Project West Ford

In 1963, the US Air Force conducted Project West Ford (originally Project Needles) ¹, an experiment to create an artificial orbiting communications medium. Nearly 500 million hair-thin copper dipoles, each 1.78 cm long and 25.4 µm thick, were released into a circular orbit at ~3,700 km altitude, producing a belt with an average density of about five dipoles per cubic kilometer. Designed to resonate at 8.35 GHz, the dipoles acted as passive scatterers. Tests demonstrated data rates up to 20 kbps using frequency shift keying (FSK), sufficient for intelligible digitized speech between Camp Parks, California and Westford, Massachusetts. As the belt dispersed, the data rates dropped to 100 bps.

The project drew strong objections from radio astronomers, concerned that the artificial belt would permanently interfere with celestial observations. To mitigate these concerns, the dipoles were designed to disperse and eventually decay. By early 1966, most of the belt had disappeared. However, clumping meant that some fragments remained in orbit much longer; as of April 2023, at least 44 clumps larger than 10 cm were still being tracked. The West Ford experiment was never repeated, but it demonstrated that point-to-point communications via an artificial scattering medium could be highly survivable.