Welcome to tonight's classic episode Lick anybody else. The three of us constantly wonder how can we build a secret moon base? Oh?
Yes, keeps me up nights. Well, yeah, and why not build a secret moon base?
Right?
I mean if we can get there?
Well, and if we were to build a secret moon base, what protections could it be put in place? So a portal to Hell doesn't open up? And it ended up like the event Horizon, not to be confused with Project Horizon.
Which is the subject of our classic episode.
Yeah, I mean, look, if you're the Department of Navy, the Department of the Army, it's late nineteen fifty nine, You're like, man, how are we gonna put a base up there? If we actually do this, they gotta.
Get that moon on lock. You gotta lock that down.
If only there were some sort of space force, dare I see?
You know it's interesting.
We originally recorded this in I want to say, July twenty nineteen, and not to brush our shoulders too hard, but on December of twenty nineteen, the US created Space.
Force Space Force. Let's dive right in.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want.
You to know.
A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Hello, Welcome back to the show. I'm sitting entirely too low right now. My name is Matt.
Pump up that chair, Matt. My name is Noah.
They call me Ben. We are joined, as always with our super producer, Paul Mission Controlled Decan, who just returned from mysterious adventures. Thanks for coming back, Paul. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. So how's everybody doing today? Before we get into this, I spoke with Michigan Control a little bit before we went back on the air. I asked him if he was okay. He gave me a thumbs up. Paul, we still on thumbs upstatus.
Okay.
Just for the record, we re recorded this intro. So I don't know how many times we can ask Paul to give me a thumbs up.
I mean, it's tired of it. How many times has this happened? Right, I mean infinite number of times, right, all the generations. Well, I was just going to tell you, guys, I for the first time put some glow in the dark planets up above the ceiling where my son sleeps, and I did that yesterday. And the one thing that's missing from that, it's got all the planets. Pluto's not included, remember, but it does not have the moon.
It doesn't have the moon. There's a really cool moon globe you can get, and there's also a glow in the dark three dimensional moon sphere we could get for him.
That one is really awesome, and I'm looking to get that one.
Day a day that doesn't break the bank.
Yeah, because these things were real, real cheap.
I want to get one of those cool starry night projector things that you just put like on the floor and it just projects this cool galaxy onto the ceiling all around your room. And I'm thirty five, so I'm into stuff like that.
That actually sounds amazing.
Yeah, I love night projections. I have some stuff like that at the place where I currently live.
Oh, they're using my other residents.
Yes, a place where I live, which is a real place. How are things going where you live? What do you think about space exploration today? We're exploring a strange story about the moon, and we'd like to hear from you. So, if the spirit so moves you while you listen to today's show, feel free to pause it. We'll be here when you get back and give us a call with your thoughts directly,
your visceral hot takes. You're off the cuff, stuff that you wouldn't say to anyone other than us, and your fellow listeners are.
Like a machine facsimile of us.
Yeah, yeah, your innermost thoughts.
Spill them, yeah, along with your social Security number, a list of your fears, your blood type.
But really we need your innermost thoughts to fuel our machine or infernal machine we've created here.
Try to keep them limited to the three minute mark, right.
Yeah, if you know, if you want to or just leave a bunch of messages, that's fine.
That's Matt's favorite thing when you hit our call in line and leave fifteen messages because he gets a notification.
Yeah, we mentioned one person, I think on the last episode, but that person hasn't called back again yet. Maybe she knew we were talking about her, you know, fourth dimensionally Jennifer.
Right, I maybe feel free to keep calling Jennifer. But if you want to take a page out of Jennifer's book and share some information, with your fellow listeners. You're probably wondering if you just pick up the phone and start talking, almost you have to hit a numerical code first.
Yes, that's one eight three three std WYTK. That's just stuff they don't want you to know.
Every time we say that number, it feels like there's going to be an AM radio talk show tag on where it's like in the money down the moon. Yes, yes, the moon. We have been there, not the four of us personally, and odds are not most of us listening, but our species has. It's pretty easy to prove this is the case. However, it is completely absolutely understandable. I would argue that folks could be skeptical about this claim. After all, the timeline's really weird, so our entire species,
of everybody, our entire species. One country landed people on the Moon, and they only did it six times, and they only did it between nineteen sixty nine to nineteen seventy two, at which point they just stopped.
Yeah, for no reason other than it's really really expensive and there's not much going on up there officially.
