Name: Why The US Government Put 480 Million Needles Into the Sky
Uploaded: 2026-02-15T22:03:15.000Z
Duration: 7 min 51 s
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Wright Construction Company built the Seattle Space Needlean iconic feat of engineering with, let's admit it, limited practical use.

Participle clauses

But if you're into iconic, impressively engineered space needles with limited practical use, this isn't really the number one.

Arguably, it's number 480 million and one.

That's because of something called Project Westforward, an endeavor by the United States to create a new form of long distance communication by.

And I'm looking at my notes this is true.

Launching 480 million copper needles into space.

Project Westford, named after the nearby town of Westford, Massachusetts, but

with a little bit of space added, was a Cold War thing.

That is a deeply ambitious, sorta weird undertaking that only really happened because the US and USSR had this will they, won't they total annihilation thing going.

And the tensions expressed itself in unorthodox ways like digging really deep holes or filling space with needles.

The needles, of course, course, were not purely decorative.

The point was to create an artificial ionosphere to allow for reliable long distance chat.

Mind you, this was before, and I mean right before the dawn of communication satellites.

So the primary means of long distance communication the US was using were one, undersea cables and two, over the horizon radio communication, which is all well and good, except that undersea cables are pretty vulnerable to attack.

And over the horizon radar, especially back then, could be finicky.

That's because oth radar works by sending signals through the ionosphere, a layer of charged particles between 100 and 300 kilometers above the Earth's surface.

We're not going to get into all the science of why, but

basically, if you send a signal with the right frequency into the ionosphere, it can bounce around in there and come down and be perceived by an antenna thousands of kilometers away.

There are two things you need to know about the ionosphere.

The first is that the E layer of the ionosphere is where the cats in cats get to go if they win the pageant.

It changes a lot, especially due to solar flares.

And back in the 50s and 60s, people were worried that new nuclear tests might mess with it too.

Because of all that, oth radio got disrupted kind of a lot.

And the concern was that if there was a solar storm and the USSR snipped one of the US Undersea cables.

The whole long range communications system would be down.

The idea was to create a ring of copper wires orbiting the Earth that could do the job of the ionosphere more consistently.

Each one would be 1.8 cm long and serve as a dipole antenna for 8 GHz signals sent from the Earth.

If all went to plan, the US could send one of those signals into the sky.

It would refract through all those little antennae and come back down to Earth somewhere far, far away.

But first there was the matter of getting hundreds of millions of copper wires into the sky.

To do that, the Project Westford folks built a dispersal machine.

Though this is just a prototype, the real ones are still in space.

It's about the length and width of a standard wiener dog and would carry a canister full of copper needles encased in a naphthalene gel, which the spring would slowly push out once it reached space.

When the gel met sunlight, it would slowly melt during orbit, scattering needles around the planet and completing a space needle ring in a matter of weeks.

The first attempt of this was in October of 1961, and

it didn't really work because of a malfunctioning release mechanism.

They tried again in May of 1963, and it worked.

The belt formed in a polar orbit over the course of about 40 days.

And while it didn't include the full number of needles they needed, it was cool enough to make a partial belt and test the system.

Voice transmissions between Massachusetts and California were successful.

So why didn't we ever send up the rest of the needles or really end up using the ones that were there?

One of the big concerns was the precedent the United States was setting by filling Earth's orbit with needles sans anyone else's consent.

In the astronomy world, people were worried that a belt of conductive material in Earth's orbit could distort or otherwise harm tools trying to take measurements or images of outer space.

And beyond astronomers, other countries were miffed that the United States military, citing the existential threat of nuclear war with the ussr, was unilaterally deciding what to put in everyone's sky.

And while studies and additional launches proved that these needles didn't cause problems for anyone's astronomy instruments or the general aesthetics of the sky, the world was rightful uncomfortable with how it all went down.

So when the Outer space treaty of 1967 was drafted, Article 9 included language stating that whatever you get up into space, you must give due regard to the corresponding interests of all other states parties to the treaty.

Which is to say if we went needle mode again, we'd need other countries to agree instead of just throwing 480 million of the things up there and saying, see, it didn't bother anybody.

But since they didn't actually bother anybody, why didn't we use what we'd already sent up?

Well, Project Needles, as it was first known, was started in 1958 with the successful dispersal of needles and the subsequent successful communications tests not happening until 1963.

And by 1963, a few key things had happened.

First, little Eva had released the locomotion.

So I assume the world was a bit less focused on long range communications and a little more focused on doing a brand new dance now.

Also, AT&T had launched Telstarthe world's first active communications satellite.

And the United States had created the Communications Satellite Corporation, or comsat, a massive federal investment in satellite worldwide.

So by the time we knew that needles worked, they were basically obsolete.

All that was left to do was collect all 480 million needles out of the sky.

Since we wouldn't be needing other services.

It's generally assumed that since the 60s, most of those needles did re enter the atmosphere at some point, like when some kind of solar wind came through.

Meaning if you find yourself at the north or South Pole, make sure to pan through the snow a bit.

There are probably quite a lot of copper needles laying around there, but

there are still a ton, or more accurately, a few kilograms.

These things were pretty light of Project Westford artifacts still in orbit for one, the machines that dispersed them, and

for two hundreds, perhaps thousands of clumps of needles that melded together and are just whipping around the planet 24, 7.

That's because it turned out that when the needles were put in the gel, a lot of them were touching each other metal to metal.

So when the gel melted and the wires met the warm sun and vacuum of space, a lot of them self welded into big clumps.

And while it would take a few years for a single wire to find its way out of orbit and come back down to Earth, a heavier clump of them would take many decades, decades that have not yet fully passed.

We're aware of several dozen clumps like this that were still in orbit around 2013, but

there could be thousands more as yet undetected at least they're not messing with telescopes.

Since Project Westford, the telescope they built in Massachusetts to prove the needle belt would work, is still there, but

was converted to do geodetic observations in 1981.

And that's basically all we have to remember, this wacky idea behind a repurposed telescope, a few thousand balls of copper in the sky and a prototype dispersal machine on display in Chantilly, Virginia.

And of course, the language of Article 9 of the Outer Space Treaty.

And of course, the friends we made along the way.

Speaking of friends in outer space, did you know that a bunch of my friends and I started a streaming service together with an outer space Y name?