The Day After Roswell by Corso Philip

Author:Corso, Philip [Corso, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2012-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Project Moon Base

“I envision expeditious development of the proposal to establish a lunar outpost to be of critical importance to the U.S. Army of the future. This evaluation is apparently shared by the Chief of Staff in view of his expeditious approval and enthusiastic endorsement of initiation of the study,” General Trudeau wrote to the chief of ordnance in March 1959, in support of the army’s “Project HORIZON,” a strategic plan for deploying a military outpost on the surface of the moon. It was the army’s most ambitious response to the threat from extraterrestrials and, by the time I arrived at the Pentagon, it was one of the projects that General Trudeau had handed off to me to get moving.

“The boys at NASA are taking over the whole rocket-launching business, Phil,” he said. “And the army’s not even getting the scraps left on the table.”

I had just left the White House when the National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed in 1958, and I knew what that had portended. It transferred the responsibility of space from the military services to a civilian-run agency that was supposed to fulfill the U.S. promises to other countries for the demilitarization of space. It was a laudable goal, anyone would argue: demilitarize space so that countries could explore and experiment without the risk of losing their space vehicles or satellites to hostile activities. For the United States and the Russians the agreement meant that our respective astronauts and cosmonauts wouldn’t make war on each other. Good idea. But someone forgot to tell it to the extraterrestrials, who had been systematically violating our planet’s airspace for decades, if not centuries, and had already set up a base of operations on the moon.

For General Trudeau and much of the U.S. military command, the Soviets’ ability to put high-payload vehicles and cosmonauts into orbit with relative ease was a frightening prospect. Unless the United States challenged Soviet technology with our own ongoing launch program and expanded our satellite surveillance, the army believed it would cede an all-important strategic advantage to the Soviet Union. By 1960, we were reaching a critical juncture. Because of the development window and the time it took to get projects through development, programs started too late in the 1960s would be hopelessly obsolete by 1970, when the Soviets were expected to have established a presence in space.

As in the U2 program, we had another agenda that concerned us more than just the Soviets’ ability to threaten us with a nuclear-missile capability from space. We were also very much aware of the ability of a dominant military power on Earth to establish its own version of a treaty with extraterrestrials. We had already seen how Stalin negotiated a separate nonaggression pact with Hitler, allowing the Germans to stabilize its Eastern front and invade Western Europe. We didn’t want to see Khrushchev gain so much unchallenged power in space that the extraterrestrials would readily agree to some kind of accommodation with him guaranteeing both of them a degree of freedom to dominate the political affairs of our planet.

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