That Time the U.S. Military Launched a Half a Billion Needles to Space for Reasons...

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In this video:
In the early 1960s, international communications were limited to transmissions through undersea cables or occasionally unreliable radio signals bounced off of the ionosphere. As you might imagine from this, many in the Western world weren’t too keen on the state of the situation given that were to someone, say, the Soviet Union, cut those cables before launching an attack, international communications with overseas forces and foreign allies would have to rely on the mood of said ionosphere.
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Sources:
articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cg...
www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/s...
space.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/Program...
www.thecrimson.com/article/196...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionosphere
www.factmonster.com/ce6/sci/a0...
ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeab...
www.armscontrol.org/factsheets...
space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/w...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_...
www.engineeringpathway.com/eng...
www.k-grayengineeringeducation...
www.thecrimson.com/article/196...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project...
www.todayifoundout.com/index.p...
www.todayifoundout.com/index.p...
www.todayifoundout.com/index.p...

[@TodayIFoundOut]

Please do go check out Star Conflict free here:

[@fencserx9423]

“Accidentally nuking a satellite” is one of those “oops moments” that makes me proud to be an American

[@TracksideViews]

Alien parents: Kids lock the doors and roll up the windows we’re passing by earth.

[@the-chillian]

Never. Attempt. To. Pronounce. Japanese. Again.

[@brkr78]

"...planned to nuke the moon, more or less just because they could" ... ahrm, yeah, that sound about as 'murican as it gets.

[@davidslattery5168]

Shout out to my shape-shifting, time travelling lizard people from space

[@Bcarr122391]

I’m convinced he keeps making lizard people references with that sense of humor to throw us off his trail.

[@theangelbelow88]

The 50s US military was having a blast, at the cost of everyone else

[@Joe-po9xn]

"We'll get those 99 Red Balloons now!" - The Pentagon

[@matthewmoser1284]

Anybody else concerned that there are literally HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of tiny needles just chilling up in our atmosphere....?

[@kairyss4285]

"For reasons" sums up a lot of things we do, actually...

[@charlesdeens8927]

The world: WTF happened to our satellites?!

[@O4C209]

Let's talk about America sending millions of needles into space, side note, we nuked space.

[@MaYkO-WWH]

When Simon was reading the Patrick Stewart line and said, "make it so", I can genuinely see him playing Captain Picard in a reboot he has the voice and the haircut 😁 MAKE IT SO!

[@jaspr1999]

I bet Stewart had such a blast delivering that "To Boldly Go..." message! Having Captain Picard and Captain Kirk waking you up in space has got to be one very cool moment!

[@Ivymichael1994]

"We're going to spare you some of the complexities"

[@rafterrafter1227]

Legend has it, that whenever there's a tear on astronauts space suits those needles come very handy.

[@J8n3eyr3]

Science.

[@jking1948]

When I was a kid we knew of this radio wave bouncing calling it skip. We didn’t know how it worked but we did know that at night with good “skip” we could talk to Japan from the west coast of Washington.

[@seanpeacock4290]

When you have a new hammer, everything looks like a nail. Nukes are big hammers and the U.S. had alot of them.