![]() ![]() This NASA file image shows flight controllers celebrating the successful conclusion of the Apollo 11 lunar landing on July 24, 1969. ", the extent to which future operations might be conducted in space…is of such a magnitude as to almost defy the imagination.… The interactions of space and terrestrial war are so great as to generate radically new concepts." "The results of failure to first place man on extraterrestrial, naturally occurring real estate will raise grave political questions and at the same time lower United States prestige and influence," reads one 1959 Army document about a secret program called Project Horizon. Both countries wanted to get to the moon first because they thought it would give them military superiority in their long, bitter and costly Cold War. The reasons for frantic scheming on both sides of the Cold War were not just the altruistic advancement of science and a chance to feed national pride. And detailed studies recommended that the United States detonate a nuclear weapon near or on the moon, partly in hopes of setting off a "moonquake" and partly to scare the crap out of the Russians. Designs were drawn up for building nuclear reactors there, although no one seemed to have given much thought about where the radioactive waste would be disposed in the vacuum of space. ![]() Blueprints were prepared for a military base largely buried under the lunar surface. Many of the plans were prepared by the American military, which focused on how the moon could be used for fighting. Instead, the just-released documents from the 1950s and '60s, many of which were obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, portrays the much messier-and sometimes quite frightening-story playing out behind the scenes in what is arguably the most important international competition in human history. Kennedy announcing in 1961 his goal to send a manned mission there by the end of the decade, and culminates eight years later with Neil Armstrong stepping out of a lunar landing module and declaring that he was taking a small step for a man but a giant step for mankind. The polished-smooth history of America's successful effort to land a man on the moon starts with President John F. This is a tale replete with fumbling, bumbling, bickering and at least one insane-sounding notion. This is not the stirring tale of macho crew cuts and heroic deeds from The Right Stuff that is now a fat chapter in every U.S. A rotating moon pictured on Apshows the Apollo landings at "SPY: The Secret World of Espionage" at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. ![]()
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