Wired for Protest

The object of the experiment was to shoot a bunch of copper wires into a thin, high band that could be used to relay radio microwaves around the curve of the earth. But even before the first rocket of the Air Force Project West Ford blasted off its pad, the protests of outraged scientists soared into orbit. Metal wires, the world's astronomers warned, would also reflect sunlight, fogging the photographic plates of optical telescopes. They would foul up radio astronomy by reflecting man-made radio waves and masquerading as distant stars or galaxies.

The protests were still mounting when the first attempt at Project West Ford flopped. Its collection of copper wares went into orbit as scheduled, but the wires failed to spread out. Circling the earth as a few lumps, they remained inactive, bothering neither optical nor radio telescopes.

Spreading Sausage. The astronomers relaxed, but not for long. Last week, after issuing soothing releases, M.I.T.'s Lincoln Lab announced that Project West Ford was blasting off once more. A redesigned dispenser climbed into a polar orbit riding piggyback on a secret Air Force satellite. Lincoln Lab scientists followed its course, and when they were sure it was in the proper orbit, they sent a signal that released a powerful spring.

Out of the dispenser shot 18 rapidly spinning disks. The disks were only 0.7 in. thick and 4.5 in. in diameter, but each was made of 22 million copper wires one-third as thick as a human hair. The wires were stuck together with naphthalene, the familiar material of mothballs. As the disks spun in space, the naphthalene slowly vaporized, releasing a cloud of wires that spread into a sausage shape, then into a long cylinder curving around the earth, 2,000 miles above its surface.

Lincoln Lab scientists watched the cloud by radar and saw it grow longer and longer as the thin wires separated. In about two months the wires should be evenly distributed around the earth, occupying a belt five miles wide and 25 miles thick.

Fossil Science. The welcome signals reflected from the wire belt were almost drowned out by new protests from radio astronomers. "The experiment is not useful." said Dr. David Heeschen, director of the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Observatory. "It may have a long-range effect on radio astronomy." Said Dr. Harold Weaver, director of the University of California's Hat Creek Observatory: "We object. We may be a fossil science barely after we've been born."

The Air Force sponsors of West Ford had answers ready. The wires, they explained, are made so that they reflect only a narrow band of microwaves about 1.4 in. long ( 8,000 megacycles"). Other waves will not be reflected efficiently, and even if the wire belt causes some unexpected kind of trouble for radio astronomers, it will not last forever. The almost invisible wires are strongly affected by the pressure of sunlight. In five years or less, they will be pushed out of their orbit and will burn like junior meteors in the atmosphere.

The astronomers were not to be soothed. Even if they are not bothered by the first batch of West Ford wires, they asked, what about the future? If the wires prove successful, the astronomers predicted gloomily, the Air Force will surely want to launch more of them, and the sky soon will be thick with wires reflecting garbled TV programs back to earth, hiding the radio stars.

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