEO would mostly clear up before the century is out. I know that seems 'forever', but it isn't. Also, depending on the severity of the debris, interplanetary exploration would not necessarily be out of the picture; if the debris is severe enough that a GSO satellite has a 99% chance of being destroyed within a year, then that orbit is as good as ruined. But if you only plan to pass through that region for a few hours, not spend a whole year there, you might be able to do that if you can tolerate some risk. It'd be like running across a highway, except the cars move faster than bullets and won't brake for you. If you hang out in the middle of the road you are certain to get hit. If you time it right and run across, you have a chance of getting through.
- yodon 4y agoIf you go back a bit farther, I think you'll find the work on nuclear winter actually came out of work done at Cornell to try to model the result of a large object impacting the earth 65 million years ago to kill off the dinosaurs. Amazingly enough, one of the hardest parts of the dinosaur extinction work was figuring out how a localized impact like that could kill enough things to cause an extinction, and that part came from the atmospheric modelers. After doing that modeling work, they realized the parallels with a nuclear conflict and produced the nuclear winter projections.
- ncmncm 4y agoThen it turned out everything was cooked, not frozen.
- robonerd 4y agoI think there's little doubt that tons of soot and ash in the upper atmosphere can cause periods of global cooling. The problem with the nuclear winter hypothesis is in the link between nuclear war and tons of soot in the stratosphere. These nuclear winter models make a lot of assumptions about the likelihood of a modern cities turning into firestorms and the amount of soot they would generate, the amount of soot lifted into the stratosphere by the fireball, and the amount of soot that stays there instead of precipitating out.
- phendrenad2 4y agoDoes anyone actually believe in that? Surely most space debris doesn't form a stable orbit, but falls back to earth after a few collisions.
- bagels 4y agoHow often do you think an individual piece of debris is impacting other objects? Most space debris starts as something in orbit, and if it's at a high enough altitude, most pieces do indeed stay in orbit. There is clear precedence for this. https://swfound.org/media/6575/swf_iridium_cosmos_collision_fact_sheet_updated_2012.pdf https://swfound.org/media/6575/swf_iridium_cosmos_collision_... "Analysis by both NASA and outside experts indicates that more than half of the Iridium debris will remain in orbit for at least 100 years, and much of the Cosmos debris will remain in orbit at least 20 to thirty years."
- mcguire 4y agoObjects in orbit are primarily cleared by atmospheric drag, with two major variables: height of perigee (lower causes more drag) and object mass (lighter objects are slowed more). Following an impact, some of the debris will be cleared quickly, but some will not. "On 11 January 2007, China conducted an anti-satellite missile test in which one of their FY-1C weather satellites was chosen as the target. The collision occurred at an altitude of 865 kilometres, when the satellite with a mass of 750 kilograms was struck in a head-on-collision by a kinetic payload traveling with a speed of 8 km/s (18,000 mph) in the opposite direction. The resulting debris orbits the Earth with a mean altitude above 850 kilometres, and will likely remain in orbit for decades or centuries.[18]" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome#Anti-satellite_missile_tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome#Anti-satellit...) Kessler syndrome requires the rate of debris creation be greater than the rate of clearing and the rate of clearing in higher orbits is very slow. https://amostech.com/TechnicalPapers/2012/Orbital_Debris/NIKOLAEV.pdf https://amostech.com/TechnicalPapers/2012/Orbital_Debris/NIK...
- phendrenad2 4y ago> will likely remain in orbit for decades or centuries How much debris though? If I put orange juice in my coffee mug, after a few runs through the dishwasher there may technically be a few particles of orange juice left, but my taste buds probably won't collide with it.
- photochemsyn 4y agoThe article briefly mentions it... not sure how many per 'clump' though: > "Going back to the needles, in case you’re wondering, despite the planned obsolescence, as of 2019, a few dozen clumps of them remain in orbit and are closely tracked..."
- JKCalhoun 4y agoI assume static charge is what clumped them. I assume too that is why the initial launch "failed to disperse".
- robonerd 4y agoWW3 will likely make a mess of orbit, particularly LEO. However most of the debris that intersects LEO will decay in the order of years to tens of years. After the war (assuming anybody is in any shape to be sending stuff to space in the first place) I think communication satellites in LEO will become the norm (moreso than it already is becoming.) This would be the obvious response to higher orbits being ruined by debris. But such a war would be very bad in many ways, and if this happens I don't think worrying about space will be high on your list of personal priorities.
- idealmedtech 4y agoLEO is too susceptible to interference (of the physical, not radio, kind) for any serious digital communications infrastructure to be placed there. I could see laser-based swarms of comms satellites being used (cubesat size, not starlink size), but I don't think the economics are there quite yet.
