Thus, the stage was set for a byzantine bureaucratic struggle among members of the same organizations but with different levels of security clearance, policy objectives, and even knowledge of what had taken place in years gone by. And underlying it all was the basic assumption that the world’s civilian population was not ready to learn the real truth about the existence of extraterrestrial cultures and the likely threat these cultures posed to life on Earth. General Trudeau was as undaunted as I had ever seen him. In Korea, he charged back up Pork Chop Hill into the face of an enemy attack so fierce that the soldiers who had volunteered to go up with him believed they were going to breathe their last. But they couldn’t let him go up there alone, which is exactly what he was set to do when he threw away his helmet and clasped one on from a wounded sergeant. He chambered the first round into his automatic and said, “I’m going. Who’s with me?” I imagined he had the same look on his face now, as he handed me the report for Project Horizon, as he did then. “We’re going, Phil,” he said, and that was all I needed to hear.
When the civilian space agency supporters told the army that all of the issues the military raised about the need to establish a presence first would be accomplished with civilian missions, General Trudeau argued that the civilian plans did not explicitly call for a base on the moon, only for the possibility of an outpost in earth orbit that may or may not be capable of serving as a way station for flights to the moon or to other planets. And the time frame for the construction of an orbiting space station made it seem obsolete even before it reached the drawing boards. Besides, General Trudeau told the scientists on Eisenhower’s aeronautics and space advisory committee toward the end of the President’s administration, you can’t trust a civilian-run agency to complete a military mission. It hadn’t happened in the past and it wouldn’t happen in the future. If you wanted a military operation completed, only the military could do it. President Eisenhower understood that kind of logic.
In the late 1950s, the White House had forwarded queries to General Trudeau about the army’s research and development policy regarding Project Horizon and why, specifically, the military needed to be on the moon and why a civilian mission couldn’t accomplish most of the scientific objectives. This was at the time when the White House was supporting the National Aeronautics and Space Act and was supporting the creation of the civilian National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
General Trudeau responded that he couldn’t immediately lay out the full extent of the military potential. “But,” he wrote in the report, “it is probable that observation of the Earth and space vehicles from the moon will prove to be highly advantageous.”
Later he wrote that by using a moon-to-Earth baseline, space surveillance by triangulation—in other words, using a point of reference on Earth and a point of reference on the moon to pinpoint the positions of enemy missiles, satellites, or spacecraft—promised greater range and accuracy of observation. Instead of having only one point of observation, we would have an additional angle because we would have a base on the moon as another point of observation. This was especially the case for the types of lunar and Mars missions NASA was planning as early as 1960. He said that the types of earth-based tracking and control networks currently in the planning stages were already inadequate for the deep space operations that were also in the planning stages in the civilian agencies. So, it made no sense to spend money developing communications and control networks that would be obsolete for the very purposes for which they were being designed. Military communications would be improved immeasurably by the use of a moon-based relay station that would cover a broader range and probably be more resistant to attack during a conventional or nuclear war that took place on Earth. But General Trudeau had the real bombshell waiting to be dropped.
“The employment of moon-based weapons systems against Earth or space targets may prove to be feasible and desirable,” he wrote the army chief of ordnance, revealing for the first time that he believed, along with Douglas MacArthur, that the army might be called upon to fight a war in space as well as on Earth. General Trudeau foresaw the possibility that a moon-based communications network would have an advantage in tracking guided missiles launched from Earth, but he also realized that weapons could be fired from space, and not just by Earth governments but by extraterrestrial craft. It was the moon-base project, he believed, that would be able to protect civilian populations and military forces on Earth from attacks launched either from earth orbit or from space. But a moon-based defense initiative had an added feature.
“Moon-based military power will be a strong deterrent to war because of the extreme difficulty, from the enemy point of view, of eliminating our ability to retaliate,” he hypothesized. “Any military operations on the moon will be difficult to counter by the enemy because of the difficulty of his reaching the moon, if our forces are already present and have means of countering a landing or of neutralizing any hostile forces that have landed.” And, the general told me, this would apply whether those hostile forces were the Soviets, the Chinese, or the EBEs. The situation would be reversed, however, “if hostile forces are permitted to arrive first. They can militarily counter our landings and attempt to deny us politically the use of their property.”
The army conceived of the development of a moon base as an endeavor similar to the building of the atomic bomb: a vast amount of resources applied to one particular mission, complete secrecy about the nature of the mission, and a crash program to complete the mission before the end of the next decade. He said that the establishment of the outpost should be a special project having authority and priority similar to the Manhattan Project in World War II. Once established, the lunar base would be operated under the control of a unified space command, which was an extension of current military command-and-control policy, and still is. Space, specifically an imaginary sphere of space encompassing the earth and the moon, would be considered a military theater governed by whatever military rules were in force at that time. The control of all U.S. military forces by a unified command had already been in effect by the late 1950s, so General Trudeau’s plan for a unified military space command was no exception to an ongoing practice. The only difference was that the general didn’t want the unified command to exercise authority solely over the moon base itself; he wanted it extended to control and utilize exclusively military satellites, military space vehicles, space surveillance systems, and the entire logistical network installed to support these military assets.
