In the 1960s, an unexpected gift from the Air Force led Herb Weiss ’40 to develop an antenna that could track a speeding bullet 1,000 miles above Earth. And a radome Buckminster Fuller had helped design protected it.
This 1964 Technology Review photo shows Haystack’s 120-foot-diameter primary reflector about to be adjusted so that no point on its quarter-acre surface would be more than 0.075 inches from a perfect paraboloidal contour.
MIT Museum
In the summer of 1952, a group of scientists, engineers, and military people convened at Lincoln Laboratory amid brewing Cold War tensions to evaluate US vulnerability to air attacks. The “Summer Study,” led by MIT physics professor Jerrold Zacharias, recommended establishing what became known as the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line—a network of surveillance radars and communication links from Alaska across northern Canada to Greenland that could warn the US three to six hours ahead of an attack. The US Air Force soon signed off on a plan to do just that.
Beyond tackling major electrical engineering issues involved in developing the DEW Line, Lincoln Laboratory engineers also had to figure out how to protect the giant radar setups from the elements. At the time, large antennas were sometimes set up inside inflatable radar domes known as radomes. But such inflatables, often made of rubber or vinyl (sometimes coated), would be no match for the Arctic’s snow and rain, howling winds, and bitter temperatures. To design a rigid radome that would offer weather protection but still be electromagnetically transparent, they enlisted the help of Buckminster Fuller, the geodesic dome’s inventor. Fuller recommended a three-quarter-sphere design and advised constructing it of polyester-bonded fiberglass, an exceptionally strong, lightweight, and affordable material. The team built a prototype 31 feet in diameter that survived 1954’s Hurricane Carol atop a Lincoln Laboratory building and then withstood the harsh conditions at the summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Radomes 50 feet in diameter were then built for DEW Line antennas in Greenland and Newfoundland and on Cape Cod.
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In 1955, Lincoln Laboratory would also begin developing the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), a crucial piece of the “mutually assured destruction” counterstrike capability meant to deter the Soviets from launching ICBMs armed with nuclear weapons. The Millstone Hill radar system, designed by radar engineer and Lincoln Laboratory director Herbert G. Weiss ’40 as a prototype for BMEWS, went live in 1957 in Westford, Massachusetts, just in time to track the Soviet Sputnik I satellite. Described in Technology Review as “one of the most important sources of satellite tracking information in the Free World,” Millstone was immensely effective at the task—and also held great promise for astronomers eager to study planets. So a companion radar dish that was bigger, more precise, and more powerful was definitely on Weiss’s wish list for Lincoln Laboratory.
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In 1960, Major John Shock of the US Air Force called Weiss with a novel proposition. He asked if Weiss “could think of any use for a 150-foot space-frame radome of the type Lincoln Laboratory had designed for BMEWS,” as Weiss recalled years later. “The Air Force had ordered nine radomes, but they only decided to install eight radars, and they wanted to stop paying storage charges at a manufacturer’s plant.” The technology wasn’t a perfect match for Weiss and Lincoln’s vision, but it was close enough.
Construction began in 1961 on the radome to house what would become known as the Haystack Radar Dish, up the hill from Millstone. Haystack was to be 2,500 times more sensitive than the original Millstone system—a powerful tool for US satellite communications, space surveillance, and interplanetary radar astronomy. It would be the only US system able to track a “stationary” communications satellite in a 24-hour equatorial orbit more than 22,000 miles above Earth.
This ad for Lincoln Laboratory, which ran in Technology Review in April 1963, features a rigid radome. The lab had designed radomes for the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line radars with input from Buckminster Fuller.
MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Haystack’s new technology would be as expensive as it was expansive, ultimately costing $155 million in today’s dollars. Neither development nor construction was simple; a third of the project’s funding was spent designing and redesigning the antenna 42 separate times, which required “up to six continuous running hours on IBM 7094 computers” and a “wheelbarrow load of computer printouts,” as Weiss later recounted.
Given the hefty price tag to develop the antenna, the Air Force’s gift was especially welcome. On-site construction of the radome, which would preserve Haystack’s unprecedented precision by protecting the radar dish from solar radiation and the vagaries of New England weather, commenced in 1961, long before the antenna was to be delivered—in pieces—to Westford. Like a ship in a bottle, the antenna would be built inside the nearly completed radome. After testing a scale model of the radome in the MIT Wind Tunnel, the engineers constructed it out of 930 laminated-fiberglass triangles, each only as thick as six sheets of paper but able to withstand 150-mile-per-hour winds. The Boston Globe called it “a jig saw puzzle with the back-breaking geometric name of a trapezoidal hexecontahedron, involving three miles of aluminum space frame beams which hold together an acre and a half of the thin but strong fibre-glass triangles.”