- robonerd 4y agoIt's not clear what exactly you mean by physical interference, but either way I think you're mistaken. Starlink is already proving the viability of launching huge constellations of fairly large (a ton or so) LEO satellites. If you're talking about debris grounding these constellations, that's a problem that resolves itself given enough time, as that debris deorbits naturally. If you're talking about intentional physical interference, aka anti-satellite weapons, the solution to that is having the ability to rapidly replenish the constellation (SpaceX is good at this, and with Starship they'll be even better at it; hundreds of replacement satellites with a single launch.) In the event of a war, a constellation could be kept operational through the brute force of launching more satellites faster than they're destroyed. Of course this will make a huge mess, but that's what wars do. Anyway, they're going forward with this already. The National Defense Space Architecture calls for a very large constellation of LEO communication satellites forming a mesh network using inter-satellite laser links. Starlink is likely dual-use technology and has been intended as such from the start.
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- anonymousiam 4y agoGreat article! The needles formed a passive repeater, which would be a cheap alternative to a comsat. To me, the more interesting part of the article was the history of exo-atomospheric nuclear testing and the consequences to the satellites that were operating in that era. It's also interesting that the scientific community's objections to further launches actually had an effect. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore -- at least not with Starlink.
- dylan604 4y agoStarlink is a private company that doesn't concern itself with the concerns of others. I don't think comparing a private corp to a gov't body should have expectations of similar results. Private corp doesn't
- bozhark 4y agoIt should, when it comes to space. There is nothing private about space
- dylan604 4y agoMostly, but we have no idea (confirmed) what the Air Force's space plane does. We know it exists, we can track it while in orbit, but what it does do while there is not public. Also, the software and other capabilities of a lot of satellites are inferred but not 100% known. So these birds are privately doing things in a public, ahem, space.
- robonerd 4y agoIt's nothing new. There were numerous classifieds Shuttle missions 30+ years ago that are still classified. People have more or less figured out what these missions were, but they're still classified and and a lot of the details still aren't known. Interesting anecdote from one of them (STS-27): > The day after Atlantis landed, the 1988 Armenian earthquake killed tens of thousands in the Soviet Union. At an astronaut meeting Gibson said, "I know many of you may have been very curious about our classified payload. While I can't go into its design features, I can say Armenia was its first target!" As military astronauts laughed and civilians cringed, Gibson continued, "And we only had the weapon set on stun!" (Turns out it was actually a synthetic aperture radar recon satellite, not an earthquake machine.)
- spicy_tendies 4y ago>Today in our digital world, of course, a similar electromagnetic pulse would have much more catastrophic effects, especially if near more populated centers, potentially even revealing the Lizard people’s Matrix, which would be catastrophic to our Draconian overlords’ (may they reign forever) plans… I loved this joke they threw in there
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- jmmcd 4y agoI also enjoyed the phrasing: > To begin with, the ionosphere’s composition changes most drastically at night, primarily because, of course, the Sun goes missing for a bit. I can imagine Bertie Wooster saying this.
- mig39 4y ago> consider that also smack dab in the middle of this time, the United States was busy accidentally nuking Britain’s first satellite, among many, many others. Woah... anybody have more info on that? Edit: more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
- 0des 4y agoFrom what I'm told this is more common than one might assume. It's been some years, but it was alleged that this happened to the first Indian satellite or something of that nature.
- elliottkember 4y agoFinish the article. It's fully explained in the very next paragraph.
- mushbino 4y ago>Scientific Discoveries: The Starfish bomb contained Cd-109 as a tracer, which helped work out the seasonal mixing rate of polar and tropical air masses. Ah, totally worth it
- mcguire 4y ago"Presumably it would have been even worse had everyone realized the United States had, a few years before this, planned to nuke the moon, more or less just because they could…" Do have to say, that was a glorious era of scientific tomfoolery.
- dylan604 4y agoMy favorite has always been scientifically promoted medicinal use of leeches.
- wumpus 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirudo_medicinalis#Today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirudo_medicinalis#Today
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- evilduck 4y agoNuking the moon was relatively mild compared to the proposed Project Orion.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoIt was glorious, I think because no one knew what the hell they were doing — or rather, rockets enabled this brave new world where nothing had yet been done. For example, the time they exploded 11,000 gallons of water 80 miles up. "Three more flights with dummy upper stages followed over the next 17 months, which were all completely or mostly successful. Two of them had the S-IV filled with water and detonated at high altitude after stage separation to form an ice cloud that was then photographed." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_I#Saturn_emerges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_I#Saturn_emerges
- dylan604 4y ago>would have to rely on the mood of said ionosphere. From launching needles into space to HAARP, lots of study in making the ionosphere more dependable. HAARP was fun fodder for consipiracy types back in the 90s. Even the wikipedia article doesn't touch but a fraction of the stories I've heard of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program#Conspiracy_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_Active_Auroral_...
