Chuck Bryant

Yeah, she really did.

Surrounded by mountains because mountains provide a natural barrier for those radio signals.

And probably not near a city, but not too far from Washington, D.C., where things would likely be headquartered.

So they finally looked around.

They settled on the Appalachian Mountains between Virginia and West Virginia.

That is part one of solving the problem.

Part two was getting funding.

Luckily, President Eisenhower was kind of into this.

So in 1956, he asked Congress back when that was a thing for $7 million to fund a radio astronomy center.

And Congress said, yeah, let's do it.

Yeah, they kind of laid the groundwork, I feel like.

That's right.

So that smaller NRQZ, the National Radio Quiet Zone, had from the jump had some looser restrictions than the even much smaller WVRAZ.

It covered a much larger area, about 13,000 square miles.

But think of it this way.

It's really a rectangle, the NRQZ, 13,000 square miles across Virginia and West Virginia, and a little bit of Maryland, the southernmost tip on that western panhandle.

Just the tip.

Just the tip.

It's very mountainous.

It's got parts of the Allegheny, parts of the Blue Ridge Mountains.