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The Department of Defense was in the midst of a separate project to put 500 million copper needles into orbit to try to reflect radio waves and help long-distance communication. military didn’t have many qualms about sending almost anything into space. The space race was in its infancy back then, and the U.S. It was set off in October 1961, about 13,000 feet above an island in the Arctic Circle. had broken from a voluntary moratorium, with the Soviets conducting 31 experimental blasts, including Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated. After three years of no testing, the Soviet Union and the U.S. Cold War heats upĪ year before, in 1961, international negotiations to ban nuclear testing had taken a turn for the worse. “I told my dad years later, ‘You know, if I knew I was going to become a nuclear weapon physicist, I would have paid more attention,’” he says.
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The memory of that day stuck with Spriggs, who is now a weapons scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where he works preserving and analyzing archival nuclear test footage. But the results of Starfish Prime serve as a warning of what might happen if Earth’s magnetic field gets blasted again with high doses of radiation, either from another nuke or from natural sources such as the sun.
Fallout earth from space free#
signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and outer space has been H-bomb free for almost 60 years. The following year, the U.S., the U.K., and the U.S.S.R. An accompanying electromagnetic pulse washed out radio stations, set off an emergency siren, and caused streetlights to black out in Hawaii. “It looked as though the heavens had belched forth a new sun that flared briefly, but long enough to set the sky on fire ,” according to one account in the Hilo Tribune-Herald. For as long as 15 minutes after the initial explosion, charged particles from the blast collided with molecules in Earth’s atmosphere, creating an artificial aurora that could be seen as far away as New Zealand. Starfish Prime exploded at an altitude of 250 miles, at about the height where the International Space Station orbits today. “When that nuclear weapon went off, the whole sky lit up in every direction. It turned out that the blast-a 1.4 megaton bomb, 500 times as powerful as the one that fell on Hiroshima-was not subtle. Photographers aimed their lenses toward the horizon and debated the best camera settings for capturing a thermonuclear explosion in outer space. Spectators were also holding “watch-the-bomb parties” in Hawaii, as the countdown was broadcast over shortwave radio. “He thought there was going to be this little flicker, so he wanted to make sure everybody was going to see it.” “He was trying to figure out which direction to look,” Spriggs recalls. military was scheduled to launch a rocket into space to test a fusion bomb. That night on another atoll a thousand miles away, the U.S. It was pitch black when Greg Spriggs’ father brought his family to the highest point on Midway Atoll on July 8, 1962. The results from the 1962 Starfish Prime test serve as a warning of what might happen if Earth’s magnetic field gets blasted again with high doses of radiation. Published by the National Geographic, 15 July 2021