*Originally posted on Medium here, I am reposting this article on my personal page so that non-medium subscribers can have access to it.
An Introduction.
The concept of a “moon base,” of helmet-clad people venturing across the lunar surface from their shining steel homes, has occupied the American consciousness since the dawn of the space age, as both an object of fantasy and a very real possibility. Humans living semi-permanently on the Moon has persisted as staple of the science fiction genre in film, literature, and beyond since 1953’s Project Moonbase. It’s popped up in classics across the decades from Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in 1966 to Andy Weir’s 2017 novel Artemis. There’s just something in the concept of moving human life onto another world, of standing in a quiet place looking out at the quieter dark of the empty beyond, of kicking up clouds of regolith in a wild drive across a rugged, exotic surface, that captures the imagination of the American spirit, raised on stories of the Wild West where frontierism and Manifest Destiny are not just good and right ideas, but an expression of divine providence.
Fascination with the possibilities and inherent symbolism of a moon base extends far beyond pop culture and public discourse. Establishment of a lunar station remains a target not only of NASA’s human exploration program but also, more quietly, of the US military. NASA’s current human exploration-focused projects, including the newborn Artemis program and the questionably funded Lunar Gateway (full name Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, formerly known as the Deep Space Gateway), are explicitly stated to be individual pieces of a larger project of developing truely “sustainable infrastructure” on the Moon. The missions planned for Artemis and the Lunar Gateway extend into the next decade; both concepts have undergone heavy criticism from NASA insiders and outsiders alike. If these programs advance beyond concept studies, they may advance American dreams of a moon base farther than ever before.
But wait, what about the military? What does the US military have to do with this?
To consider the goals of the US military as separate from the aims of NASA’s human space exploration programs is to ignore the fact that both have had a long and storied history of cooperation since NASA’s establishment in 1958. Indeed, the military’s interest in the potential of a moon base extends all the way back to the earliest days of space exploration — the first full-length proposal on the subject was produced by members of the US Army’s research and development team in 1959. More proposals followed into the 1960s within different divisions of the military, all focused on the potential of a moon base and all written with immense confidence — full of grand ideas, fanciful timelines, and underestimated budgets, but extremely serious in terms of goals, ambitions, and long-term ramifications of such a project.
There is an inherent absurdity in reading the military’s plans to build a moon base by the late 1960s, given our advanced knowledge of how far short these ambitious concepts fell in comparison to our reality. It is now 2020, and we are only perhaps a little bit closer to building a moon base as part of Artemis than the poor thinkers of the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division were in 1960. And yet, I’ve written this piece to revisit these reports, investigate the thinking behind them, and discuss their implications, not just for the future of American space exploration, but for how we think about space exploration as a concept.
What was the goal of a US military moon base? Exactly what we might expect — a new and innovative means of holding a gun to the world’s head for the purposes of American protection. And that, dear readers, is always a cause for discussion and concern. What are the goals of a moon base today? Who is a moon base for, and how does it fit in to our 21st century vision of space exploration? Let’s take a look backwards and find out.
Figure 1. Idealized living quarters for the crew of Project HORIZON.
From the Army’s Project Horizon to the Air Force’s Lunar Expedition: A Brief History of Moon Base Proposals
Three declassified proposals for the establishment of a moon base, prepared by different branches of the U.S. military between 1959 and 1961, are available in the National Security Archives. It is likely that many more documents of a similar nature exist, including proposals from more recent decades that have yet to be declassified. Despite their small number, these three reports still amount to over 700 pages of text describing, in detail, the technical, management, and budgetary considerations necessary to build and staff a functional moon base. Here, we address the technical considerations that filled the bulk of these pages — what did these earliest visions for a moon base look like? What were the priorities? How was such a bold endeavor, one which the proposals confidently stated was “technically feasible,” expected to actually play out?
Let’s begin with Project Horizon, the initial two-volume proposal developed by the US Army; it represents the most complete declassification of all available reports, and the later proposals largely build on the structure developed here. Clocking in at a staggering 419 pages, the report is a sublime combination of the highly technical and the borderline absurd. From the start, the proponents of Project Horizon had a remarkable grasp of all the moving pieces necessary to make a moon base work, including a functional launch infrastructure, a reliable Earth-to-Moon communications system, and some means of long-term excavation of the lunar subsurface to protect their young outpost. All of this, they noted, was needed before even considering how the outpost could be used. The end result of the proposed work was an operation of incredible scope: a permanent outpost hosting twelve men, continuously operational, at a cost of $6 billon, powered by two nuclear reactors and regular deliveries from Earth.