Right, it's pretty it's pretty dangerous, right, and it's a dangerous expedition. One of the most dangerous trips those people would have ever taken in their lives. Today's episode is about the idea that we did not stop going to the moon so.
And that perhaps of the reason we went up there was not what was told of the public and.
The world exactly exactly. So to get to get our heads around this first, we have to start with the facts. So here they are and side note, we would love to hear any We'd love to hear any counter arguments about this, because I am certain that some of us listening as soon as they heard me say, yeah, we went.
To the Moon and it's pretty easy. You're right, right, Well, it's a show that we got there.
Yes, we will have some examples or some arguments for why that is the case, and we want to hear your arguments against it. So boom, we're back in the nineteen fifties. This is the Moon, what we did, and how we did it. It's nineteen fifties. The United States is locked in a race with the Soviet Union for domination over everything, especially space.
The new Frontier. And you know, this is all just more Cold War stuff. After we as in the Soviet Union in the United States were victorious during World War Two. We're trying to figure out who is the superpower. And then on January tewod nineteen fifty nine, there's this thing called the Soviet Luna I spacecraft and it made the first official flyby of the Moon at a distance of
three thousand, seven hundred and twenty five miles. That's nine hundred and ninety four kilometers from the Moon's surface, so it's that far away from the Moon. But again, this is a huge achievement because is the first time we've ever gotten a piece of human machinery that far out to the Moon and then successfully essentially looked at it with a piece of technology that we created.
On September twelfth, nineteen fifty nine, they landed the second lie To mission.
And it's strange because you'll hear that described is they impacted the Moon. Yeah, which we have to remember for the time. It was a really big and amazing deal just to be able to hit that moving target.
Oh yeah, that's amazing. The math involved is so far beyond my comprehension that it's crazy that they could even attempt to do it.
And then on May twenty fifth, nineteen sixty one, severely freaked out by the success of the USSR, President John F. Kennedy issues a challenge and his speech to Congress when he says, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieve the goal before this decade is out. I've landed a man on the moon and retalitied him safely to Earth.
And see that was right after one of doctor feel Good's injections of what we now know was methamphetamines.
Is that right, yes, Kennedy, Yes, Now we made him talk like that.
It was all it was exactly what it was, less the accent and just more of the.
Energy the paths.
Yeah, he was already there.
He was already on the moon looking looking down.
They were like, certain income inequality remains a problem. The nation is embroiled in racial disparity. Intention and he's like the.
Moon, the moon, And also where's the doctor.
Where's the dye called Marylyn? Uh? Yes, this leads to a series of things. We're going to walk through him pretty quickly. Before we had the Apollo program, we had something called the US Ranger Program. This ran from sixty one to sixty five. It sent nine missions.
To the Moon.
There were no people on them. This was all machinery. In sixty two, the Ranger four reached the lunar surface, but it impacted, it crashed, and it wasn't able to send any data back. So we just managed to make a very expensive bullet essentially.
Yeah, and a small crater. But hey, congratulations, we had an impact. Right, That's how it would be written in some kind of board room where they're having Hey, look, we made an impact.
We made an impact. We literally made an impact. Two years later, Ranger seven captures and sends back four thousand photos of the Moon before it hits the surface, and also goes to put The next big step was to land something without crashing.
Yes, good idea. Again, much more difficult than you could ever imagine. However, here's the thing. The Soviets, again like they did before, beat us out. The Americans, of course, touching down the lunar nine. So they're at the ninth iteration of the Luna at this point on February third, nineteen sixty six. But here's the thing though, the American side, again of this Cold War, we weren't very far behind the surveyor one mission. This is a new craft or new I guess part of the program. It made a
controlled landing on the Moon about three months later. So here we are nineteen sixty six. Both the Soviets and the United States have landed things successfully there.
And this all leads up to the big ticket item, the big tent, right, the big temple, the milestone of lunar exploration, which is landing a spacecraft with people on it on the lunar surface.
And hopefully getting them back to Earth somehow.
Well, let's gonna be hasty.
Let's not be hasty, one step at a time.
