Project A119

In 1958, months after Sputnik, the U.S. Air Force commissioned a secret study at the Armour Research Foundation in Chicago titled A Study of Lunar Research Flights, known as Project A119. Physicist Leonard Reiffel led a small team that examined what would happen if a nuclear weapon were exploded on or near the Moon: how bright the flash would be from Earth, what dust cloud it would raise, and what scientists could learn about the Moon's surface and the effects of nuclear blasts in space. A young graduate student, Carl Sagan, calculated how the expanding dust cloud would behave.¹²

The motive was largely political: a flash visible from Earth would have shown the world that the United States could match the Soviet Union in space. Planners decided the scientific gains did not justify the risks of contaminating the Moon, the possibility of a failed launch falling back to Earth, and the likely public reaction, and the project was dropped by 1959. The Soviet Union studied a similar idea. Reiffel revealed the study in 2000, and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty later banned nuclear weapons on celestial bodies.¹²