DARPA in the 1970s

revisit this topic in the future. Will come back and continue the story of DARPA. But I did not want to turn tech stuff into DARPA stuff, So after this one, I figure we'll move on to something else and maybe in a few weeks we'll pick up where we left

off today. In our last episode, we covered a lot more of the technology that was developed as part of the efforts in the Vietnam War, and I guess now it's a good time to remind every in the DARPA, which back in the sixties was known by its original name ARPA, was not an R and D facility itself, not truly. It was more of an agency that would award contracts to other organizations such as think tanks, universities,

defense contractors, and stuff like that. ARPA slash DARPA would fund the work and they would also set the expectations, the guidelines, you know what it was that they were hoping to get out of it. But the actual science and development was going on throughout the United States and all these different facilities, and these projects were frequently top top top secret, meaning the people who worked on them

would keep it quiet even from their co workers. So only people at the top of DARPA really tended to know all about the bits and pieces, and sometimes even the director wasn't fully aware of everything that was going on. That's how classified some of these projects were. In nineteen sixty nine, while several ARPA research projects were all tied up in the Vietnam War, a group of computer networking

specialists would initiate the original Arpanet Connections. ARPANETT was the R and D project to create a means for different computers to send data back and forth between each other, even if those computers relied upon different computer languages, and even if they were separated by many many miles from one another. Part of this required the design and production

of a brand new technology a router. ARPA had contracted the company BBN Technologies to build the first routers back in nineteen sixty eight, and then it took a year. But on October twenty, nineteen sixty nine, computers at the Stanford Research Institute, at the University of California and Santa Barbara and at the University of Utah would connect through

these routers. The first message sent across this three node network was low l O. This was actually Christopher Lines attempt to log in l O g I N to the s r I computer remotely, but the s r I computer crashed in mid message, and so low is all we got. Also, how typical is it that the server goes down just when you have something important to send to it? It dates all the way back to

the beginning of the ARPA net. But more seriously, this connection showed that remote computers would be able to send data back and forth using network communication standards and also relying upon technologies like packet switching that involves dividing data such as the data that represents a file, into smaller packets, and each packet has information about where the data is from, where it's going, and how it fits into the overall collection of information so that you can um when I

say you, so that a computer can reconstruct the file. These ideas we get fleshed out over the next several years. An important moment would happen to night teen seventy four when vent Surf and Bob con would publish a protocol for Packet Network Interconnection, which laid out the principles behind TCP.

But I've done full episodes about ur PONET, so for this episode, we'll just remind you that that was something that was happening at this time, and will also point out some of the big moments as they tie back into our PA. So the main purpose of our Bonette, by the way, that was just to create those methodologies

for computer networks. But one of the applications, perhaps one of the benefits that ar Bo was really interested in, was the idea that by creating distributed networks of computers, the US could maintain some communications and command structures in the event of a nuclear strike. So it's kind of scary, but it's also really interesting when you think of it from a communication standpoint. If you have a concentrated computer center, let's say that you've got a known defense computer at

a university, Well, that is a potential target. If your adversary knows that there's a computer at that location and they know that it's of critical importance, they may target it. And if they take it down, then you lose it, and that is another problem for you to have to handle. But if you create a means for computers to work together across a big network and it spreads all over

the country, you have distributed your computing power significantly. And even if a strike were to take down part of that network, because the nature of the network itself, the rest of it may continue to operate without the section that has been taken out, which means you still have some of your communications and control systems in place. So it was looked at as a defense measure as well, not just a means of having computers be able to communicate with one another, but it was an added benefit.

