Getting the Facts Right
By James Oberg
ABCNEWS

Proper celebration of the Apollo 11 Moon landing demands proper remembering of what really happened. Yet in the last three decades, much of the common knowledge about that voyage has strayed from the reality.
This is understandable, since that event glares so blindingly bright in our history that it conjures up dazzling mirages and casts stark shadows. But out of respect for our farthest venture, we owe it to ourselves to get it right.
For example, purist historians have long argued that the Apollo flights did not blast off from Cape Kennedy (renamed Cape Canaveral in 1971) at all. They insist correctly that the launch pads for Saturn moon rockets (and for today's space shuttles) are really on Merritt Island, north of the more famous cape. That is what maps do show, but nevertheless the term "the Cape" has overwhelmingly come to denote the entire space center, and there's no longer any point in nit-picking this long-lost argument.

One Small Step-literally
But it remains worthwhile to battle widespread misconceptions about Neil Armstrong's first words on the moon, both what was said and when and why it was said.
This dispute is not about the first words right after the Eagle lunar module landed. They were "okay, engine stop," followed by several additional technical phrases before Armstrong first used the "Tranquility Base" call sign. No, this dispute concerns what really happened several hours later when he descended the ladder.
The astronaut came to the bottom rung of the ladder, several feet above the ground, and then jumped the rest of the way down, landing on the two-foot-wide footpad of one of Eagle's legs, but he was not yet touching the moon itself.
After jumping back up to the bottom rung, and then slipping back down onto the footpad, Armstrong slowly moved his left foot out a few inches and pressed it into the lunar dust.
Along with half a billion others, I was listening to the noisy radio transmissions, and I distinctly recall hearing him say just what he always has insisted he said. It was "one small step for a man," with the "a" practically inaudible in the static and microphone cycling. He was there too, so when he wants the words to be "a man" I suggest we go along.

Voice and Picture Don't Line Up
A far more serious distortion appears in most but not all television documentaries of the mission. Since the "small step" was really so small and his body movement so subtle, the video of this event is not dramatic enough for some programs. Instead, the audio track of the first words is transferred forward about a minute to coincide with Armstrong's first jump down the ladder to the footpad. This turns the poetic "small step" into an awkward big hop.
That may satisfy action-oriented entertainment values but it is false history. It is untrue to the significance of Armstrong's words.
Viewers, be warned! Better yet, when you see such careless falsification, complain loudly!
On the other hand, some aspects of the Apollo program, which were obscure at the time, have come into sharp focus through the miracle of hindsight. The biggest controversy back then was whether or not the "moon race" with Moscow was even real.
Throughout the 1960s and for years after, it was the conventional wisdom of the west's intellectuals that NASA had invented the "moon race" as a budget ploy. Leading news organs such as the New York Times and Parade Magazine, and public figures from J. William Fulbright to Walter Cronkite to Leonard Nimoy asserted that there never actually had been a “race to the moon”. The Russians, it was said, were too smart to waste all that money on such a stunt, while NASA encouraged the fiction to keep its finances flowing, after Apollo 11, Moscow said exactly that: If they had really wanted to race, they would have won.

The Truth Comes Out
Today we know that Moscow's post-Apollo rationalizations, and the views of so many western experts, were false. Russia did compete, and tried to build the rockets and spaceships to beat Apollo. They failed, and the American victory was genuine.
Or was it so genuine? It may not have been surprising that such an astonishing feat should find many people unwilling to believe it had actually happened. Today, however, the extent of such persistent skepticism is truly astonishing.
It's not just a few crackpots and their new books and Internet conspiracy sites. There are entire subcultures within the U.S., and substantial cultures around the world, that strongly believe the landing was faked. I'm told that this is official dogma still taught in schools in Cuba, plus wherever else Cuban teachers have been sent (such as Sandanista, Nicaragua and Angola).
At the other extreme there are also very widespread beliefs that Apollo accomplished far more than was claimed. Beyond mere moon rocks, the astronauts are supposed to have brought back descriptions and photographs of alien vehicles that followed them and alien structures found on the moon itself.