The most interesting bits of the report are the moments of remarkable foresight on the part of the writers, with logic that holds true today. Project Horizons’ proposed outpost is almost entirely underground, a vision at odds with pop culture imaginings of lunar civilization as a series of domed cities, but in line with today’s approach toward maximizing structural longevity. The reasoning, then as now, is as follows: placing a habitat of any kind underneath the lunar surface provides protection from micrometeorite bombardment, solar radiation, and dangerously large temperature fluctuations, and coopts the impressive insulatory powers of the lunar regolith to boot. Even the most obvious downside — asking the men to live in a twenty-foot pressurized titanium cylinder buried a minimum of three feet down — was deemed similar enough to life aboard a submarine as to seem both feasible and humane (Fig. 1). Environmental control was to be supplied by containers of liquid oxygen and nitrogen, dropped off at the station as needed by supply crafts from Earth. But the men would also have to build their base themselves, working on the lunar surface for an estimated six months with the aid of potential “lunar construction vehicles” (Fig. 2) imagined by the writers of the report. If they survived those six months of preliminary construction, the military’s newest and farthest outpost would be complete.
Figure 2. Idealized “lunar backhoe” that would assist in excavating the area necessary to build the buried lunar base.
While Project Horizon exhaustively outlined how the lunar base itself might function, the two other proposals were instead focused — with good reason — on the launch transit capabilities that made up the most immediate obstacle to lunar travel, and which were in the process of being addressed by the coalition of industrial and governmental partners enmeshed in the early days of the Apollo program. The base itself remained more of an artists’ rendition — would it host 12 men, or 21? Would they be deployed for 6 months, or a year? Could a launch schedule even support such a concept? A competing Air Force proposal noted that a functional base might require a lunar launch every month, with an annual operating cost of $631 million ($1.4 billion today). Given their optimistic assessment of all costs associated with technology development, this is likely an aggressive underestimate.
The further the proposal writers got in their timelines the more unrealistic their goals and associated budgets became, despite claims by the 1961 LUNEX team that their concepts were both “economical and reliable.” A fully functioning lunar base in 1969, from a project start date in 1960? The 1969 lunar landing was a well-funded miracle; Project Horizon and its compatriot proposals were asking for more money, more rockets, and more good luck. It’s no wonder they were published, reviewed, and apparently set aside. But this raises a secondary question — why, if these concepts were so unfeasible, did various sections of the US military come back to the idea? What was the point of an American moon base?
“For political and psychological reasons, anything short of being first on the lunar surface would be catastrophic.” Project HORIZON, Vol. 1.
What are Men to Rocks and Mountains? Exploring the Military’s Stated and Unstated Goals for a Moon Base
First, let us be clear — the US military’s lunar outpost concepts were not meant to be the starting point for larger settlements or some sort of “lunar civilization.” The goal wasn’t even prestige — at least, not the same kind of prestige as the space race proper, and the idea of lunar “boots on the ground.” As the authors noted, the establishment of a lunar base was considered a “military expedition” exclusively. All development, funding, and personnel for these moon base projects would be military in origin — soldiers would staff these bases, not astronauts. Civilian science, while a great selling point for these missions to the American public, was a nice bonus, not the bases’ intended purpose. These were military installations in the most traditional sense, extrapolated to the boundary between reality and science fiction. But why was the military so convinced they were necessary? From the perspective of the Army, or the Air Force, what were these bases for? The potential military applications of these outposts were both endless and ambiguous.
Unsurprisingly, the how and the why of a lunar outpost was wrapped in the thorny logic of the Cold War. The projects sat squarely between traditional US foreign policy and the Space Race: “United States military capabilities in space are necessary to ensure that space will not be used for military purposes against the free world.” We must militarize space before it is militarized against us. The appendix of Project Horizon delves deeper into the Army’s more specific concerns: What if the Russians land on the moon first? Will they “claim the entire lunar surface” on behalf of the USSR? And if so, what will the United States do? If they claim only a portion of the lunar surface, what then? Could separate lunar bases built by each superpower coexist on the moon? The Moon, as well as space as a whole, was completely new territory for foreign policy, and rapidly evolving concerns of what was and was not “legal,” including claiming the Moon on behalf of a terrestrial nation, made the military uneasy.
