Starfish Prime

This test really pissed off NASA, who at the same time was just beginning human spaceflights. They had just finished studying the harmful effects of the Van Allen belts, compensated for the exposure in their mission, and then a surprise new radiation belt in the lower regions shows up.

Wow, I didn't know that this eventually knocked out a whole array of satellites! I wonder if there was restitution of some kind to the respective operators.

Edit: It seems the only disabled commercial satellite was Telstar [1], where it wasn't possible to point to a single cause because of Project K [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstar

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Project_K_nuclear_tests

> According to U.S. atomic veteran Cecil R. Coale, some hotels in Hawaii offered "rainbow bomb" parties on their roofs for Starfish Prime, contradicting some reports that the artificial aurora was unexpected.

This reads a little like something from a Culture novel.

The Starfish Prime story is much bigger than the Wikipedia entry suggests. If you search the web you can find out quite a bit more about how it affected infrastructure across more than half the planet.

Then you can read up about the "space needles", when they exploded a package og 480 million small copper needles in orbit to see what would happen: https://nowiknow.com/space-needles/

"Burning the sky" is a pretty great read / audio book on the topic.

https://www.audible.com/pd/Burning-the-Sky-Audiobook/B07L6PV...

This has an interesting intersection with Telstar, the first communications satellite: http://eager.io/blog/telstar-and-starfish-prime/

Aka "what could possibly go wrong?"

The words "surprised" and "unexpected" are especially disturbing when science meets weapon testing. ie. "Oops we were surprised people were made sick for the rest of their lives, this was unexpected, oh well sucks for them"

I wonder how many nuclear weapons have been tied to the internet these days. All the new "advanced fighters" are plagued by endless problems, why would nuclear missiles be any different.