Science Becomes Sci-Fi
Sometimes these bizarre claims are based on photographic aberrations, such as window reflections of ceiling lights on one Apollo 11 move sequence, or the starkly sunlit end of the just-discarded Saturn third stage on Apollo 12 (a "structured disk", it is called), or on common film emulsion smears. Sometimes they are based on misunderstood space jargon, as when Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad joked about "company" on the way to the moon when the crew was actually watching parts of their discarded booster rocket, drifting nearby ("some nuts make a big deal of these jokes", Conrad told me later). But most often they are based purely on imaginary "leaks", on hoaxed "transcripts", on enthusiastic self-deception and on delicious delusions of space cover-up conspiracies.
In honor of this anniversary, at least one persistent myth deserves to be strangled at last. Despite the cuteness of the story, Armstrong did not say "good luck, Mr. Gorski during his moonwalk.
The charming urban legend alleges that at as a teenager Armstrong overheard a family argument about a husband's unusual sexual suggestion to his wife. "You'll get that when the kid next door walks to the moon". Armstrong supposedly heard Mrs. Gorski proclaim. Sorry, it never happened.
In the end, we need only remember that humans walked on the moon and will do so again. The mythological attachments clinging to this event are similar to what has happened with every previous great period of human exploration. They humanize a frightening, alien frontier. As long as we also remember what really happened, we can enjoy and exploit the new myths.

Neil Armstrong
Still Reticent After All These Years


By Marcia Dunnbr
The Associated Press

Neil Armstrong was standing at the pad where he blasted off on July 16, 1969, watching the tower roll away from the soon-to-be-launched space shuttle Columbia, when a technician approached him.
Would he kindly sign a photo? After all, the shuttle worker explained, we're all following your dream. The first man on the moon replied he didn't sign autographs. The worker, irritated, walked away.
Ten or 15 minutes later, Armstrong went over, asked to see the photo and scrawled his name on it. The technician thanked him. But more than two years later, the encounter was in April 1997, it still irks him.
"I can understand it if you were outside with a big crowd and everybody was bombarding you," the worker, who did not want to be identified, said in recalling the story last week. “But I don't know why he's got so many hostilities when he's around the launch pad."

Three Decades Later
Just days away from the 30th anniversary of his first step on the moon — when he proclaimed, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” — Armstrong is as reclusive and reticent as ever.
While the 68-year-old commander of Apollo 11 has agreed to attend a banquet at Kennedy Space Center on Friday, he will take part in no interviews or news conferences, and give no autographs.
He’ll be joined by Buzz Aldrin, who followed him down the ladder onto the Sea of Tranquillity. Aldrin, 69, is pushing space tourism these days as president of a couple of Los Angeles companies.
Michael Collins, 68, who circled the moon in the Apollo 11 command module, is skipping the banquet. He’s retired in Marco Island, Fla.
As usual, Aldrin is the only one of the three publicly reminiscing on this 30th anniversary of man’s first moon landing.
“As time has passed,” Aldrin told the National Press Club in Washington last month, “I’ve come to understand that the true value of Apollo wasn’t the rocks, wasn’t the data that we brought back. It was the worldwide sense of participation, of people everywhere recalling where they were at that moment, and how they shared in a human adventure that brought out the best in all of us.”

His Silence is Understood
Fellow astronauts wish Armstrong also would speak out, but they respect his decades of silence.
“I think there’s a reason to tell the story. Neil has the capability of doing that very, very well. He chooses not to,” said Apollo 12’s Dick Gordon. “You can imagine what would happen if he started something like that. I mean, the poor guy would never have any peace of mind.” Instead, that burden is borne by the Neil Armstrong Air & Space Museum, in his hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio.
“We just are bombarded weekly with requests for him, everything from ‘Will you sign this for me?’ to ‘Will you come to my son’s Boy Scout, Eagle Scout program?’”said museum manager John Zwez.
Zwez wishes Armstrong, who has an office in Lebanon, Ohio, would drop by now and then and mingle with visitors. Armstrong has no ties to the 27-year-old museum and has been there only five or six times.
“On the other hand,” Zwez noted, “the fact that Neil Armstrong is quiet and reserved about the whole thing perhaps is the better approach than going out there and selling this and selling that, promoting this and promoting that.”