While the idea of competing lunar bases by the end of 1969 may now seem absurd, in the early 1960s these were real and very serious concerns, not just for the US military but for the US government as a whole. As the 1961 LUNEX report notes, the Soviets did not “differentiate between military and non-military space systems” the way the Americans did with NASA — making the US military unceasingly paranoid that each and every space mission undertaken by the USSR had some sort of aggressive military angle, regardless of what the Soviets actually said about it. If the Soviets made it to the Moon first, why, new “space weapon systems” trained on the capitalist world might not be far behind! Of course, the US military was certainly not averse to developing advanced weapons systems of their own; the Air Force’s 1960 report suggests that a “lunar-based earth bombardment system” based on traditional ballistic missiles could have a median error radius of two to five nautical miles. The idea of weapons on the Moon fazed no one; the reports took as a given that a nation with a “military lunar system” was sure to increase its “deterrent capability.” It was only a matter of whose hand was on the trigger.
As such, these military moon bases were the military’s way of combining political impact, i.e., the clout of having men living and working on the moon with the American flag flying somewhere in the background, with the potential for “meaningful military capabilities.” These moon base concepts really were completely separate from any NASA activities with similar goals, including the Apollo program — while the authors envisioned collaboration with NASA and exchange of relevant data, including geologic and topographic maps and information concerning lunar surface composition and properties, the military unsurprisingly hoped to get everything done in-house. This was unless, of course, NASA missions and activities could be repurposed entirely for defense: the 1960 Air Force report went so far as to advocate for a system more similar to the Soviets: integrating these new military plans with NASA to generate one national lunar program that could most easily serve the military’s needs.
Needless to say, this unsettlingly militaristic NASA merger did not happen, nor did any of the moon bases so lovingly characterized by their authors. But the legacy of these old moon base concepts, as strange and sometimes silly as they seem, echo with us today. New US space policy declares that we’re “returning to the Moon to stay.” But are we truly closer to that goal? And who, exactly, is it that will be staying?
“It is recognized… that United States military capabilities in space are necessary to insure that space will not be used for military purposes against the free world; that man will move into space both for military reasons and for scientific exploration…” Project HORIZON, Vol. 1.
Legacies of hope and power: Artemis, the Lunar Gateway, and where we stand on standing on the Moon
Why did these old proposals for moon bases fail? Why is their legacy simply a series of quietly declassified documents waiting to be read by a handful of scholars? The answers to these questions are complex; null results and abandoned projects are rarely documented as they fail. It could have been the sheer scope and cost of the project, as well as the immense volume of additional technical unknowns that came with long-term life on the Moon instead of a temporary visit. It could have been a reluctance on the part of higher-ups in the military and the government to aggressively, overtly militarize the Moon at a time when the Apollo Program claimed their voyages were “a wish for peace;” these two visions of the future of space exploration were fundamentally at odds. In the end, it was likely all of these factors played a part in these moon base plans collecting dust. The vision for a peaceful moon won out, and continues to dominate the view of the Moon for the American public today.
But moon bases are not a thing of the past for the American space program, nor (likely) for the US military, if the establishment of the Space Force is any indication. Recent executive branch declarations have cast into doubt whether space in general, and the Moon in particular, can transform once again into a battleground for nationalism and/or commercialism. We come once again to a time of rapidly-evolving plans for the Moon; in the last eight years NASA’s Deep Space Gateway concept has evolved into the Lunar Gateway (Fig. 3), while the Artemis program sprung into being in 2019, born out of a deep-seated desire to return to a time when a successful space program brought with it unprecedented political and public success. The new Space Force was also announced in late 2019 as another shakeup on the military side of things; it appears that the division between public-facing and defense-focused initiatives will continue. Outside of the traditional space exploration framework the idea of a moon base is also alive and well — numerous commercial space companies are scrambling to use NASA funding to get a foothold on lunar exploration for themselves.
Here’s where we are right now in terms of a real-life moon base: NASA plans for such a settlement do not exist; or, if they do, they’re not part of the current human exploration timeline, which is focused on the dual goals of hitting the current hard deadline of “boots on the ground” in 2024 and somehow building a functional Lunar Gateway. The Lunar Gateway itself is a point of controversy in the space community, for astronauts and engineers alike. As the first space station in deep space, it would provide a “waypoint” for astronauts between Earth and the Moon, where supplies could be more easily restocked and new exploration sites analyzed with rover intermediaries instead of risking human lives. All of that might sound pretty good, but the Gateway also poses an immense logistical challenge in terms of construction, staffing, and communication, and effectively eliminates any plan for a lunar base from both a cost and redundancy standpoint. While its usefulness as an alternative to a moon base remains in doubt (since neither currently exist), astronaut Terry Virts complained that the Gateway would “shackle human exploration, not enable it” by locking exploration into a modular space station mode rather than doing something new — like establishing a lunar base. Many other ex-NASA officials also have questioned why the plan is to orbit the Moon, rather than “go directly there,” as George Abbey so succinctly put it. The problem with a grand vision like a potential “lunar civilization” is how easy that dream gets tangled in any attempt at execution. Whether Artemis and the Lunar Gateway will succeed or become another page in the story of failed great lunar exploration ideas remains to be seen.
