Was It Even Possible? What Would Have Happened?
Despite Reiffel’s assertions that A119 was a distinct possibility, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes is unsure of the feasibility of the project. According to Rhodes, any plan to nuke the moon would not have made it past the study stage. In his opinion, the United States did not have any rockets with the power to get past the Earth’s orbit and hit the moon.
Astronomer Carl Sagan was responsible for many of A119’s calculations, and one of his biographers believes he breached national security protocols by revealing the classified project in 1959 when he applied for an academic fellowship. Many of the details of the project emerged in 1999 when Sagan’s biography was published, but the full nature of A119 is still not known.
The project was probably abandoned due to concerns over radioactive material that would contaminate space. There was also the small matter of the bomb exploding prematurely and endangering the inhabitants of Earth. The public outcry would probably have reached fever pitch if details of A119 were known at the time. Danagoulian is not so sure that the bomb would have led to dangerous radioactivity for future astronauts. He points out that the moon is already very radioactive so spending too much time there is dangerous in any case. He also doesn’t think that residual radiation would have caused problems for future manned missions to the moon.
The Space Race
It is crazy to think that mankind’s first experience with another object outside of Earth could have been to launch a nuclear bomb. Project A119 would have left a very different impression on the moon than the one Neil Armstrong did in 1969. Instead of launching a bomb, the United States launched Explorer 1 into orbit on January 31, 1958. The Air Force officially canceled Project A119 in January 1959.
In 1959, the Soviets made a breakthrough of sorts when Luna 2 became the first space probe to hit the moon. The USSR edged ahead in the Space Race when Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth in April 1961. On May 5, Alan Shepherd was the first American in space although he did not orbit the Earth. In the same month, John F. Kennedy made the claim that the United States would not only be the first nation to put a man on the moon, but they would also do it before the end of the decade.
America started to take the lead and showed its intent when John Glenn emulated Gagarin in February 1962. By 1964, NASA’s budget has increased six-fold in three years, but it suffered a major setback in January 1967 when three astronauts died in a launch simulation. Meanwhile, the USSR suffered a crippling blow when Sergey Korolyov, the chief engineer of its space program, died in January 1966.
The first manned space mission to orbit the moon, Apollo 8, launched in December 1968 and finally, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission. Who knows how the above would have unfolded had Project A119 been a success?
Read Next: 20 Successes and Failures of the American Space Program in the 1960s.