United States Army study for a permanently manned military outpost on the moon, submitted to the Department of the Army on 9 June 1959 and prepared under the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, with Arthur Trudeau as Chief of Research and Development on the covering letter. It proposed a twelve-man outpost, a first manned landing in April 1965, full operating capability in November 1966, and a cost of roughly six billion dollars over eight and a half years.
It is a real, long-declassified document and one of the more remarkable artefacts of pre-NASA military space planning. Its argument runs entirely on Soviet competition and it contains no extraterrestrials. Philip J. Corso reproduces the summary volume as an appendix to The Day After Roswell and reads the moon base as a response to a non-human presence, a motive the document itself never supplies.
Connections
Arthur Trudeau · Philip J. Corso · The Day After Roswell · Department of War