It's kind of like Gatige. You know, how far are you going to get if you spend all if you save all your energy for this swim back. This was way before Gattiko, but it's a good film. All these steps were leading to this, and it was a bloody path. It was not a situation where it's all angel farts
and trumpets and harps and stuff. Tragedy struck during a test on January twenty seventh, nineteen sixty seven, a fire swept through the Apollo command module, killing three astronauts, and NASA name the test Apollo one to honor the crew. And then we get to the manned lunar landings. They all take place again between nineteen sixty nine and nineteen seventy two. They're all part of the Apollo program. They
all come from the US. The most popular one, the one that changed history forever, was the July twentieth, nineteen sixty nine moon landing, when Neil Armstrong and longtime friend of the show Buzz Doctor Rendezvous Aldrin land on the lunar surface. It's followed by five other crude missions. The astronauts who first touch on the Moon's surface have to go way out of the way. This is this is so dangerous. They have to travel three hundred and eighty
three thousand kilometers roughly just to reach the Moon. They have to survive landing, have to survive being on the Moon. They have to make it.
They have to like take off from the Moon.
They have to take off from the Moon, which people forget you to get and then they have to make it back to Earth preferably alive.
You miss a step. They got a rendezvous after taking off from the Moon with the other spacecraft that's going around the Moon. Right, docs successfully then make it back.
That's a good point. So you can see just from all the all the dangers involved there why people would be skeptical, especially when again the argument is that there are so many problems on this planet that we can solve through mundane means. You know, why are we sending just six missions to the Moon and quitting? Why did we quit?
Right?
So, there have been tons and tons of uncrude landings which persist in the modern day. And as you can imagine, this way less risky, way less expensive. And now we get to the question of how we know that we, being humanity, got there some way. There are a number of ways to prove human beings visited the Moon. First, we have pieces of it, with literal pieces of it. It's illegal for us to buy them, because we're apparently not cool enough. But thanks for writing back, NASA. But humanity has.
Have you, guys ever seen that movie of Hollow eighteen?
I have not is the same as Apollo thirteen, thanks.
The almost almost the same thing. It's just like five missions later. Five more so so, Apollo seventeen is the last man mission to the Moon that occurred. This one is about the next one and what they find and uh less spoiler alert, there's some naughty moon rocks up there. That's all I'll.
Say, naughty moon rose. I guess so endearor when you describe stuff is.
Not moon rocks is like a weed thing.
Oh it is.
It's like some really concentrated like weed thing. Oh well, I heard in rap songs. I only know that's.
Oh well, it's not that okay, But anyway, watch is it?
Yeah? So, astronauts working for NASA brought back about eight hundred and forty two pounds of moon rocks rocks from the lunar surface for scientists to study. Although it would be great if it were eight hundred and forty two pounds of marijuana that they brought back. The thing about these rocks is the oldest The oldest ones are four point five billion years old, which makes them two hundred million years older than the oldest rocks on Earth. WHOA,
So it's a pretty good argument. You could also say, well, maybe they just collected eight hundred and forty two pounds of meteorites that landed on Earth. But the moon rocks have characteristics that are unique to them. And then there's the other idea, which is that you can see stuff reflected on the Moon. You can see the retroflectors, you can see the flag still there, which is a little ghost on our part, But how inspiring anyhow. These are just some of the things that you can see on
the Moon and so far in twenty nineteen. This is the official narrative, at least, the very broad strokes of our species collective quest to reach the Moon. But what if there's more to the story.
Yeah, what if instead of faking the moon landing the way so many of us at least have pondered, what if there's more to the mission than what the public had been led to believe. What if we had a whole other ulterior motive just by even imagining going up to the Moon. And what if we did something crazy.
We'll explore that concept when we get back from a quick sponsor brank years where it gets crazy.
We absolutely planned more stuff. By we at this point, we don't mean the human species. We mean the US government. We planned a ton of very strange things we did not tell anyone. We would like to reveal one of those plans on the air today, something called Project Horizon. All the way back in nineteen fifty eight or fifty nine, ten or so, ten or more years before the first lunar landing, Uncle Sam was already planning to build a permanent lunar base. They listed the requirements.
Like this, So here's the quote. The lunar outpost is required to develop and protect potential United States interests on the Moon. To develop techniques in Moon based surveillance of the Earth and space and communications relay and operations on the surface of the Moon. To serve as a base for exploration of the Moon, for future exploration into space, and for military operations on the Moon if required. And to support scientific investigation on the Moon. Very very moon based document here.
Well, yeah, but again, we're talking about having a military, like a ready to go military outpost on the Moon in nineteen fifty eight.
Gees. I mean, that's like a pretty big leap. But I guess anytime we're conquering anything, we're doing it for military purposes, right, Like why bother sending humans to the Moon just so we can have the bragging rights if we're not going to actually use it to blow people up in some way, right.