To the general, being second to the Soviet Union in deploying and supporting a permanent lunar outpost would have been “disastrous” not only to our national prestige but to our very democratic system itself. In Arthur Trudeau’s estimation, the Soviet Union was currently planning to fortify a lunar base by the middle 1960s and declare it Soviet territory. He believed that if the United States tried to land on the moon, especially if we tried to establish a base of operations there, the Soviets would have propagandized the event as an act of war, an invasion of its territory, and would have tried to characterize the United States as the aggressor and our presence as a hostile act. If they defended the moon as one of their colonies, or if they were the proxy force on behalf of the extraterrestrials with whom they had forged a military treaty, the United States would be in a weakened position. Thus, General Trudeau concluded and so advised his chief of the Ordnance Missile Command, it was of the utmost urgency that the U.S. Army devise a feasible plan to have a manned landing on the lunar surface by spring 1965, with a fully operational lunar outpost deployed on the moon by late 1966 at a cost over an eight-and-a-half-year period of $6 billion.
The first two astronauts, the spearhead of the scouting crew, were scheduled to touch down on the lunar surface in April 1965, in an area near the lunar equator where, according to the surveys, the army believed the terrain would support multiple landing and liftoff facilities and the construction of a cylindrical, ranch-house type of structure with tubular walls built beneath the surfa
ce into a crevice that would house an initial twelve personnel. The bulk of the construction materials for the lunar outpost, about 300,000 pounds, would already be on the site, having been transported there over the previous three months. According to the army plan, an additional 190,000 pounds of cargo would be sent to the moon from April 1965 through November 1966. And from December 1966 through December 1967, another 266,000 pounds of cargo and supplies would be scheduled to arrive at the now operational moon base.
It is April 1965, and a lunar vehicle with a crew of two astronauts has just touched down on the moon’s surface. Although the vehicle has an immediate liftoff capability to return the astronauts to Earth, their scouting from orbit has determined that the area is safe and that there are no threats from either the Soviets or any extraterrestrials. The radio crackles with the team’s first instructions.
“This is Horizon control, Moonbase. You are go for the first twenty-four hours,” Horizon control at the Cocoa Beach, Florida, Cape Canaveral Space Command Center advises the astronauts. They secure their lander, which, if they receive the go to stay for additional periods, will ultimately become their cabin for the next two months as the construction crews arrive from Earth to begin the assembly of the lunar outpost.
However, even before the first manned cargo ships arrive, the advance crew of two astronauts will confirm the condition of the cargo that has already been delivered to the site, refine the environmental studies that have been conducted by the unmanned surveillance probes, and verify that the initial measurements and assumptions for the site of the moon base are correct.
By July 1965, the first crew of nine men arrive to begin laying the cylindrical tubes in the crevice beneath the surface and install the two portable atomic reactors that will power the entire outpost. A number of factors influenced the army’s decision to sink the main structures beneath the lunar surface. The most important of these were the uniform temperatures, the insulation of the lunar surface material itself, protection from a potentially hazardous shower of small meteors and meteorites, camouflage and security, and protection from the kinds of radiation particles that are normally prevented from reaching Earth by our atmosphere.
Army engineers designed the cylindrical housing units to look and act like vacuum tank thermos bottles with a double wall with a special insulation between. The thermos design would prevent heat loss and so insulate the housing unit so that just the heat radiated by the internal artificial lighting system would be more than adequate to maintain a comfortable temperature inside. The crew’s atmosphere was to be maintained by insulated tanks containing liquid oxygen and nitrogen with the waste moisture and carbon dioxide absorbed by solid chemicals and recycled through a dehumidifier. Eventually, as the base became more permanent and new crews were rotated in and out, a more efficient recycling system was to be installed.
The initial construction crew was assigned to live in a temporary configuration of cylindrical quarters as their numbers were increased by an additional six men and more supplies. Like the permanent facility, the temporary construction cabin would be buried in a crevice beneath the lunar surface, but it would be smaller than the permanent cabin and have none of the laboratory facilities that were to be built in the permanent structure. From the component parts already shipped to the landing site, the construction crew was to assemble a lunar surface rover, a digging and trenching vehicle—similar to a backhoe—and a forklift type of vehicle that would also serve as a type of crane. With just these three devices, the army believed, a crew of fifteen workers could assemble a permanent outpost out of prefabricated components. The Horizon plan for construction of facilities in a weightless, airless environment ultimately became the model for the construction of both the Russian Mir and American Freedom space stations.
