During the second world war and cold war military planners increasingly needed to move large amounts of information over long distances, beyond the reach of radio.
As the upper limit for useful radio propagation is around 30 MHz, any communications above this frequency struggled to go far, even with the help of the atmosphere and its reflecting ionosphere.
Eventually researchers discovered meteors could send data as they exploded and created a brief plasma around 100km in altitude, which could reflect signals at much higher frequencies.
With enough bandwidth to be useful, meteor burst communications was soon used by the military, with the first major system, COMET, used by NATO to link its many outposts with Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe.
With the end of the cold war COMET was renamed and is still in use, although more modern systems use higher frequencies to bounce signals off the troposphere rather than meteors.