Also in nineteen sixty nine, are PA and the U. S Army with Bell Labs and the Williams Research Corporation to develop the w R nineteen turbo fan engine. This engine acts as the power plant for many different cruise missiles. And I actually had to look this up because I was not familiar with the term power plant when it comes to things like missiles and jets and airplanes. I think a power plant as a place that is used to generate electricity. But power plant in this context is

an apparatus that provides power for device. It's not a big surprise. And so the power in this particular scenario is the power to fly through the air. So not that mysterious and just threw me for a loop the first time I saw it, because despite the fact that I've been doing this for ten years, that I'm forty three years old, I don't think I've ever actually encountered

that phrasing before. Meanwhile, while this turbo fan is in development, while ar Panetta is coming online, ARPO was also funding advancements in underwater propulsion systems. So not just this turbo fan for going through the air, they were also looking at underwater systems. The U. S. Navy had already funded work out of the Applied Research Laboratory at Penn State for a system that was called the Stored Chemical Energy Propulsion System or SKEPS s c e p S. This

was used to power torpedoes. ARPA would fund subsequent research to increase the operation duration for those systems to have them be long endurance systems in other words, and these were systems that were relying upon thermal chemical reactions, so you would have them burned through what was essentially fuel. So they had to come up with new ways to replenish that. The result of this was an improvement over the old technology, and it would be incorporated in the

design of the m K fifty torpedo. In anti war sentiment was on the rise in the United States. The Vietnam War conflict had been dragging on for were quite some time, and the news was just devastating out of Vietnam. For one thing, via the Vietnam War was one of the first real conflicts where reporters on the ground were able to send back footage and real stories of what was going on, and it was not These were not

positive stories. One place where this anti war sentiment really became apparent was at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne. There an enormous computer, the fastest in the world at that time, was the bull's eye of this target. The computer was called the ILIAC four I L L I A C four. Professor Daniel L. Slotnick who had called

John von Neumann, a mentor he had studied under. Von Neuman was the Arbors scientist in charge of the Iliac four project, and his goal was to get the ILIAC four up to being able to process a billion instructs per second. It was running calculations related to ballistic missiles as well as the possibility of using weather modification for defense top secret stuff in other words, because it was

a Department of Defense computer running at this university. And in early nineteen seventy a student reporter was able to attend a meeting where they talked about how this computer's time was being allocated, and in that story that the student reporter published, the reporter revealed that one of the things the computer was being used to do was related to nuclear weapons. Slot Nick was caught between anti war

protesters and the Department of Defense. He managed to anger both sides at the same time when he said he took on this project in order to be able to build the computer. He wanted to have this computer capable of running a billion operations per second, and in order to do that he was going to need millions of dollars,

and the Department of Defense offered that operat tunity. He said that if the Red Cross had done the same, he would have taken the money from the Red Cross and had nothing to do with the Department of Defense. This had the benefit of taking off both the anti war protesters and the Department of Defense. Nobody was happy about this. Tensions continued to grow, and there were more than a few violent incidents on and around the University of Illinois campus in the months following this news report.

So in June of that year, the university reported to ARPA that the university was no longer going to be able to keep this computer safe. The ILIAC four was in danger if it stayed on campus, and so ARPA chose to move the computer, which by the way, was huge. I mean it was several feet long, several feet wide, weight an enormous amounts, So moving it was not a an easy option. In fact, just to plug in the power supply you would have to have a forklift. So this was not an easy thing to move. But they

did relocate it. They moved did all the way out to California to NASA's Institute for Advanced Computation at the AIMS Research Center. Now, following this, while you have this anti war sentiment growing, you have these these violent protests happening. Senator Mike Mansfield would introduce a bill that would limit ARPA's projects to those that had a quote specific military function end quote. ARPA would end up having trouble getting

budget for speculative or bleeding edge research. They were mostly trying to look into ways of pushing the bleeding edge

of technology out much further than anyone else. In fact, the whole goal of ARPA or DARPA as it would later be known, was to make certain that the United States would never be left behind again, that another spot Nick type event would never happen to the US, that the US would always be on the forefront of that technology, which would mean having to do a lot of exploratory research and development that you could not easily tie into

active military efforts because you're looking ahead to anticipate problems that you don't have yet but you think are around the corner. So this was a real blow to the agency. In addition, the Secretary of Defense would order ARPA to be removed from the Pentagon, so the agency's new office would be almost three miles away in Arlington, Virginia, and that would mean that you would no longer have that very quick, immediate access to Pentagon officials. You weren't working