I guess so. And just to give you a little background on what we're reading from, this is an unclassified secret document that we found on History dot Army dot mill. It's entitled Project Horizon, Volume one, Summary and Supporting Considerations, and we have a little more about the background of this project.
Yeah, yeah, Now, I know a lot of us are titillated by the the titling there. Yeah, if you are, if you're still awake after hearing that title. This was the brainchild of a Lieutenant General Arthur G. Trudeau, who was the US Army's chief of Research and Development. The project had two components. First, the publicly acknowledged idea, which is very very star trek, very post scarcity economy.
That's exactly what it is, to boldly.
Go where no one has gone before, to explore space for the betterment of mankind, to develop new and better technology.
Again for the betterment of mankind, right right right.
To explore strange new places right but below the surface. The true purpose of Project Horizon and many similar projects in the you know, the secret thing, what people said when all the doors were closed and the monitors were turned off, was to create a situation where they could have military superiority in the Cold War, military superiority in space through through nuclear weaponry. They weren't going to just
put people on the Moon. They wanted to put nukes, there by permanently occupying the Moon, and more importantly, by getting there before Soviet forces did. The US could say we own this now, and the Moon and all that it holds or any use that it has is now ours, and this could be useful on a multitude of fronts. First, you have in many ways, you have the potential for an obscene level of air superiority. Oh yeah, you can also restrict space from You can restrict anyone from accessing space.
Yeah, that's huge. You've got a moon base on that thing that's just looming over the planet at all times. Your you can observe anything that the Moon can see. You can then see, right, which is a little difficult to plan for. Well, I guess not really.
You could.
You could do all of your all of your research somehow, I don't know, underground or outside of the Moon's view somehow.
Right, Radiation shielding would have to be a big part you could. You could also, for example, make a tremendous amount of money because you would have a monopoly on lunar travel. There you go, and millionaires existed back in the in the fifties as well as the sixties, so it's quite conceivable that they would pay any price to get to the Moon if they were allowed to. The
army could also have massive, massive surveillance capabilities. There would be no such thing as a secret area of the USSR unless it was very deep, but even then you could see it being constructed.
I mean, it just feels like there wouldn't be as much of a race kind of situation if there wasn't some military angle at play, right right, it seems like any time that the US is like, oh, we better catch up with the Russians because they don't want the Russians to have the upper hand, it's less of a reputation thing, and to me it seems like more of like a strategic thing.
Well yeah, I mean, think about this last bit that we were talking about the nukes. If you had nukes on the lunar surface so they could be launched, let's say, with a dead man's hand kind of situation, where if Washington, DC gets attacked, if New York gets attacked, if all of it gets wiped off the face of the Earth through Soviet missiles, then there are still lunar nukes coming at you, right, no matter what you do to the United States mainland or any of its other outposts. There
still will be nukes on the way. They might take a while, but they're headed your direction.
That's it. I mean, that's a very very good point, because even if every single part of the US security structures disabled, they're going to have a tough time hitting the moon. Right, you can also vastly improve radio communications, at least for the time. So it's clear that we
can see this. It's clear that it has advantages, and I enjoy what you pointed out, and no one which is I would say, not just any endeavor like this, but all all wars and expansions are about controlling resource and access, you know, So it's not out of the goodness of their hearts that they planned this. The Pentagon said, Okay, let's let's think about this, let's figure it out. So they turned Project Horizon over to one of the only
people they felt qualified to study its feasibility. A person will be familiar to many of our longtime listeners today, that is Werner von Braun.
Yeah, so the Pentagon turned Projectorizon over to Werner von Braun, and at this point he was the head of the US Army Ballistic Missile Agency, abbma personal favorite. It's almost abba. Yeah, that's neither here nor there. But von Braun was able to assign the study to one of his German colleagues, who also had been brought to the United States as part of Operation paper Clip, which we've discussed on the show. I think it's one of your personal favorites, Math, I'm not mistaken.
Yeah, I hopefully it's a show favorite because it's just one of those weird things in history that occurred that we don't like to think about.
Really happened. Quick little summary.
Germany's put One of Germany's most important and least known at the time popular exports post World War Two was former Nazi scientists.
Yeah, minds, great minds that put together the technology that was used to overcome most of the rest of the world's military might.
The US got them, in Russia got them too. They were also the Cold War had already begun, so Operation paper Clip was the secret program to spirit these scientists away without the US public learning about it.
