Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Project West Ford (also known as Westford Needles and Project Needles) was a test carried out by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory on behalf of the United States Military in 1961 and 1963 to create an artificial ionosphere above the Earth. This was done to solve a major weakness that had been identified in US military communications. At the height of the Cold War, all international communications were either sent through undersea cables or bounced off the natural ionosphere. The United States Military was concerned that the Soviets might cut those cables, forcing the unpredictable ionosphere to be the only means of communication with overseas forces. So, a ring of 4.8 x 108 copper dipole antennas (1.78cm long needles, 25.4 m (1961) / 17.8 m (1963) in diameter) was placed in orbit to allow global radio communication.

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