33. Carl Sagan Once Researched Nuking the Moon
In the late 1950s, America’s space program was on the ropes, while the Soviets were scooping us by successfully launching satellites – and demonstrating the power of their rockets. So the Eisenhower administration came up with a secret project, “A Study of Lunar Research Flights”.
The project’s innocuous title masked its true, and truly weird, purpose: detonating a nuke on the Moon. The former Armour Research Foundation, now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology, was tasked with the research. Among the researchers was a then-young graduate student, Carl Sagan, who would go on to become a global celebrity for popularizing science and astronomy on TV.