side by side with them anymore. No one at ARPA, not even the director, was really sure if the agency was going to be around much longer or not. There was a serious worry that the agency might just fizzle out without a formal conclusion. But the agency wasn't officially shut down, and so it would continue to fund R and D work in various projects. I'll explain a little bit more in just a second, but first let's take

a quick break to thank our sponsor. ARFA was also funding work to develop low weight mirrors made out of beryllium for use, and stuff like infrared telescopes and ballistic missile defense systems and weapons guidance systems ended up being useful for lots of stuff, especially in space. I mean anytime, and I'll mention this again towards the end of this episode, anytime you can reduce the amount of weight of the components you're sending up into space, you want to do

it because weight essentially equates money. The heavier your payload is to get into space, the more expensive it's going to be to get up there. So this was an important development not just for these military guidance systems and defense systems, but for space faring stuff overall. Are but also funded development of technologies that would be incorporated into a new generation of detection equipment that could pick up

Soviet submarine movements. Uh. The project was considered one of the agency's biggest successes, with the resulting technology being deployed in the early nineteen eighties. So again you see how far ahead the agency is from the production of technology. You know, it's several years out from where they're doing the research and development. They do the r and D work in the early seventies, it's not really ready to be rolled out in an application until the nineteen eighties.

But that was again are PA's argument. They said, we are necessary to be able to work on these problems and anticipate these things so that we're ready to go within a decade or so. But if we're not doing that, if we're being reactionary instead of proactive, we're going to

be behind the game. John Lehman, who was Secretary of the Navy in nineteen would end up saying that because of these submarine sensors, if a war were to ever break out between the United States and the Soviet Union, those sensors would give him the capability to attack all Soviet subs that were in deployment within the first five minutes of that war. So it was considered to be

an incredibly successful technology. It's also indicative of a lot of DARPA's early work, which focused largely on developing sensor technology for all sorts of stuff seismic sensors, acoustic sensors, radioactive isotope sensors, etcetera. So there's also no getting around the fact that most of the technologies I've talked about in these episodes are meant either to defend against or attack,

or to make attacks more effective. They're all supposed to be related to military stuff, after all, But this next bit is sort of a relief from that. In the early nineteen seventies, are PA funded research into what was called glassy carbon. This was a foamy sort of stuff made from pure carbon, and the foam had some really

interesting features. It was strong, it didn't weigh very much, it was chemically inert, and while the original idea was that the stuff might be really important for numerous electrochemical applications. One unexpected benefit was that it became a strong candidate for material to use in surgical implants like heart valves, and so it was. And so this particular ARPA project would fund work on a technology that would go on to save countless lives, and I think that's pretty cool.

It's also a good reminder that while some of this technology was initially intended specifically for a military purpose or to potentially go into military applications, they often would have much wider applications than just military ones. In nineteen two, are PAS Materials Research Projects developed rare earth permanent magnets capable of operating That means is, you know, maintaining their magnetism across a range of temperatures that had been identified

as being military relevant. And it's a pretty big range. So on the low end is minus fifty five degrees celsius or minus sixty seven fahrenheit. On the hot end of the scale, it's a hundred twenty five degrees celsius, which is two hundred fifty seven degrees fahrenheit. Now, typically heating a magnet will reduce its strength of its magnetic field, and cooling a magnet down will increase a permanent magnets

magnetic field. So why is that Well, from a very basic level, a magnet's molecules are largely aligned with one another. They're more or less all pointing in the same direction within the material. So you've got all these molecules that are lined up in parallel, and their north poles are all pointing in one direction, their south poles are all pointing in the other direction. Heating a magnet up causes

molecules to move around. Heating stuff up causes molecular movement, and the more the molecules move around, the more that alignment is compromised. So if you heat up a magnet a bit, it starts to lose its magnetic properties. If you heat it up enough to a point that's called the Curie point, named after Madam Curry, they will no longer be magnetic at all. You will have demagnetized your magnet by heating it up to this point. It's where the molecules will be out of alignment and they will

