Kingdom Come

In 1959 the USSR’s Luna 2 was the first spacecraft to reach the surface of the moon.

It is impossible to believe that just 2 years after the first successful launch of a satellite the size of a basketball that reached only 583 miles high the USSR was able to build a spacecraft capable of both making it through the Van Allen Belts and traveling 250,000 miles to the moon and confirm its arrival by a strong enough radio signal to make it through the Van Allen Belts’ interference.

Be gullible if you think its cool and lets you hang with the hip crowd. But there is every reason the hip crowd really despises you and is just using you, as well as reason to disbelieve the Soviet claim.

Not the least is America’s’ failure to beat it.

In 1959 the U.S. launched the X-15, a small rocket-powered aircraft.  For flight outside of the appreciable Earth’s atmosphere, the X-15 used hydrogen peroxide rockets which provided thrust for 80 to 120 seconds of flight. The remainder of the normal 10-11 minute flight was powerless and ended with a 200 mile-per-hour glide landing.

The X-15 research aircraft provided inflight information and data on aero-thermodynamics, aerodynamics, structures, flight controls and the physiological aspects of high-speed, high-altitude flight. A follow-on program utilized the aircraft to carry various scientific experiments beyond the Earth’s atmosphere on a repeated basis. The three X-15 aircraft made 199 powered flights, concluding with the last flight on Oct. 24, 1968. Total cost of the X-15 program, including development of the three aircraft, was about $300 million. 

To do what? Well, what we KNOW was the case at that stage in space exploration is that the Van Allen Belts posed an impenetrable barrier to spacecraft or instruments attempting to enter.

In 1966, the USSR’s Luna 9 became the first spacecraft to achieve a controlled soft landing and Luna 10 became the first spacecraft to orbit the moon.

Why so long, if they had gotten to the moon in 1959?

Don’t believe it.

In 1968 the US’s Apollo 8 was the first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon.

We have no reason to believe this either.

On 16 July 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were strapped into their Apollo spacecraft on top of the vast Saturn V rocket and were propelled into orbit in just over 11 minutes. Four days later, Armstrong and Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the lunar surface.

An estimated 650 million people watched Armstrong’s televised image and heard his voice describe the event as he took “…one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” on July 20, 1969.

Or did they?

Before blackballing this writer as an idiot conspiracy theorist, compare this effort made to understand the claim against your own. 

Put this claim in context of technological development. We have to believe that in just ten years the U.S. made a giant leap from developing a rocket that could keep a man aloft in the X-15 for 2 minutes max to a rocket that could travel roughly 500,000 miles to the moon and back.

Put this claim in the context of America preparing for worst-case scenario nuclear war against the Soviets. Whose got the high ground now, baby!! Better think twice about dropping one on us!

Despite the popular belief that space is peaceful, the military has always played a role in its exploration.

Military officers piloted most Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft, which its [military] rockets boosted into space.

Behind the scenes, the Pentagon planned its own secret space missions, coordinated by an agency later renamed DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

When we follow a linear and logical trail of thought, can we not see that the most valuable “space” is that which is closest to earth for military, and of course commercial, purposes?

Today…“The space environment has become increasingly congested, competitive and contested,” Frank Rose, a senior fellow for security and strategy at the Brookings Institution and former assistant secretary of state for arms control, explained to Congress in March 2019…

From the start, the military rationale for space weapons was to control the high ground and shoot down enemies. Such an attack, generals and politicians argued, would be impossible to stop…

The U.S. military dreams of “space superiority” or “counter-space dominance.” Judging by their own publications and statements, Russian and Chinese strategists clearly share such reveries. Nascent space powers like India and North Korea may do so as well. Yet technology advantages often prove fleeting. After all, the U.S. military once had an exclusive hold on atomic weapons, jet aircraft, ICBMs, semiconductors, cyberwarfare, and artificial intelligence. It may still lead in those fields, but it is clearly no longer alone…

As the technologies of space warfare continue to become ever more sophisticated, the Earth seems trapped in a slow spiral of escalation toward open conflict in space. 

Preparation for war is the context in which every – every – activity in space must be viewed.

After collating various sources of data on this subject and comparing and contrasting conflicting statements from NASA itself, I don’t find America’s claim to have landed men on the moon to be a valid – externally supported – or reliable – internally consistent – claim.

Fifty years on, the Apollo Moon program is probably still humankind’s single greatest technological achievement.

Seriously? That statement is simply incredible in light of all the technological achievements made in the last 50 years.

That statement is also incredible in light of

• the lack of technological achievements made by the U.S. in contrast to the USSR
• in the 16 years between both seizing existing rocket science as spoils of war from Germany in 1945
• and initial space achievements.

By 1961 the USSR had beaten the US in every space race event –

• the first to rocket a man into space,
• the first to orbit the earth,
• the first to spend a significant amount of time in space.

But within the next 8 years in a massive technological leap forward the US

• developed the Saturn Rocket
• which propelled a series of spaceships in round trips totaling 500,000 miles to the moon and back
• never again repeated by any nation including the US or the highly competitive Russians or emerging power houses China or India

In 1972 the US sent its last crewed missions to the moon. 1972 was the most recent time humans have set foot on the Moon or traveled beyond low Earth orbit.

I encourage you to listen to NASA’s own public service announcement, launched in 2014, on Apollo’s replcement, the Orion spacecraft.