Hello wonderful person this is Anton and in today's video we're going to be talking
a little bit about the history of space and
briefly mention a very interesting project that actually created an artificial ring around our planet Earth.
Anyway welcome to What The Math.
So we are actually in a simulation where there's a sphere of moons orbiting around Earth
and you know what can possibly go wrong here well let's actually find out.
Yeah, things will not end so well for our earth With the sphere around it
Today we're talking about a very unusual, very interesting project that basically was devolved in the early 60s
1960s and placed an artificial ring around our planet Earth.
Due to, well actually quite a lot of scares from the Soviet Union and the potential
attack by the Soviet Union and basically it was supposed to protect the United States communication route,
in order for the United State to be able to communicate with most the other countries.
Now, let's actually just finish this simulation and wait everything to
explode and the land on planet earth and let's actually briefly talk about
what actually happened.
Now, this project had a very unusual origin, and it was actually known as a Project West for it
because of the location where it was developed.
It was originally was actually known as Project Needles and let me actually explain to you. Why all right?
Yeah, Earth is obviously not doing so well here.
Let us go to a more realistic simulation where there is just earth so the year is essentially
1957 ; 1958 and
the American scientists realized that if ever the Soviet Union which was located right here decides to
cut off the communication between North America and Europe for example by cutting these
really long cables that actually stretched all the way across and are usually underwater
but if they were to use their submarines to cut off those cables
there would be no way for them to communicate with their bases in Germany, with their bases
in essentially anywhere, Turkey, Europe, and of course Asia as well.
This was a very big concern for the United States, and they decided to develop a kind of a
basically communication system that would prevent any such
attack from the Soviet Union in order for them to be able to communicate.
Now one of such projects was actually very unusual while such projects was known as
Project Diana and the Project was to actually try to find a way
to reflect the radio communication from the surface of the moon
and then send it back to Earth
this was actually theoretical possible
but it wasn't very effective so Project Diana that started in 1946 was actually abandoned pretty quickly
the other project that was known as
Project Echo, and I've actually made a video about it a few years ago.
Basically created these very very large metallic balloons that I'm going to actually try to launch here.
By placing a bunch of random asteroids in orbit around Earth.
So it was supposed to launch these very large metallic balloons that would orbit in upper
atmosphere and they would essentially be used to reflect the communication from Earth
through the atmosphere and from one point to another
But unfortunately this was not very effective and these could actually be easily shut down as well
so this project was also kind of abandoned and
the balloons were kind of hard to maintain, they were difficult to make,
and they were too large to basically be effective.
So a new project had to be born and
eventually scientists realized that well you could actually try to create
a kind of a metallic ring around our planet
using these tiny tiny copper wires about 1.8. Centimeters
or about just under an inch long to try to transmit
communication in the frequency of about eight gigahertz . Now this is what they were thinking.
They were thinking of creating a kind of a ring and we're going to do this right now by placing these particles here
and we're going to just give them some mass we're going to change their color to
something that looks more copper ish basically something that looks more this way
and we're also going to place them at the distance of about
3500 ish kilometers away from the surface of the planet
and we're basically just going to add them right now. So there's that copper ring.
Now, let's just run the simulation and see how it works and
essentially this was planned back in the
early 60s and in 1961 they actually launched the first spacecraft
that was supposed to carry these little particles to the orbit of our planet
but unfortunately it didn't deploy correctly and so it actually ended up throwing them off somewhere into the orbit
we still don't really know exactly where they went and
some of them got clumped together and created big chunks of space debris and because of this accident
The Soviet newspaper called Pravda wrote an article saying
"USA, They're In Space" and basically
Claimed that the United States is going to create a lot of junk in space because of this
a little accident which was actually to be honest completely correct.
They ended up creating these huge chunks of copper
that still orbit somewhere in space and might one day cause some
Crazy collision between a satellite or even a spacecraft with people in it.
Some of them were I still track today. There's about a dozen that is tracked by the
various projects on the surface of our planet,
and they've been in in orbit for quite a long time.