not realign. To do that, though, you'd have to heat the material a pretty darn hot. The Cury point is typically very very very hot for most materials, so for example, iron that curi point is like seven seventy degrees celsius. It's one thousand, four hundred seventeen degrees fahrenheit. So this would mean that it be very rare that you would ever encounter those kind of situations. The only way you

would do it is if you were doing it on purpose. Typically, this work was really to make sure that the magnets were going to operate according to expectations under hot and cold conditions. Also in nineteen two, ARPA officially became DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and it would stick with that name until nine. In three it would drop the D and become ARPA again for three years,

and then in nine will become DARPA again. But I figure we're gonna have a while before we get to the nineties, so we'll talk about that when we get there. Another DARPA funded innovation in the early nineteen seventies was the development of gallium arsenide as a semiconductor material. So before the semiconductor electronics relied on these really large component parts like vacuum tubes, which meant your basic computer would

take up an enormous amount of space. Several researchers developed semiconductor technologies all the way through the nineteen forties, but it would take a while for the semiconductor transistor to become practical. The properties of gallium arsenide allowed it to host faster transistors running on more power than you could

put on a silicon transistor. Technology would find its way into all sorts of applications, though the military was mostly concerned with its use on GPS kits and precision guided munitions and other defensive systems. One last bit about the Vietnam War and DARPA, because we're getting to the point where America was getting ready to withdraw from Vietnam. The war became increasingly unpopular as it stretched on, and for one thing, in the US, it was never really a

formal war. The US had started out trying to supply aid in the form of technology and training to the South Vietnamese government and military, and this was all in an effort to stop the growth of communism without getting directly involved. That was the goal, was to make sure that the South Vietnamese forces were capable of handling this without the US having to get directly involved. But obviously

that did not pan out. Every year since nineteen fifty nine had seen an increase in the number of US troops sent to the region. In nineteen seventy one, a former Rand Corporation analyst named Daniel Ellsberg would leak a collection of documents that collectively were called the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. Those documents contained information about the US is secret involvement with Vietnam for more than

a decade. This was actually a detailed report that mc namara had asked the Rand Corporation to put together as it was going on, sort of an encyclopedia of the

Vietnam War. And the problem was that at this point this analyst leaked the whole thing to The New York Times, and it included details on the various ARPA projects that had happened in that time, and the involvement of the super elitist group of scientists called the Jason's and the growing anti war movement was really gaining momentum in the United States, and many people were outraged not just about the war, but also about these revelations of how the

US public had been deceived over the years, how the government had been purposefully misleading the US population, that is, you know, at least supposed to be represented by this government. And so it bred this this distrust in the government, saying you have been doing all the secret stuff, telling us it's one thing when it's really another. The anti war sentiment put a lot of pressure on all parties involved.

Eventually it led to ARPA's director, who was a Dr. Steve J. Lucasik, the seventh director of ARPA at that point, to sever the ties with the Jason's ARPA was seen as the R and D tip on the point of the military industrial complex SPEAR, and since the efforts in Vietnam didn't prevent the North Vietnamese forces from taking Saigon, many were beginning to question the usefulness of such an agency in the first place. The experience of Vietnam had

an enormous effect on the American psyche. The majority of Americans felt the war was unethical and a political mistake, and that it led to the deaths of thousands of Americans, not to mention millions of others. And it taunt Americans that the use of force and superior technology would not necessarily win out over philosophies and ideology. It wasn't realistic to say because we are technologically superior, We're definitely going

to win. Now, all of this is to say that it would make the post Vietnam War era for DARPA really challenging. Apart from the name change, which was again to indicate that from this point forward, the agency was only going to pursue projects that met a specific military need. All projects related to the Vietnam War were to stop. Project Agile was called an enormous failure, that all the attempts to bring research and technology to stop insurgents had

