military conquest of the Moon

[Keith Obye]

Just so you can rest assured that U.S. American planners still keep the
"national interest" at heart.....

Check this out, I finally tracked it down.

Select quote:

"Some people don't want to hear this, and it sure isn't in vogue,
but--absolutely--we're going to fight in space. We're going to fight from
space and we're going to fight into space? We will engage terrestrial
targets someday--ships, airplanes, land targets--from space."
    -U.S. space commander in chief John W. Ashy

http://www.fair.org/extra/9905/phantom-menace.html

Cheers, Keith

----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Millison" <millison at online-journalist.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2000 12:21 PM
Subject: military conquest of the Moon


> Thanks, Dave Monroe, for the heads-up on that article, "Shootin' for
> the Moon" (at
> http://www.bullatomsci.org/issues/2000/so00/so00richelson.html).
>
> Love this reference to a U.S. Air Force general with a curiously
> Pynchonesque name and a dream not altogether unlike
> Blicero/Weissmann's (and check out the appearance of another
> perennial favorite V. 'n B).
>
> It would be interesting to know if Pynchon read any of the reports
> and articles referred to in this article.  Blicero packing his young
> lover into the rocket sounds a bit like Von Braun shipping those
> colonists off to the Moon:
>
> [snip]
> One of those who most fervently believed in the military potential of
> the moon was
> the air force's Brig. Gen. Homer A. Boushey. In a late January 1958
address to
> Washington's Aero Club, Boushey, then the service's deputy director
> for research
> and development (and subsequently its director of advanced
> technology), specified
> two possible military uses of the moon--as a missile base and as the home
of an
> observatory to spy on developments within the Soviet Union.
>
> Boushey asserted that missiles fired from the moon--or possibly
> catapulted (as in
> Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress)--could be observed
> and guided from
> start to impact (an act not possible on Earth due to its rotation).
> The launch sites
> might even be located on the far side of the moon, invisible to the
> most sophisticated
> of Soviet telescopes.
>
> In addition, the launch sites would present an insoluble problem for
Soviet
> strategists. An attack on the United States could be observed from
> the moon, and
> "sure and massive retaliation" would follow 48 hours later. If the
> Soviets attempted
> to remove the lunar-based retaliatory force first, they would have to
> fire missiles
> toward the moon two and a half days before they attacked the United
States.
> Appropriately, parts of Boushey's speech were published in the February 7,
1958
> issue of U.S. News & World Report, whose cover read, "Why Soviets
> Plan 'First Blow':
> What Missiles Mean in Red Strategy."
>
> Boushey not only told his audience of the strategic advantages of a
> lunar missile
> base, but "with man and his intelligence once established upon the moon
the
> possibilities of construction and creation of an artificial
> environment are virtually
> unlimited." Energy, rocket fuel, and oxygen could all be extracted
> from the moon, he
> said.
>
> In another forum, Boushey noted a very logical implication of any
> U.S. decision to
> turn the moon into a military base--that the moon would have to be
> U.S. property. He
> observed that the United States should not fail to be first on the
> moon. "We cannot
> afford to come out second in a territorial race of this magnitude. .
> . . This outpost,
> under our control, would be the best possible guarantee that all of
> space will indeed
> be preserved for the peaceful purposes of man."
>
> [snip]
>
> A number of aerospace firms were involved in these lunar studies. In
> the first quarter
> of 1959, the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division, Wright Air
> Development Center,
> Strategic Air Command, NASA, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were
> briefed on the
> lunar base concept by Boeing, Republic Aviation, Douglas Aircraft,
> General Electric,
> and several other firms. (Earlier, the Martin Cooperation had
> completed a classified
> study, Military Requirements for a Moon Base.) The companies suggested
that the
> whole program might cost $20 billion. But the authors of the study
> questioned the
> cost and value of an observatory, considering that it would be able
> to productively
> view the Earth for only a small portion of the day.
>
> Their pessimism was not reflected in one of the ultimate products of the
study
> efforts, an April 1960 Ballistic Missile Division report that had two
> different titles,
> depending on audience. The first title, Military Lunar Base Program,
> was classified;
> the second, S.R. 183 Lunar Observatory Study, was not.
>
> [snip]
>
> The air force was not the only military service that had been
> studying the possibility
> of a lunar outpost in 1959. In June of that year the Army Ordnance Missile
> Command submitted its four-volume Project Horizon report on the
> feasibility of a
> manned lunar base to Army Chief of Staff Maxwell Taylor. The study,
> produced by a
> group headed by Werner von Braun, argued that a lunar outpost was
"required to
> develop and protect potential United States interests on the moon, to
develop
> moon-based surveillance of the Earth and space, in communications relay,
and in
> operations on the surface of the moon." The lunar base would also
> serve as a base
> for exploration of the moon, for further exploration of space, and
> for scientific
> investigations on the moon.
>
> The study also argued that the establishment of an outpost was of
> such importance
> that it "should be a special project having an authority and priority
> similar to the
> Manhattan Project." It warned that the Soviet Union had openly announced
that
> some of its citizens would celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the
> October 1917
> revolution on the moon. If the Soviets were to be the first to
> establish a moon base, it "would be disastrous to our nation's
> prestige and in turn to our democratic
> philosophy."
> --
>
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