The Communication Moon Relay project (also known as simply Moon Relay, or, alternatively, Operation Moon Bounce) was a telecommunication project carried out by the United States Navy. Its objective was to develop a secure and reliable method of wireless communication by using the Moon as a natural communications satellite — a technique known as Earth–Moon–Earth communication (EME). Most of the project's work took place during the 1950s at the United States Naval Research Laboratory. Operation Moon Relay was spun off from a classified military espionage program known as Passive Moon Relay (PAMOR), which sought to eavesdrop on Soviet military radar signals reflected from the Moon. Background Communication Moon Relay grew out of many ideas and concepts in radio espionage. Some impetus for the project was provided by post-World War II efforts to develop methods of tracking radio signals, particularly those originating in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Other sources included earlier proposals to use the Moon as a radio wave reflector, which date back to 1928. The first proof of this concept was the Project Diana program of the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1946, which detected radar waves bounced off the Moon. This attracted the attention of Donald Menzel. Menzell was a staff member of the Harvard College Observatory and a former United States Navy Reserve commander, who proposed that the Navy undertake a program to use the Moon as a secure communications satellite. Prior to the Moon Relay project, long distance wireless communication around the curve of the Earth was conducted by skywave ("skip") transmission, in which radio waves are refracted by the Earth's ionosphere, which was sometimes disrupted by solar flares and geomagnetic storms. Before artificial satellites, the Moon provided the only reliable celestial object from which to reflect radio waves to communicate between points on opposite sides of the Earth. The developments in Moon circuit communications eventually came to the attention of James Trexler, a radio engineer at the Naval Research Laboratory. His interest was piqued by a paper published by researchers at an ITT laboratory. Trexler developed plans for a system designed to intercept Soviet radar signals by detecting the transmissions that bounced off the Moon. This program, codenamed "Joe," began making regular observations in August 1949. Within a year, "Joe" was made an official Navy intelligence program, the Passive Moon Relay (PAMOR). In September 1950, a new parabolic antenna for the PAMOR project