been ineffective at best and counter productive at worst. Several previous ARPA directors who oversaw Project Agile throughout the years would admit that their efforts were misguided and ineffective. DARBA established a new office called Tactical Technology. This office carried out much of the top secret R and D work around sensors, improving the technologies that had been part of the failed electric fence project, as well as more successful

projects like VILA and the submarine sensors. And then there was the move to research technologies that can mask aircraft from radar systems. New advanced air defense missile systems were making it increasingly dangerous to fly missions in combat theaters. DARPA would tackle this problem by funding research into ways that an aircraft might foil radar systems, either by absorbing radar waves so that nothing bounces back, or by reflecting radar waves off into other directions so that they don't

return to their radar stations, or both. These projects would evolve into have Blue, the first practical stealth combat aircraft. This was a proof of concept vehicle the had's first test flight in nineteen seventy seven, and there's an interesting behind the scenes story that really shows how secretive all this stuff was. So the CIA had previously been working with Lockheed to develop stealth technology that would culminate with an aircraft called the A twelve Ox cart Plane. I

talked about it in an episode about stealth aircraft. But the A twelve was so top secret that even the director of DARPA, who was George Hallmeyer at this time, he hadn't even heard about it. So when DARPA began to look for possible contractors to work on stealth technology, they did not initially consider Lockeed. They weren't They didn't know that Lockeed had been working on this stuff. They originally only reached out to McDonald Douglas and to Northrop.

When Lockeed executives found out, they petitioned the CIA to let them tell DARPA about the stealth technology that the Super Secrets Gunkworks division had been doing in order to bid on this contract. The CIA would allow Locked to tell hal Meyer about the twelve, which later would evolve into the SR seventy one reconnaissance aircraft for the Air Force,

and Lockeed would win this contract. I'll have more to say about stealth technology and some of the other tech that DARBA worked on towards the end of the seventies in just a moment, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. The original design for what would become Have Blue would later evolve into the F one seventeen stealth fighter. The original design was nicknamed the

Hopeless Diamond. The sketch was of an aircraft that vaguely resembled the Hope Diamond and had lots of facets and odd angles. No one was really sure if it would be able to fly. The weird angles were part of the stealth technology. It was all on effort to redirect those incoming radar signals so that they would not return

to the listing stations. They would bounce off into some other directions, kind of like using a mirror to direct a ray of light and you just tilt the mirror a different direction and the light goes a different way. By redirecting the radar signals, it would seem to the radar station that there was nothing in that region of the sky. That was the whole idea. Much of the work on the stealth technology took place on the most famous secret base of all time, which of course is

Area fifty one or the Groom Lake Facility. I've talked about this base numerous times in this podcast as well. The Air Force would take over the program in the late nineteen seventies and conduct flight tests all over the Tonopah Test Range, which was seventy miles northwest of Area fifty one. Some people would just call that Area fifty two. And another big project was in updating the old transit

navigation system. It was a satellite based navigation system that u ARPA had been involved with in the early sixties. This effort was to replace that with a more robust

satellite system. In nineteen seventy three, as America was withdrawing from Vietnam, the Pentagon ordered a joint program for a single navigation system that all the branches of the military would be able to use, because at this point, these various military branches had all been working on their own systems which were not compatible with one another, and eventually um the government said, this doesn't make sense. We should

have a more unified approach. So this new program was called nav Star, and DARPA helped fund the development of this program, which by was finally ready for full deployment, and it consisted of twenty four satellites with atomic clocks, which was necessary for synchronization, and they were launched into orbit to give global navigation coverage. This information could be used not just to navigate people around the world, but also for guided weapons systems. As part of the technology,

designers included what they called an offset feature. It was it was known as selective availability, and it meant that if you didn't have the right kind of receiver to descramble this information and get a readout, you would actually get a result that would be off by several hundred feet, which would limit the chances of someone unauthorized making use of the system, and it would also keep the GPS