Surprise Guest Appearances
Armstrong surprised many when he threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Houston Astrodome in April. Two months earlier, he introduced a singer at Italy’s San Remo music festival. Aldrin was at the songfest, too.
In response to the common question of whether he would have made a better first man on the moon from a PR perspective, Apollo 12’s boisterous commander Pete Conrad refused to comment.
“Come on. I mean, Neil’s entitled to do his thing,” Conrad, the third man on the moon, said in a recent interview. Conrad was fatally injured in a motorcycle accident last week.
Armstrong’s loner status goes way back. Conrad noted that during Armstrong’s test-pilot days at Edwards Air Force Base in California, he lived miles away in the mountains.
His piloting skills, though, were unmatched. So was his cool.

A Proven History
As a fighter pilot in Korea, Armstrong lost part of a wing over enemy territory but still managed to return to safety. He struggled to regain control of his tumbling Gemini 8 spacecraft in 1966 and brought it down early. He ejected from a lunar-lander trainer in 1968 moments before it crashed in flames. And he was down to about 15 seconds of fuel, after dodging boulders on the moon, when the Eagle landed on July 20, 1969.
“I can’t offhand think of a better choice to be first man on the moon,” Collins wrote in his 1974 book “Carrying the Fire.”
Sure, Gordon would have preferred to see his Apollo 12 buddies Pete Conrad and Alan Bean be the first two men on the moon, instead of third and fourth. But he acknowledges Armstrong “has to command a lot of respect for what he did and his capabilities.”
As for the 30 years since, Gordon said: “I make no judgment — Neil did what he wanted to do.”

The Leading Men of Apollo 11
Some of the key players, in alphabetical order:

Buzz Aldrin: Lunar module pilot and second man to walk on the moon. Now 69, he’s president of Starcraft Enterprises and two other companies in Los Angeles, and pushing space tourism.

Neil Armstrong: Mission commander and first man to walk on the moon. Now 68, he’s a businessman in Lebanon, Ohio.

Michael Collins: Command module pilot who circled the moon. Now 68, he lives in Marco Island, Fla., and spends much of his time fishing. _Kurt Debus: Director of Kennedy Space Center who started out as a member of Wernher von Braun’s German rocket team. Died in 1983 at age 74.

Robert Gilruth: Director of Manned Spacecraft Center, now Johnson Space Center, in Houston. Now 85, he suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and is in a nursing home in Charlottesville, Va.

Christopher Kraft: Director of flight operations for Manned Spacecraft Center. Now 75, he lives in Houston and is writing a book.

Gene Kranz: Flight director who later led Mission Control team that brought Apollo 13 safely back to Earth. Now 65, he lives in Houston and is writing a book.

George Low: Manager of Apollo spacecraft program for Manned Spacecraft Center. Died in 1984 at age 58.

Richard Nixon: President who addressed Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon and later canceled the Apollo program. Died in 1994 at age 81.

Thomas Paine: NASA administrator. Died in 1992 at age 70.

Rocco Petrone: Launch director. Now 73, he lives in Palos Verdes Estates, Calif., and is enjoying retirement.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Samuel Phillips: Director of Apollo lunar landing program. Died in 1990 at age 68. Deke Slayton: Director of flight crew operations and one of seven Mercury astronauts. Died in 1993 at age 69.

Wernher von Braun: Director of Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., who led team of World War II rocket scientists from Hitler’s Germany to America and led design of Saturn V moon rocket. Died in 1977 at age 65.

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The Tragedy That Wasn’t
Nixon Would Have Been Ready for Moon Landing Disaster

By Calvin Woodward
The Associated Press


When man first landed on the moon 30 years ago, President Nixon had a speech all ready in case man could not get off again.
A contingency statement was prepared for Nixon, an eerie, poignant tribute that he would deliver while the astronauts were still alive but when there was no longer any hope for them.
“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace,” says the statement, incorporated in a memo entitled “In Event of Moon Disaster.”
‘Widows-to-Be’
The memo is dated July 18, 1969, two days before the moon landing.
Nixon never had to act on it. Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin made it safely off the moon, back into the command module with Michael Collins, and home. The words were drafted by William Safire, then a Nixon speechwriter and now a columnist for The New York Times.
The memo ended up in the National Archives and was reported this week by the Los Angeles Times.
According to the memo, in the event of disaster Nixon was advised to call each of the “widows-to-be” before reading the statement to the nation.
Then NASA would cut off communication with the stranded astronauts and a clergyman would “adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to ‘the deepest of the deep,’ concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.”
It has long been rumored that astronauts landing on the moon carried suicide capsules in case their return became impossible.
The Apollo XI astronauts spent more than 21 hours on the moon, watched by millions around the world on TV. Nixon had the happy duty of putting in a phone call to them while they stood on the dusty lunar surface.