- derac 4y agoThe weather control theory is still very prevalent.
- ncmncm 4y agoThey handed it over to the scientists.
- dylan604 4y agoThe idea that HAARP caused the massive flooding of the Mississipi in the 90s by causing the jet stream to move is still held strongly today.
- arein3 4y agoSupposedly Mr. Trump asked about weather control when in office and supposedly was disappointed there was supposedly none. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/10/donald-trump-china-hurricanes https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/10/donald-trump... The guardian's commentary tries to ridicule Trump but he makes sense. If you can make tsunamis with bombs and can stop hail by bombing the clouds when they are still forming maybe there could be a way to stop/create hurricanes. No harm in asking.
- Analemma_ 4y agoThe problem with "stopping hurricanes" is that even if we figured out a way to interrupt their formation, hurricanes ultimately stem from the temperature gradient between the ocean at low latitudes and at high latitudes - a hurricane carries heat away from the equator, warming the high latitudes and cooling the lower ones. If you somehow interrupt that process, the gradient just gets steeper with even more potential energy available, leading to a bigger, more destructive hurricane later on.
- benatkin 4y agoI skipped the article and found the Wikipedia page, which satisfied my curiosity from the headline: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford
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- wumpus 4y agoYep, that's a very interesting Wikipedia article. One thing that surprised me is that most of the needles reentered within 3 years. They have a pretty large surface area per unit mass, so the effects of the very thin atmosphere up there is maximized. Normally a satellite at 3,500 km would take centuries to decay. There are some clumps of needles still up there. One not-well-understood thing is how many small clumps remain -- the clumps which are too small to be seen on radar.
- 4dahalibut 4y agoThis is a link to the original post: https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/10/that-time-the-u-s-military-launched-a-half-a-billion-needles-to-space-for-reasons/ https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/10/that-time-t... written by Melissa Blevins https://www.linkedin.com/in/blevinsmelissa/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/blevinsmelissa/
- dang 4y agoChanged above from https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-history/us-military-launched-needles-space/ https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-history/us-military-la.... Thanks!
- gwill 4y agogreat article! I loved the tidbits at the bottom too. found a good list of wake up songs from nasa here: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts135/135_wakeup.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/s...
- mabbo 4y agoCurious: what happened to them? Sure, at this point none should still be in orbit because LEO has too much drag. But did they definitely burn up on re-entry? Or did the American Government cover the planet in a fine layer of tiny needles?
- panzagl 4y agoStill there, look for SATIDs in the 2360s.
- wumpus 4y agoThose are the clumps large enough to be seen by radar. The needles that successfully deployed came down in 3 years.
- shagie 4y agohttps://www.wired.com/2013/08/project-west-ford/ https://www.wired.com/2013/08/project-west-ford/ > On May 9, 1963, a second West Ford launch successfully dispersed its spindly cargo approximately 3,500 kilometers above the Earth, along an orbit that crossed the North and South Pole. Voice transmissions were successfully relayed between California and Massachusetts, and the technical aspects of the experiment were declared a success. As the dipole needles continued to disperse, the transmissions fell off considerably, although the experiment proved the strategy could work in principle. The successful MEO are still there - https://www.n2yo.com/satellites/?c=37 https://www.n2yo.com/satellites/?c=37
- wumpus 4y agoAs I said, those are the clumps. The individual needles can't be seen by radar and have a high enough surface to mass ratio that they deorbited in 3 years instead of centuries.
- panzagl 4y agoOccasionally NASA will do surveys of smaller objects, but I'm not sure how they would be able to tell if they're still up there since they're not regularly tracked- it's more like 'we scanned volume x and found y objects smaller than we usually track so we think there are z small objects up there overall'. Overall one of the more interesting bits of the 'hold my beer' phase of space exploration.
- Uptrenda 4y agoI wonder if those needle clumps that remain in orbit are still useful for communication? The article mentioned that a nuke launch damaged some satellites at the time. Wouldn't needles also have the advantage that they have no circuits that could be fried from EMPs or radiation? I'm not sure to what extent you can shield satellites today - but it is something to think about.
- wumpus 4y agoNo, the clumps were an accident and are useless for communication. The first telecommunications satellite was a balloon in orbit that signals were bounced off of. That would be safe from EMP. But it's not really useful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloon_satellite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloon_satellite
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- scalablenotions 4y agoIf I had to determine whether a planet was hostile, "fired 500 million needles into space" would be pretty freakin high up on my criteria
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- tempestn 4y agoCome for the needles, stay for the Space DJs.