While the construction of the permanent subsurface structure was under way, other members of the crew would lay out the multiantenna communications system that would rely on geosynchronous Earth satellites to relay transmissions back and forth from Earth ground stations. Lunar-based tracking and surveillance radar equipment would also maintain a constant vigilance of the earth and be able to track any orbital vehicles from the earth’s surface as well as space vehicles entering the planet’s atmosphere from outer space. Members of the crew would communicate with each other and with the outpost itself by radios mounted in the helmets of their space suits.
By the time the army was proposing Project Horizon, army engineers had already selected a number of launch sites. Instead of Cape Canaveral, the army chose an equatorial location because the earth spins fastest at the equator and this would provide added thrust to any rocket with an especially heavy payload. The army chose a secret location in Brazil where it wanted to start construction on an eight-launchpad facility that would house the entire project. The spacecraft would be monitored and controlled from the facilities at Cocoa Beach, where the army and navy were already launching their satellites.
We broke the program into six separate phases beginning with the June 1959 initial feasibility, which was written in response to General Trudeau’s first proposal and became Phase I of the entire plan. Phase II, scheduled to be completed in early 1960, when I was to take over the project, called for a detailed development and funding plan in conjunction with preliminary experimentation on some of the essential components. During this phase, I had planned to use our regular Army R&D procedures to manage and review the testing and make sure that we could do what we said we could do under the initial feasibility study.
In Phase III, we scheduled the complete development of the hardware and the system integration for the entire project. This included the rockets, the space capsules, all of the lunar transportation and construction vehicles, the launch facilities at the proposed site in Brazil, and the lunar outpost components for both the temporary and the permanent bases. Also included in this phase was the development of all of the communications systems, including relay stations, surveillance systems, and the personal protective and communications gear that the astronauts would use. And finally, Phase III called for the engineering of all the actual procedures needed for Horizon to be successful such as the orbital rendezvous, orbital fueling of lunar transportation vehicles, transfer of cargo in orbit, and launching and testing of cargo rockets.
Under Phase IV, scheduled for 1965, the first lunar landing was to take place. The establishment of the first two-man lunar observation outpost and the construction of the preliminary living and working quarters for the first detachment of the crew were all slated for completion. The plans stated that by the end of this phase, “a manned lunar outpost will have been established.”
Phases V and VI were the operational phases of the project and were scheduled to be completed over a two-year period beginning in December 1966 and winding up in January 1968. Under these phases, the lunar outpost would progress from the preliminary construction phases to the construction of the permanent facilities. These facilities begin the surveillance of Earth, establish our military presence by the emplacement of fortified positions on the moon, and begin the first scientific experiments and exploration. In Phase VI, based upon the success of the permanent outpost and the exploration of the lunar terrain, the army planned to expand the outpost with more landings and additional facilities and report on the results of biological and chemical testing and the first attempts to exploit the moon as a commercial entity. The army also believed, because that was the way we in R&D believed we could pay back the enormous development overhead we incurred, that by commercially exploiting the moon, perhaps through the same kind of federal land-leasing deals the Department of the Interior currently grants for oil and mineral exploration, we could put the billions of dollars spent back into the federal coffers.
Project Horizon also outlined the development of an Earth-orbiting station as an ancillary project to support the lunar landing missions. Under the “Orbital Station” specifications, the Army Ordnance project developers suggested the launching and assembly o
f an “austere, basic” orbital platform that would provide astronaut crews on their way to the moon with a rendezvous point for exchanging and increasing their payloads, refueling, and relaunching their spacecraft. The orbiting station would also be important in the early cargo shipment stages of Project Horizon where army crews could handle the cargo loading in the weightlessness of space faster and easier than they could on Earth. Cargo could be shipped up separately, travel in earth orbit with the station, and then be reassembled by crews who would live in their own spaceship cabins instead of in the space station and then return to Earth when the refueling and reassembly of payloads was complete.
If the preliminary basic space station were successful, the army envisioned a more elaborate, sophisticated facility that would have its own scientific and military mission and serve as a relay station for crews on their way to or from the lunar outpost. This station would have an enhanced military capability and enable the United States to dominate the airspace over its enemies, blind its enemies’ satellites, and shoot down its missiles. The army also saw the enhanced orbiting space station as another component in an elaborate defense against extraterrestrials, especially if the military were able to develop high-energy lasers and the particle-beam weapon we had seen aboard the Roswell spacecraft. The space station would, according to the army plan, effectively provide the platform for testing Earth-to-space weapons, and these, General Trudeau and I agreed, would be primarily directed against the hostile extraterrestrials who were the real threat to our planet.
The Day After Roswell Page 19