‘Epic Men’
But had something gone terribly wrong, these words were prepared:
“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.
“These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
“These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.
“They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.
“In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.
“In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
“Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.
“For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.”

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One Small Step For A Man?
Neil Armstrong meant to say "One small step for a man...", but is unsure how it came out three decades ago on the moon.

By Marcia Dunn
The Associated Press



He thought he said it. He meant to say it. But 30 years after he blasted off on Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong can’t be certain he inserted an “a” before “man” in his moon-stepping speech.
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” is how history has recorded the first words uttered by the first man to tread the lunar surface.
In his first news conference in years, at an anniversary celebration Friday, Armstrong said he came up with the line after he and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, four days after lifting off from Kennedy Space Center.
Armstrong said his “gut feeling” when he lifted off from Earth with Aldrin and Michael Collins is that they had a 90 percent chance of returning safely and that he and Aldrin had a 50 percent chance of landing successfully on the moon.
“After landing, actually having been somewhat surprised, the fact that we were able to make a successful touchdown, I realized I was going to have to say something,” said the 68-year-old Armstrong, who was the mission commander.
“But it wasn’t anything very complicated. When you just think about stepping off, why, it seemed to follow.”

A 30 Year Debate
What didn’t follow, at least for those listening back on Earth, was “a” — the subject of decades of debate among space historians and space buffs. Armstrong speculated after the mission that his voice — operated transmitter may not have picked up the word.
“The ‘a’ was intended,” Armstrong explained to reporters. “I thought I said it. I can’t hear it when I listen on the radio reception here on Earth. So I’ll be happy if you just put it in parenthesis.”
The normally reclusive Armstrong, flanked by Aldrin and two other Apollo astronauts, sat on a stool and clasped his hands in his lap as he fielded questions from dozens of journalists. He spoke quietly and with a minimum of emotion.
Would he choose privacy over being the first man on the moon?
“Never,” he replied.
Does he think about his moon landing on a daily basis? “Probably only when you guys remind me,” he told reporters.
Should America return to the moon? Society should return, he stressed.
“Yeah, I left a few things up there.”
As for the legacy of Apollo, Armstrong said: “The important achievement of Apollo was a demonstration that humanity is not forever chained to this planet, and our visions go rather farther than that.”

Celebrating the Astronauts
At a banquet later in the evening at a tourist complex housing a Saturn V moon rocket, Armstrong and Aldrin received standing ovations from the crowd of 1,000, many of them space program retirees who helped send them to the moon. Collins, who circled the moon in the Apollo 11 command module, did not attend.
“It’s never too late to say, ‘Thanks,’ and I could never say, ‘Thanks’ often enough to those of you who made it possible,” Armstrong said.
Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, noted that any of the Apollo astronauts could have been first.
“It could have been any one of a number of us,” Cernan said. “But it so happened to be that it was Neil Armstrong. And the press has questioned him and even criticized him over the years for the privacy he has maintained in his life.
“But I want to tell you as I stand here with a great deal of pride to say there is none of us, any of us in the space program who would have had that opportunity, who could have handled the responsibility with such dignity.”
Armstrong promised the press, with a shy smile: “Maybe I’ll try to do better.”

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Neil and Buzz an Unlikely Duo
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were an unlikely pairing because they had — and have — nothing in common.

By Lee Dye
ABCNEWS

They’re so different, it’s surprising that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin didn’t come to blows before their cramped lunar lander touched down on Tranquility Base 30 years ago.
In the years since, they’ve dealt with the burden of fame in very different ways.
During my interview with Armstrong a few weeks after the moon landing, he seemed aloof and very uncomfortable with his celebrity status, coming across as somewhat of a patrician. I was a young reporter who had never talked with a man from the moon; he was simply a man willing to let his deeds speak for themselves.
It’s little wonder that in the years since Apollo 11, he’s avoided the spotlight.

