The insane American plot to stop anyone from winning the space race
We would all like to believe that the race to the moon of the 1950s and ’60s was simply two countries trying to broaden the horizons of humanity with science. In this perfect world, it was only a friendly competition to see who could breach the skies first.
Depressingly enough, nothing could have been further from the truth. The space race was an extension of the Cold War and was treated as such by NASA’s superiors at the time. Leading to what’s since been reported to be a pretty horrific atmosphere in Houston for the entire time the Apollo Program was active. After all, this was a group of scientists with not only the weight of an entire nation’s expectations on them to do the impossible, but the weight of a government’s retribution on them if they failed.
That weight was coming down on them particularly hard by the end of the ’50s, when both sides of the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States of America were convinced they had lost. Which, to be clear, they were more than justified to feel. You must understand that at the time, putting a man on the moon was only a little bit more plausible than sending him back in time. By the end of the ’50s, not only did both sides believe they were nowhere near the moon, but both believed that the other was about to build a house there.
In America, the fear of taking this defeat was particularly intense. Up until then, the Soviets had all the major firsts in the history of space travel. First unmanned probe sent into space. First manned craft sent into space. In a few years, they would have also been responsible for the first craft to orbit the moon. Hell, they’d send the first animal and plant life into space. It only made sense that they were gearing up to land the final humiliation and get to the moon before the mighty United States.
Thus, a plan began to be formulated to make sure that if the Americans couldn’t win, then no one would. The plan is one so mind-boggling, horrible that the American government has never formally acknowledged it, but a document under the name A Study of Luna Research Flights, or Project A119, was unearthed that shows the whole torrid affair – the American government invested real money, real time and real manpower in a project that, when spoken plainly, sounds like a literal joke.
If it became clear that the Russians were about to land men on the moon, the United States was going to blow up a nuclear weapon on it.
It sounds utterly absurd, but it’s true… they were going to launch a nuclear weapon into space and detonate it on the border between the light and dark side of the moon, a place literally called The Terminator Line, as if this whole thing hasn’t been on the nose enough – this way, the flash from the explosion, not to mention the dust cloud caused by it, would be visible with the naked eye from Earth. It was theorised, by a team of scientists that included a young student named Carl Sagan, that this would be enough of a display of military might to boost the morale of the American people and dissuade anyone from making an attempt to reach the moon first.
Pretty much the moment the paper on it was complete, the project was rubbished. The idea that this would boost anyone’s morale was laughed out of the room. Especially compared with the morale boost that would come from, y’know, reaching the moon first. The whole thing goes down today as a dark moment of Cold War paranoia, but it gets even scarier when you consider one simple fact, which we know of due to another declassified Cold War-era document.
The Russians had planned the exact same thing, at the exact same time.