Space for science?
President Dwight D. Eisenhower offered a more moderate vision of the advance into space. In 1958, he proposed to Congress that NASA be established under civilian control, with the aim that “outer space be devoted to peaceful and scientific purposes.”
But Eisenhower also made the Department of Defense responsible for “space activities peculiar to or primarily associated with military weapons systems or military operations.” Eisenhower’s dual approach indicated that exploration and the military use of space were not easily separated: Space-based surveillance and communication had both military and peaceful applications, and the same rockets that launched satellites could be armed as missiles.
In fact, ballistic missiles, in their parabolic flights, have the potential to reach altitudes of thousands of miles, well past the Kármán line 62 miles (100 km) up, which generally denotes the ill-defined border of outer space.
A number of Cold War-era strategists argued that nuclear weapons needn’t be limited to a space station, either. In 1959, Dwight E. Beach, the Army’s director of guided missiles and special weapons, said, “We ought to consider the possibility of Moon-based weapons systems, eventually to be used against Earth and space targets.”
The Air Force’s deputy director of research and development, Homer A. Boushey, argued that because missiles launched at the Moon would take about 48 hours to arrive, no Soviet attack on the Moon or Earth would go unanswered, making the base a superb deterrent.
Also in 1959, the U.S. Army developed Project Horizon, a plan for a Moon base that would house scientists and, potentially, nuclear missiles. To build Horizon, however, would have required 149 launches, as well as another 64 launches in its first year to maintain the base. The cost: $6 billion at the time, which equates to over $54 billion today.
Eisenhower not only rejected Project Horizon, but questioned the strategic value of any nuclear weapons in space. His Science Advisory Committee had reported in March 1958 that while reconnaissance and communication from spaceflight would have important military applications, there was no real value to releasing atomic or other weapons from space.
Bombs dropped from a satellite would not simply fall on their targets, but spiral in gradually as their orbits decayed. Even with a rocket to give it the necessary boost, a missile launched from a moving platform in space, though harder to detect, would be far less accurate than an Earth-based one. Indeed, the committee judged the idea “clumsy and ineffective.”