Buzz — his legal name for the last 20 years — is another story.
As the son of a pioneer aviator who helped Robert Goddard design rockets to carry Americans into space, Buzz seemed destined for greatness. Being a member of the first crew to land on the moon seemed natural. But being the second man — not the first — to step onto its dusty surface may have been a little harder to stomach than even he realized.
Buzz, a true superachiever, was never comfortable with second place. That kind of drive gave him the edge to shoot down two MiGs in the Korean War, and then go on to earn a doctorate in astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Several years ago, I was looking for a seat in a crowded auditorium when I heard someone shouting my name from across the room. Startled, I looked up to see someone shaking his fist at me. It was Buzz Aldrin.
We had spent several hours together a few days earlier, discussing a proposal for a shuttle system that would ferry people between Mars and Earth, much like a tugboat in a busy harbor. He also thought he could build a better space station than the one NASA was proposing then. He was passionate about his ideas, and quite frankly, some of them seemed more realistic to him than they did to me.

Wanting Press
Buzz was mad that I hadn’t managed to get his ideas on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, where I worked at the time. It was a difficult time for Aldrin, who had struggled with a number of personal demons (which should remain private) since the moon landing.
A number of astronauts have struggled to regain a sense of normalcy after adventures the rest of us can only dream of. It’s probably a bit like winning the lottery and then wondering what you’re going to do when the money doesn’t solve all your problems.
In time, Buzz got it all together. Today he runs his own company, Starcraft Enterprises, and plans to someday transport tourists to space. It’s a bold concept, but nothing less than that would appeal to a man whose notch in history is secure.

Exit Row?
These days, Buzz seems comfortable with who he is.
Rumors were rampant in the early days that, because of the seating arrangements in the lunar lander, Buzz should have stepped out of the vehicle first, but he was out maneuvered during the planning stage by Armstrong, the spacecraft commander. I asked him once if the rumors were true.
He looked at me as though I had just arrived from another planet. “Never heard that,” he said, dismissing the rumors as so much, well, horse droppings.
Armstrong seems a bit drab by comparison. After Apollo 11 he served briefly in a high-level position in NASA, and two years after the mission he returned to his home state of Ohio as professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati.
A veteran of 78 combat missions over Korea, Armstrong increasingly turned his attention to the board room, serving as a director for several corporations. He has rarely ventured into the spotlight, except to serve on various commissions, including the body charged with investigating the 1986 Challenger disaster.

Way Out of the Limelight
He has been heard from so rarely that sometimes it seems like he came back from the moon and fell off the Earth.
He recognized the dangers inherent in achieving something early in his life that will eclipse anything else he is ever likely to do.
Aldrin and Armstrong were 39 years old when the Eagle settled down in a sea of dust with only 30 seconds of landing fuel left. That leaves a lot of years to reminisce.
Armstrong took his marbles and went home, venturing into the public arena only when pressed.
Buzz is eager for another game.
It hasn’t been all that easy for either of them. Celebrity status brings a lot of baggage, and these two men, after all, are just a couple of engineers who carved a benchmark in human history.
A few thousand years from now, people will still be talking about these two guys who took us to the moon.

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Can You Buy the Moon?


