Technology

It wouldn't be the first time a military would blow up something in orbit just to see it go kaboom.

But wait! There's more. My favorite space fuckup is the West Ford project. What's better than crushing the existing satellites into million pieces, you ask? Skipping the satellite phase, and bringing up the millions of pieces just to releaae them into orbit deliberately.

The West Ford project conducted by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory for the US Air Force in the early 1960s was a notable example. The project’s purpose was to create an 8 km (5 mi) wide, 40 km (25 mi) thick band of tiny copper wire segments in a near-polar orbit around the Earth as a passive radio reflector for military communications. In the first attempted deployment, in October 1961, the payload failed to disperse as planned. Eventually, seven small objects from the failed attempt were catalogued as orbital debris. The objects, with radar cross-sections between 0.06 m2 (0.6 ft2) and 0.6 (6.5 ft2), are still in orbit at an altitude of about 3,600 km (2,250 mi). A second West Ford project deployment attempt in May 1963 carried a payload of 480 million copper needles, each 1.8 cm (0.7 in.) long and 0.00178 cm (0.0007 in.) in diameter. Project planners expected solar radiation pressure to deorbit the needles in only a few years. However, only one-fourth to one-half of the needles dispersed as planned. Most remained in clumps that were more resistant to orbital decay. Eventually, 144 clumps from that attempt were identified and tracked; forty-six of them remained in orbit in 2013, but only nine of them had perigees less than 2,000 km (1,240 mi). Individual needles are too small to track.

The History of Space Debris - Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University