When is nasa bombing the moon

Never mind that the project had no practical purpose, no discernible national-security goals and its sole design was to show the world that the U. But in , he was given a chance to manage all of the cutting-edge physics research at another Chicago-based institution, the Armour Research Foundation ARF—now known as the Illinois Institute of Technology.

From that year through , Reiffel and his team pushed physics to its limit, working on projects that studied the global environmental effects of nuclear explosions. Sometime before May , the U. Air Force asked the ARF team to investigate something truly out of the ordinary: the visibility and effects of a hypothetical nuclear explosion on the moon. The Air Force wanted to surprise the Soviets and the world: Hey, look at what we can do.

We can blow the hell out of the moon. Leonard Reiffel at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Robert W. To supplement his ARF researchers, he brought on Gerard Kuiper, the expert on planetary physics whose name came to define the Kuiper belt, a disk-shaped region beyond Neptune that contains hundreds of thousands of icy bodies and a trillion or more comets.

To round out the group, Kuiper suggested Reiffel bring in a young graduate student from the University of Chicago: Carl Sagan. Lots of math. It was important that someone like Sagan could accurately model the expansion of the dust cloud that would be caused by a nuclear explosion on the moon. We needed to know how the moon would react so we could know if the explosion could be seen from Earth. After all, putting on a big show was the whole point of the program.

Which brings up two important questions: First: Why would self-respecting scientists agree to a project to detonate a nuclear weapon on the moon? And second: Would this thing work in the first place? What would a nuclear explosion on the moon look like?

Astronomer and author Carl Sagan in a laboratory at Cornell University, To answer the first question, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of American scientists in the late s and early s. This was a time when American science was, for better or for worse, inextricably linked to American Cold War policy. Many of these scientists were patriots. HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. Follow Us. Terms Privacy Policy. The bombing isn't an act of hostility: it's all part of our search for water in space.

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