By David Morgan
ABC News

Sure, it’s far from most amenities, like shopping, schools and the beach. And the commute would be a killer.
But boy, what a view.
One of the last frontiers of real estate, the moon, can be had for a song, thanks to an American entrepreneur who has laid claim to all lunar territories (as well as eight planets).
Dennis Hope, of Rio Vista, Calif., operates the Lunar Embassy as a land speculator for off-world real estate. Hope has granted rights to sell bits of the moon to the Internet site MoonEstates.com, a British real estate agency. The price: £10, or , an acre.
“The whole concept of owning a piece of the moon is such a cool one,” said Francis Williams, a founder of MoonEstates.com.
“The moon represents huge potential,” he added.
MoonEstates.com says there are presently 300,000 Earthbound owners of lunar land, some of the more illustrious being former presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, John Travolta, Nicole Kidman, and some cast members of Star Trek.
A Homesteader Far From Home
The Outer Space Treaty, signed by the United Nations in 1967, bans any nation from laying claim to the moon. But the treaty does not say individuals cannot own lunar land. That opened the door for Hope, who laid claim to the entire land surface of the moon 20 years ago, under the Homestead Act of 1862.
Hope notified the governments of the U.S. and the then-Soviet Union, as well as the United Nations General Assembly. They did not object or officially dismiss his claim, and so the celestial squatter proceeded to sell acreage of off-world properties.
Hope formed the Lunar Embassy and drew up a “bill of rights” for the moon.
“You have the right to be guided by your heart … To seek human dignity and honor … To pursue happiness, freedom of speech, religion and property management,” it says.
Clients receive a deed and map of their holdings, which they can view with a reasonably good telescope.
There are city-sized parcels available (“for a limited time only”) for those seeking to rule their own domain, as well as adjacent mineral rights. The first lunar city, Lunafornia, has already been founded. Further cities, out of deference to colonies mentioned in the film Star Trek: First Contact, will be called Tycho-City and New-Berlin.
The Lunar Embassy has set aside several designated Lunar Reserve Areas (such as the Apollo and Soviet mission landing sites), instituting a “National Park” program of environmental and historic preserve.
But what if you want to be really far from the neighbors? Hope also offers plots on Venus, Mars, Io and other heavenly bodies.

Who Exactly Owns the Moon?
The International Institute of Air and Space Law in the Netherlands acknowledges Hope’s claim on its Web site, in the article, “Who Owns the Moon?” It also points to a counterclaim made by a German pensioner, Martin Juergens, who says he has a proclamation from the 17th century Prussian King Frederick the Great bestowing the moon on one of his ancestors as a reward for services rendered.
The Institute warns, however, that “Neither of these claims could possibly be honored … you cannot give away what you do not possess yourself.”
The 1979 Moon Treaty, which would prohibit private ownership of the moon as well as government control and military use, has not been signed or ratified by most countries (including the United States).

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US Considered Nuclear Detonation on the Moon


By Deborah Zabarenko
Reuters


At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force asked scientists to plan a spectacular nuclear blast on the moon, a physicist who worked on the project said on Tuesday.
The purpose of such an explosion would have been to make a showy display clearly visible from Earth at a time when the Soviet Union was leading in the race for space, according to Chicago-based physicist Leonard Reiffel.
“We never got to a specific [nuclear] weapon nor a launch vehicle,” physicist Leonard Reiffel said in a telephone interview. The scientists did, however, detail to the Air Force “what ordinary human beings might see on Earth; the prime motivation in my view was to make a public statement.”
People would have seen a very bright flash, particularly if the dark side of the moon was toward Earth when the bomb went off, Reiffel said. Clouds of debris would also probably have been visible, he said.
The classified project, which Reiffel said he and others worked on from late 1958 through mid-1959, was known as A119, A Study of Lunar Research Flights (SECRET) and was ordered by the Air Force Special Weapons Centre.
The Air Force had no comment.
Reiffel said part of the project was to determine what scientific data could be obtained from a nuclear lunar blast.
Any possible scientific findings “did not weigh heavily on the scale, compared to the contamination of the moon and the confusion of lunar science data that would have occurred,” Reiffel said. “And I certainly was not shy in my opinion of that.”

Times of Tension
Looking back, Reiffel called the project “ill-advised” but said the tension of the times motivated it, as the United States worked to compete with the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite in 1957 and Soviet Luna spacecraft that were circling the moon and taking pictures of it, even as an earthly arms race proceeded.
“It was extremely tense,” Reiffel said. “The people who asked us to do these things, I expect … were concerned about the political world of the United States and the Soviet Union, being led to a view that the Soviets could do something that we could not successfully contest or deter.”
The matter came to light after Reiffel wrote a letter published in the May 4 edition of the British-based science journal Nature, responding to a review of two biographies of astronomer Carl Sagan, who also worked on the project.
In his letter Reiffel stressed the classified status of the project and said Sagan — later well-known for popularizing astronomy — breached security by revealing the nature of the program when he applied for a fellowship in 1959.
“Whether the project was motivated by a desire for the United States to impress the world [and the Soviet Union in particular], or by fear that the Soviet Union itself might try the stunt, I cannot say,” Reiffel wrote.

What happened to the project? “After the final report in early- to mid-1959, it simply went away, as things sometimes do in the world of classified activities,” he said.