network impractical for commercial use. That is until President Bill Clinton would end the era of selective availability and allow civilian systems to access information with essentially the same precision as military systems, and at that point GPS receivers were accurate enough to be used for things like navigation and cars, because before you would be you know, you would have like a precision of down two around a few hundred feet. That's not very useful when you're trying to look for

return anyway. During Vietnam, DARPA had funded a few drone programs as well. These were very primitive drones compared to what we have today, but it was the beginning of serious work in unmanned aerial vehicles for reconnaissance and for weaponization. They were code named Prairie and Collare. Both were remotely piloted vehicles or RPVs, and both used lawnmower motors and could carry a payload of about twenty eight pounds or

twelve point seven kilograms. These would serve as prototypes for work in the field, which DARPA would end up handing over to the Armed Forces in nineteen seventy seven, DARPA would fund another project for an unmanned aerial vehicle called Amber that was supposed to be a long endurance u

a V that would get support from the Navy. As the project was proving promising, but in the late nineteen eighties, Congress would create a new Joint Program Office to continue research and development for unmanned aerial vehicles and DARPA was effectively removed from that process. DARPA would move on to pursue a new project called Assault Breaker, which had the goal of bringing together many different disparate technologies in an effort to make them work together in a system of systems.

This idea of we have all these pieces out there and they're all effective, but it would be better if we could actually make a cohesive approach to this. So the goal was to create a means in which military commanders would have an enormous amount of information at their disposal and the capability of launching an attack on a target, even if that target were well behind enemy lines. This would require bringing together all of these different technologies that

DARPA had played a part in making a reality. Soviet Union spies learned about this program, Assault Breaker, and they reported back to their superiors in Moscow, and as eventually, military personnel in the Soviet Union wrote up a report and published it in a journal called Military Thought. It's actually a classified journal. Only a few high ranking officials

really had access to it. Well, high ranking Soviet officials and a few U. S. Spies, because, as we know, everyone is spying on everyone else all the time, always. So when US officials learned that the Soviet government was worried that the US was building up a program that would give America this incredible advantage in both gathering intelligence and acting upon it, spirits started to run high in the US because if your enemy is scared, that's good

news for you. I guess. One cool project that started independently from Darba was one that would eventually be called simnet. So there was an Air Force pilot named Jack Thorpe who was thinking about the possibility of networked flight simulators for the purposes of training pilots, you know, combat training without actually having to go up in a real jet. And he had experienced this on a small scale ld. This was not something he just came up with on

his own. He had already had sort of this experience in a system that was at the Flying Training Division of Williams Air Force Base, and that system would allow two pilots to simulate flying emission together. The simulator was complete with hydraulic motion system, so it move you as you're piloting the simulated aircraft. But again it was just

a pair of these simulators that worked together. Thorpe wondered if perhaps it would be possible to build out a much larger system with multiple UH simulators all connected to each other to allow for more complex training. Thorpe wrote up a paper titled Future Views Aircrew Training nineteen eighty through two thousand. This was in n when he wrote this, and he pitched his ideas to top Brass, but they

didn't take it very seriously. To be fair to them, the tech that Thorpe was proposing was incredibly sophisticated for the time, and also not many people really knew that much about the progress that ARPA net had been making in networking different computer systems together, so no one was really sure how feasible this was. Thorpe would go on doing his career and then he would go to the Naval War College to further his education, and after getting out of that he was assigned sort of on loan

by the Air Force to DARPA. While he was at DARPA, his boss asked him, hey, gun, any interesting ideas, you know, beyond what you're working on. So Thorpe shared his vision of these networked simulators, and his boss loved this idea and told Thorpe that you should tell this to Larry Lynn, who was then the director of DARPA. Larry Lynn liked it a lot too, and so yes, Thorpe, how much money do you think it would cost to do this project?

