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Project A119, also known as "A Study of Lunar Research Flights", was a top-secret plan developed in 1958 by the United States Air Force.

 

The aim of the project was to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon which would help in answering some of the mysteries in planetary astronomy and astrogeology, and had the explosive device not entered into a lunar crater, the flash of explosive light would have been faintly visible to people on earth with their naked eye, a show of force resulting in a possible boosting of domestic morale in the capabilities of the United States, a boost that was needed after the Soviet Union took an early lead in the Space Race and who were also working on a similar project.

The project was never carried out, being cancelled primarily out of a fear of a negative public reaction, with the potential militarization of space that it would also have signified, and because a moon landing would undoubtedly be a more popular achievement in the eyes of the American and international public alike.

 

A similar project by the Soviet Union also never came to fruition.

The existence of the US project was revealed in 2000 by a former executive at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Leonard Reiffel, who led the project in 1958.

 

A young Carl Sagan was part of the team responsible for predicting the effects of a nuclear explosion in low gravity and in evaluating the scientific value of the project. The project documents remained secret for nearly 45 years, and despite Reiffel's revelations, the United States government has never officially recognized its involvement in the study.

In 1949, the Armor Research Foundation (ARF), based at the Illinois Institute of Technology, began studying the effects of nuclear explosions on the environment. These studies would continue until 1962. In May 1958, ARF began covertly researching the potential consequences of an atomic explosion on the Moon.

 

The main objective of the program, which ran under the auspices of the United States Air Force, which had initially proposed it, was to cause a nuclear explosion that would be visible from Earth. It was hoped that such a display would boost the morale of the American people.

At the time of the project's conception, newspapers were reporting a rumor that the Soviet Union was planning to detonate a hydrogen bomb on the Moon.

 

According to press reports in late 1957, an anonymous source had divulged to a United States Secret Service agent that the Soviets planned to commemorate the anniversary of the October Revolution by causing a nuclear explosion on the Moon to coincide with a lunar eclipse on November 7 (1957).

 

News reports of the rumored launch included mention of targeting the dark side of the terminator - Project A119 would also consider this boundary as the target for an explosion.

 

It was also reported that a failure to hit the Moon would likely result in the missile returning to Earth.

A similar idea had been put forward by Edward Teller, the "father of the H-bomb", who, in February 1957, proposed the detonation of atomic devices both on and some distance from the lunar surface to analyze the effects of the explosion.

 

 

 

Cancellation

The project was eventually canceled by the Air Force in January 1959, seemingly out of fear of a negative public reaction and the risk to the population should anything have gone wrong with the launch.

 

Another factor, cited by project leader Leonard Reiffel, was the possible implications of the nuclear fallout for future lunar research projects and colonization.

Later reports show that a corresponding Soviet project did indeed exist, but differed from the scenario reported in the press. Started in January 1958, it was part of a series of proposals under the codename "E".

Project E-1 entailed plans to reach the Moon, while projects E-2 and E-3 involved sending a probe around the far side of the Moon to take a series of photographs of its surface.

 

The final stage of the project, E-4, was to be a nuclear strike on the Moon as a display of force.

As with the American plan, the E series of projects was canceled while still in its planning stages due to concerns regarding the safety and reliability of the launch vehicle.

The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) was a robotic spacecraft operated by NASA. The mission was conceived as a low-cost means of determining the nature of hydrogen detected at the polar regions of the moon.

 

The main LCROSS mission objective was to explore the presence of water ice in a permanently shadowed crater near a lunar polar region. It was successful in discovering water in the southern lunar crater Cabeus.

It was launched together with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) on June 18, 2009, as part of the shared Lunar Precursor Robotic Program, the first American mission to the Moon in over ten years.

 

Together, LCROSS and LRO form the vanguard of NASA's return to the Moon, and are expected to influence United States government decisions on whether or not to colonize the Moon.

LCROSS was designed to collect and relay data from the impact and debris plume resulting from the launch vehicle's spent Centaur upper stage (and data collecting Shepherding Spacecraft) striking the crater Cabeus near the south pole of the Moon.

Centaur had nominal impact mass of 2,305 kg (5,081 lb), and an impact velocity of about 9,000 km/h (5,600 mph), releasing the kinetic energy equivalent of detonating approximately 2 tons of TNT (8.86 GJ).

LCROSS suffered a malfunction on August 22, depleting half of its fuel and leaving very little fuel margin in the spacecraft.

Centaur impacted successfully on October 9, 2009, at 11:31 UTC. The Shepherding Spacecraft descended through Centaur's ejectate plume, collected and relayed data, impacting six minutes later at 11:37 UTC.

Contrary to media reports at the time, neither the impact nor its dust cloud could be seen from Earth, using the naked eye or telescopes.

• LCROSS was a fast-track, low-cost companion mission to the LRO.

   

• The LCROSS payload was added after NASA moved the LRO from the Delta II to a larger launch vehicle. It was chosen from 19 other proposals.

   

• LCROSS's mission was dedicated to late American broadcaster Walter Cronkite.
   

• LCROSS launched with the LRO aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on June 18, 2009, at 21:32 UTC (17:32 EDT).

On June 23, four and a half days after launch, LCROSS and its attached Centaur booster rocket successfully completed a lunar swing by and entered into polar Earth orbit with a period of 37 days, positioning LCROSS for impact on a lunar pole.

Early in the morning on August 22, 2009, LCROSS ground controllers discovered an anomaly caused by a sensor problem, which had resulted in the spacecraft burning through 140 kilograms (309 pounds) of fuel, more than half of the fuel remaining at the time.

 

According to Dan Andrews, the LCROSS project manager,

"Our estimates now are if we pretty much baseline the mission, meaning just accomplish the things that we have to [do] to get the job done with full mission success, we're still in the black on propellant, but not by a lot."