Haystack’s antenna components were delivered to Westford in early 1963. The 120-foot-wide parabolic antenna had been manufactured at an Ohio aviation plant and designed to rise 50 feet above a 67,000-pound hydrostatic bearing assembly, the largest ever machined. Each piece weighed over 20 tons. The dish initially used radar to observe Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and parts of Venus, also serving as a ground terminal for satellites. Technology Review reported that it would “be capable of tracking a target no bigger than a dime at a distance of 1,000 miles,” unheard-of precision for the era.
This precision of movement was aided by the fact that the antenna floated on a film of oil roughly the thickness of a human hair, thus eliminating static friction. The antenna could rotate through more than three degrees of arc in less than one second, completing a 180-degree turn in under a minute.
Another novel feature was the antenna’s plug-in equipment boxes, used for various astronomy and radar experiments at wavelengths up to 115 gigahertz. Each equipment box weighed up to 6,000 pounds and required 500 gallons per minute of cooling water to be cycled up the tower and into the box. (Updated versions still exist in the redesigned Haystack antenna but take two hours, rather than days, to swap out.)
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Herbert G. Weiss ’40 leaped at the chance to build the high-power Haystack radar when the Air Force offered Lincoln Lab a 150-foot radome.
MIT MUSEUM
The Haystack antenna was dedicated on October 8, 1964. General Bernard A. Schriever, commander of the Air Force Systems Command, spoke at the ceremony, and Herb Weiss and John Shock received awards for their contributions. Weiss was praised for his “vision, dedication, and leadership” in microwave development “ever since he interrupted his graduate study at M.I.T. to join the World War II Radiation Laboratory,” and as someone who “has had a hand in the development of many important military radar systems, both large and small.”
Computers, as Weiss pointed out, were crucial to the way astronomers would use the new antenna. “A man can talk to a computer in simple English,” he told the Boston Globe. “He types the name of the object he’s interested in, plus other data he may have, and the computer generates pointing instructions for the dish 250 times a second. We have to point the antenna so that when the signal arrives, that’s where the target is. For example, it’s a five-minute round trip to Venus for radio signals.”
Praise for the new Haystack antenna was hyperbolic: It had “20-20 vision.” It was so powerful it could “put a signal on the moon that an astronaut can hear with a pocket-sized transistor radio.” And it could “pinpoint a speeding 22-caliber bullet 1,000 miles out in space.” But Weiss himself could explain the technology best and most clearly. In a 1965 joint WGBH-MIT TV production, he demonstrated the antenna’s movements and capabilities on a small model before taking the reporter and production crew on a tour of the actual radome, pointing out details in the massive edifice as small as the 1,800 one-inch-wide “targets” on the reflector’s surface that could be calibrated so that “no part of [the antenna] is more than 1/75,000 of an inch from where it’s supposed to be.”
Haystack was big news because it would allow scientists and researchers to take important next steps in microwave technology, radio physics investigations, and ground-based experimental space communications programs. Its “needle-sharp beams” would enable study “of the moon and planets, stellar radio sources, interstellar gas clouds, and external galaxies.” (Weiss was not a fan of calling it Haystack. “The newspapers heard about using needles in space and this got tied to using Haystack as finding needles in space,” he told the Boston Globe in 2021. “We never could get rid of the name, even though we never liked it.”)
Ultimately, Haystack could—and would—do more than just keep its eye on those pesky Soviet satellites. The antenna was used to image the surface of the moon to help NASA determine where the Apollo space capsules should land. It has also been used to corroborate Einstein’s general theory of relativity, pioneer the astronomical and geodetic use of very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI), and study black holes.
The radome’s 1.5- acre exterior comprises 930 triangular panels and is held together by 15 tons of nuts, bolts, and washers.
MIT MUSEUM
The old Haystack antenna was decommissioned in 2010 and an updated version was deployed in 2014 as “the highest-resolution space-object-imaging radar in the world,” thanks to the inclusion of the Haystack Ultrawideband Satellite Imaging Radar (HUSIR) developed at Lincoln Laboratory.
In September 2021, Herb Weiss, then nearly 103, braved the covid-19 pandemic to speak in person at the opening of a new exhibit on the antenna’s history and the scientists who developed it. As Colin J. Lonsdale, Haystack’s director at the time, told those assembled to mark the occasion: “This place wouldn’t exist if he had not had the leadership and the vision and the drive to make it happen.”