And Thorpe said seventeen million dollars and Lynn said, okay, doky. So the program began and it became known as Simulator Networking or sim net. DARPA would contract with delt A Graphics Incorporated, Perceptronics Incorporated, and bb IN Incorporated to help build out the system, and they would subcontract with other companies to build all these simulators. And they weren't just aircraft simulators. They built tank simulators and other stuff too,

and they networked them all together. The advantages of these simulators over real world training were numerous. Real world combat training is obviously very dangerous for some scenarios such as let's say you want to operate your aircraft, but you

also want to jam the sensors on that aircraft. Not only is that very dangerous because you're taking away some of the information that the pilots are relying upon, it's also potentially problematic because depending on where you're flying these these training missions, using that jamming technology can affect other stuff like commercial flights, or maybe the the airspace of allies, or maybe people who aren't your allies. It could be

really really touchy. But if you simulate it, you can do pretty much any scenario that the computer is capable of running. So also, because the systems were networked in theory, you could have people in different parts of the world all training together. You didn't have to get them all in the same place at the same time, though, you would have to figure out something about lag and latency for these systems. Symnet in a way was a precursor to online games that millions of gamers play these days,

like M M O RPGs. They can kind of trace, uh what not necessarily trace their history back. But symnet was definitely a precursor to that kind of stuff. There are many more technologies the DARPA helped fund In the nineteen seventies, there were xemer lasers. These were used in communications platforms between aircraft and submerged submarines. They needed to develop special lasers in the short wave range of lasers.

The longer wavelengths didn't have good penetration in the water, so you couldn't really use them to communicate with a submarine. But there was this need to communicate with submarines because at that point, really the only way a submarine could communicate with the surface is if the submarine itself surfaced, and obviously that puts the submarine in a vulnerable position.

Being able to use these short wave lasers and have them penetrate the water reach the submarine and have the submarine be able to respond opened up communication in ways that weren't possible before. DARPA also contributed some of the components for the Hubble Space Telescope. The agency would design and help build two antenna booms for the satellite telescope

in the late nineteen seventies and early nineties. DARBA pioneered the development of a special graphite and aluminum material that would allow the booms to not just conduct radio frequencies but also double as structural supports. So these structural supports that made made the overall telescope lighter. The material was lighter, it removes some of the need for some extra infrastructure. And again, if you make your payload lighter to send off into space, you bring the price down. So weight

is money, So it was a cost saving feature. It took the better part of a decade for DARPA to recover in the wake of the Vietnam War. The agency changed a lot in the nineteen seventies. And we're gonna leave off for now. We're gonna say goodbye to DARPA for the time being, but I will come back to revisit the agency and the projects that funded over the

following decades in future episodes. So we'll talk about things like star wars and autonomous cars and spying on World of Warcraft players and more, because DARPA played a role in all of that kind of stuff. It's a fascinating story. And again, because of the work that DARPA has helped fund, we have access to some pretty incredible technologies that you know, rolled out a few years later based on that early work.

So it's definitely benefited us in many, many ways. The agency has also created stuff that's been at best controversial and it worst incredibly incredibly harmful, like Agent Orange is the one to point to easily as being a truly terrible thing. So you take the good, you take the bad,

you take them both, and there you have DARPA. I guess we will revisit this in the future, but in the meantime, if you guys have any suggestions for topics you would like me to cover on tech Stuff, some sort of technology, a company, a person in tech, whatever it may be, go to tech Stuff podcast dot com. You can find all the ways to contact us there. I look forward to hearing from you. Make sure you check out our merchandise store over at t public dot

com slash tech Stuff. Don't forget we are nominated in the I Heart Radio Podcast Awards, so make sure you support tech Stuff there. I would love to be able to accept an award. I'm I'm going to be at the awards ceremony, so make sure that the speech I write is one that I get to give people. Also, just go check out the awards see if there are

shows nominated that you really love. It's always nice to give some support to the creators who make the stuff you really enjoy, whether it's tech stuff or something else. I I joke a lot about supporting tech stuff, but honestly, I think you should support whichever shows you feel deserve it the most. And if it's my show, I am very thankful for that. But if it's not, No Sweat,

I think that a good work deserves recognition. So go check that out and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics because it has stuff works dot Com. Eight