Space Hackers
Two brothers in Turin built their own listening station in a WW II bunker to listen in on the U.S. and Soviet space programs.
The Americans were due to put a man into space on 20 February 1962, 10 months after Gagarin. The Judica-Cordiglia brothers were desperate to listen in, but NASA kept the wavelength secret for fear of Soviet interference.
“We came across a photograph of an unmanned NASA Mercury capsule being recovered from the ocean,” said Gian. John Glenn was going to fly in the same craft. In the photograph they could see the antenna. “If we could accurately determine the length of this antenna then we’d have the frequency.” But the brothers lacked a scale.
They told their father, a lecturer in legal medicine at Milan University, who had a solution. In the picture, four frogmen were sitting in a boat. He used the bizygomatic index - the distance between the right and left cheek bones in proportion to the width of the face - to calculate what 1cm (0.4in) represented on the photograph.
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