As such, the modern world of moon base concepts is just as fraught as the early 1960s, and while the driving ethos behind them has evolved to match our 21st century sensibilities, less has changed than we might think. Just as all three early military proposals suggested, the primary draw of a moon base is lunar resource exploitation — what differs today is the resource itself. For the US government (and the military), the Moon remains a vantage point, a lever to tip the balance of American power on the global stage; however, it has also grown in importance as a very physical resource. What any of these new space companies could gain from lunar exploration seems a bit obtuse until we recall this fact. Spinning gold from the lunar regolith is a selling point for NASA’s lunar programs today, and a central tenet of all commercial space companies committed to lunar exploration. It was never enough to simply go to the Moon to stand on its surface and breathe; only today instead of lunar military installations, we dream of building lunar factories, refineries, fuel depots, and more. Which begs the question — what kind of moon base do we want, and who is it for?
Figure 3. Artist’s concept of the Lunar Gateway (left) orbiting the Moon, with an arriving Orion on the right. Image via NASA.
In Conclusion: Who is space for?
This piece began as part of my obsession with crazy old military plans that never worked out — these moon base plans are so dramatic, so bold that it’s almost funny how serious the authors are as they produce timeline after timeline, flowchart after flowchart, to make their proposals seem more realistic. Reading these proposals lets me be a tourist in the ruins of someone else’s epic dreams. Unfortunately, this piece ended up being about more than just these strange old ideas, because, for better or worse, these ideas have never really died out — they’ve simply evolved with time. The Moon is still a bargaining chip in international power plays, a stage for epic fantasy, and a potential resource landfall all in one — if only we could get there!
This leads us to a very important question — what do we want with the Moon, and why? Should the Moon be claimed by nations and corporations? Do we want military bases, and men with guns? Do we want factories and refineries and robotic processing of lunar regolith for deuterium and rocket fuel? For me at least, neither of these futures are ones I’m interested in — not even if the guns are cool space guns. I guess I really bought into the concept that Apollo 11 sold me; that Armstrong and Aldrin left two things on the lunar surface: an American flag, representing the world from which they came, but also an olive branch, representing the peaceful future they dreamed of. In seeking to reproduce Apollo with Artemis, we run the risk of retreading their steps, instead of growing beyond them the way they hoped we would.
Despite the flurry of future plans for lunar exploration, the actual future of humanity’s path to the lunar surface remains uncertain — which means that it can be changed. I said earlier that it’s not enough to go to the Moon just to go; in a society like ours, that’s certainly true. However, I’d argue that this truth is one that’s mutable. When we go to the Moon to stay, whenever that is, we will unavoidably remake the Moon in our image. I want to conclude this piece by asking you, the readers, to really think about what image you want that to be. As humans, we shape our environment, but we are also shaped by it in turn. Do we lean in to the lunar environment and try to learn from it as we attempt to live upon it, or do we do our best to make the Moon into whatever we need it to be? Now, I’m not saying our goal should be a utopian lunar society built on communal living. We’re not there yet. What I’m trying to say is: we could try to bring only the best of humanity to another world — our cooperative spirit, our daring instincts, our endless ideas — and maybe try our best to leave behind some of the rest. This is an easy thing to ask for on my end, but a bitterly difficult reality to achieve; it requires buy-in from the very national and military enterprises whose proposals I’ve critiqued here. And yet, I still think it’s an approach worth trying. After all, men in the 1950s were dreaming of lunar backhoes.
Readers! Keep dreaming of moon bases! Be daring. Be bold.
But maybe don’t go the route of Project Horizon and put a bunch of nuclear reactors on the Moon (Fig. 4).
Figure 4. One of the nuclear power plants that would help power Project Horizon’s subsurface outpost.
References
Abbey, George. “The moon is ‘a God-given space station orbiting Earth’ [Opinion]”. Houston Chronicle.
Executive Order on Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources.
Virts, Terry W. “Op-ed: The Deep Space Gateway would shackle human exploration, not enable it”. Ars Technica.
United States Army, Project Horizon, Volume I: Summary and Supporting Considerations, March 20, 1959
United States Army, Project Horizon, Volume II: Technical Considerations and Plans, March 20, 1959.
Air Force Ballistic Missile Division, Military Lunar Base Program (C) or S.R. 183 Lunar Observatory Study (U), Volume I: Study Summary and Program Plan, April 1960. (Extract)
Air Force Systems Command, Lunar Expedition Plan — LUNEX, May 1961.