But then in 1963 they had the second launch and they were
successful at placing these at a distance of about 35 kilometers, sorry 3,500 kilometers.
Which is about
maybe about 2,000 miles or so it kind of looked like this
And it basically was supposed to stay there for several years and was eventually supposed to be
blown away by the solar winds and
returned back to
the surface of our planet and most of them did and the most of them actually ended up
right here in the North Pole or right there in the South Pole
and that's because I actually made this ring a little bit incorrectly I need to correct my mistake.
They were actually orbiting this way this was known as the polar orbit
and this way you could always see the United States from
one of these points and basically you could always reflect your
your data, so you could almost always be able to reflect data somewhere else around the world.
And essentially the way that this this would work is let's say you're located right here
you send information into space it reflects back through
the clouds and through basically most of the atmosphere, and it would actually boost the signal quite dramatically
making it go all over the world and this way you wouldn't have to rely on
for example ionosphere, which is very unpredictable and can actually be disturbed by the
various solar flares and it happens quite a lot and you wouldn't have to rely on cables
that are underwater that can easily be cut by Soviet submarines. So this ring
kind of solved some of the communication problems, but it was obviously not very efficient
and obviously didn't really boost the signal just as
much as they would that the Americans would hope they would but most importantly
this creates a huge huge problem with space junk and
eventually in 1962 the Americans were actually able to launch
their first modern communication satellite known as Telstar, and this really made this
whole thing very absolute and a lot of people probably felt pretty dumb
launching all of this junk here because you could not just launch a satellite
which we can totally do by placing just a random
human-made satellite right there in orbit around our planet, and this is Telstar satellite
(unfortunately, there is no Telstar in this simulation so he use New Horizon instead)
that is going to be basically replacing this whole ring of copper and
making communication so much easier and as the American military realized that this was a much better solution
they basically started making more and more of these and forgot about the whole ring thing.
But finally the ring is still kind of there somewhat is still there still
orbits around our planet and some of it is actually still
going to be causing problems with space junk sometime in the next few hundred years
because a lot of these particles haven't returned back to earth yet and
What's really interesting? I guess what's really unusual is that?
this idea the idea of having satellites in space and having transmission satellites in space
actually didn't come from the military. It came from
a science-fiction space writer Arthur C Clarke famous for his 2001 Space Odyssey and
he basically came up with this idea that you could reuse and launch German v2 rockets and create
this kind of a ring of
rockets in geostationary orbit that would kind of look like this and
would essentially orbit around our planet in a geostationary orbit always pointed in the same
spot on the planet's surface and
it would essentially act as a kind of a
retransmitter of
radio waves from planet Earth they wouldn't actually transmit things themselves they would just reflect things
from through a various
radio antenna that would be installed on them and interestingly
this idea was later used to create the first
actual satellite that did the transmission and would orbit around our planet
and then we realize we can also place them in geostationary orbit to make it even easier
so all of this started as kind of a science fiction idea
that's basically in another science fiction idea that turned into real life.
But of course the idea for all of this communication stuff
the idea of having these particles orbit around planet and reflect
radio waves and of course the fact that you even have a smartphone right now that can actually use
satellites to call anyone on the planet Earth all of this start with this unusual fear
during the Cold War era it unusual pursuit of the military to create better and stronger weapons and
things like Moon bases and men on Mars and
everything else in space all started as
essentially a military pursuit, so we have to remember that most of our achievements today especially
groundbreaking achievements actually start with
the fear of being destroyed by another nation, which is kind of unusual.
Our species is really funny that way. And well anyway
that's all I wanted to talk about in this video, i just wanted to show you
this unusual artificial ring that was created around our planet Earth back in 1963
and that's kind of still there today.
Thank you for watching subscribe if you still haven't
and share this video with someone who enjoys watching space videos
And I'll see you guys tomorrow come back tomorrow to learn something else.
Space out and as always
bye-bye.
(wait, don't go anywhere, just wait a lil bit)
And if you watch this long you might enjoy this little explosion that's coming up really soon
Let's see what happens to a ring if we explode planet Earth