Chuck Bryant

They'd have to use eminent domain just to kick people out.

But 1954, like you said, it was a little bit easier.

So for a couple of years, they got together over coffee about where they could put this thing.

It needed minimal radio noise, obviously, like we talked about, probably a pretty limited population.

By the way, thanks for Anna for this one.

She did a great job on this.

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.