(ORDO NEWS) — A historical treatise recently published in Acta Aeronautica discussed some of the US plans for a base on the moon.
The planners wanted to show that they could create the technology to get to the Earth‘s satellite.
NASA, which was created in 1958, began designing moon bases. The space research sector has received several interesting proposals from the US Air Force and the Army.
The Air Force proposed the LUMAN project. It consisted of three parts. The first step was called Man in Space soonest (MISS).
The idea was to send people into space, preferably before the USSR did. The next step was to launch the LUREC (Lunar Reconnaissance) orbiter to the Moon.
Then began the manned moon landing and return phase, which would eventually get humans to the moon by 1964.
Interestingly, Neil Armstrong was prominent in the group of astronauts who were to participate in the project. But the program described by the Air Force was canceled and later returned to life as Project Mercury.
In order not to be left out of the lunar race, the US Army came up with the Horizon project.
Wernher von Braun, NASA’s first director, was part of this short-lived project. The ideas laid down in the research of the army were continued in the Apollo project.
Probably one of the strangest ideas (which, fortunately, did not come to fruition) was a secret US Air Force plan to send a nuclear bomb to the moon and power it.
The planners had, in their opinion, a good scientific justification for such an experiment, but it, fortunately, was not carried out.
Also, scientists have designed residential modules that should be hidden under the lunar regolith. Underground cities would protect people from radiation, meteor bombardment and other dangers.
In addition, researchers have thought long and hard about the use of the Moon’s natural resources by its inhabitants. Much of the resource utilization project is part of modern mission planning.
The history of moon base planning contains many more projects that have never gone beyond the drawing boards. But they were not completely abandoned.
They are a reflection of a period in history when the scientists of the two countries faced difficulties in studying space.
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