SHOOTING THE MOON

It was a dark and stormy night on October 4, 1957. Well, actually, in many areas it was clear, which meant that the Sputnik 1 satellite launched on that date by the Soviet Union was in fact visible to the naked eye by ground observers (albeit barely as only a dim sixth magnitude object).

The Ruskies, by launching the first made-made object in orbit,* caught the Americans by surprise and had taken a devastating lead in the space race. The Americans had to respond and raise the stakes to show that the USA also could kick butt in the cosmos.** Hence, "A Study of Lunar Research Flights," also known as "Project A119," was born.

What was Project A119? Landing a man on the moon? Taking pictures of the moon from a satellite? Orbiting around the dark side of the moon? Nuking the moon?

Bingo. What better and more dramatic way to demonstrate good old American technology than to launch a nuclear warhead towards the moon and produce a detonation that would be visible to the naked eye on Earth? The Americans believed that they could hit within two miles of the selected site (on the edge of the moon, where the sun could highlight the mushroom cloud), which would certainly be accurate enough for their purposes. In deference to the impractical heavy weight of hydrogen warheads, they intended to use an ordinary wussy atomic bomb.

"Hey, Premier Khrushchev, we are all about the peaceful exploration of space. Our detonation of nuclear weapons on celestial bodies is in no way intended to be provocative."

Concerns about radioactive materials eventually making their way back to Earth and the risk that the missile might deviate and hit something on this planet caused the authorities to cancel the project in 1959.

Oh, by the way, before his Cosmos days, graduate student Carl Sagan was part of the A119 team.

For more information on Project A119, please see this article in The Guardian.

*Actually, it possibly was the second man-made object launched into orbit, but that is a Factoid topic for another day.

**It is unlikely that the American leaders back then could have conceived of a day where US astronauts had to be launched on Russian rockets because the Americans had performed a voluntary orchiectomy on their own space program.

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