And verner Ron Brown was one of those men.
And one of his men, His top man for the job was a man by the name of hines Ham and coel and Over the next ninety days. This gentleman divided up to projects in the pieces and assign each part to a military department that was most suited, most
well suited to study it. The ABMA would evaluate the type of rockets and space vehicles that would be required, and then the Signal Corps would study the radio and communications needs, and the core of engineers would propose the best methods for constructing, maintaining, and expanding a habitable outpost on said moon.
And see their compartmentalizing here. They're very intelligent and how they're doing this. None of the components know necessarily exactly what the others are doing. There's Bob Lazaar, of all people that we've discussed on this show before, a guy who purportedly worked at Area fifty one or near Area fifty one. I think it's site for something like that that's near Area fifty one. He recently went on the Joe Rogan Show and he was discussing particularly this the
compartmentalization of studying something like this. How you'll get basically a title kind of what we what we see when we look in the DARPA website. You get a title of a project and a one paragraph that tells you what that thing is, so you'll know that. Okay, someone over here in this project is studying the propulsion system. Somebody over here is studying aerodynamics, you know, part of this.
If you're gonna, let's say, create a flying saucer. In this case Cole Cole he's he's doing this exact thing with building a moon base.
Right right, And he was an aeronautical engineer who made the first forays into the design of the rocket that we now know as the Saturn one. Wow, you cannot buy your own Saturn one again. Thanks for writing back, NASA. I was just curious. But you can buy a top notch lego model based on it.
And the company Saturn did make some fine vehicles for a while there.
Funny you mentioned that, Yeah, I wreck two of them. It's true. They will keep you alive. But back to horizon. So the final report, which was titled Project Rise in US Army Study for the Establishment of a Lunar Military Post, was given to the Pentagon in June of nineteen fifty nine in two volumes. The first was a summary that said presented the main conclusions of what we want to do the high level thing right. The one the execs
would read. And the second gives a longer and more detailed analysis, and we'll tell you what was in this report after a word from our sponsors. Okay, so first things first, this is written during the Cold War. This is top secret. If you told most of the world how we're going to take over the Moon, We're going to put nuclear weapons on it, you know, USA, USA, the world would not react well. So they emphasize the secrecy, but also they emphasize the grave nature of the problem.
This is very This is phrased as a inevitable, indeed, the only path to salvation for the United States or to continued stability. And they say the political implications of our failure to be first in space are a matter of public record. This failure has reflected adversely on United States scientific and political leadership. To some extent, we have
recovered the loss. However, once having been second best in the eyes of the world's population, we are not now in a position to afford being second on any other major step in space. The results of failure to first place man on an extra terrestrial base will raise grave political questions and at the same time lower US prestige and influence.
There you go. I imagine a general perhaps pacing back and forth again in a giant room filled with officials and scientists and other military personnel, just giving that speech.
I get a very doctor strange love vibe out of this because this sort of answers the question that I posed originally, which is, why would you focus on the Moon when there are so many things we could fix here on Earth? And they've they've changed the nature of the argument to say that if we want to fix anything on Earth, we have to forge the respect you know we have. Yeah, thank you, thank you for the respect we have to we have to get to the Moon.
We've been number two on several of these other big things, the first satellite, the first successful you know, lunar orbiting.
First person in space to return.
Yeah.
I mean they're like, guys, we need that base.
Now, and who knows how many other cosmonauts were just the first people in space who didn't make it back, right.
Yeah.
So then the report turns the question whether a crude moon base with actual people on it is something that we can afford and something that we could actually do.
Yeah.
So if money is no object, can we think our way around this? If money is an object. The conversation always turns to it eventually. Then how much money is too much? How much is just enough?
Well, yeah, the first when you're thinking about something as high level and conceptual as this, the first thing you do is, well, if we were going to use everything that's available to us right now, all the technology, how much would it cost? Right, that's the that's one of the major things. How much would it cost using this stuff?
And would that make sense for us? It made the assumption, like when it was first starting out this Project Horizon, that they would be able to use existing technology to do everything, at least in the beginning.
Yes, in the beginning, that's where everything seems so great, you know, in the beginning.
But here's the thing. They're already working on some technology that wasn't currently available. It was basically the R and D side of what we imagine propulsion will be. Like the dude Cole col Coel whatever, whoever's heman, he was working on a liquid hydrogen rocket, a liquid hydrogen fueled
rocket that could potentially get us there. And again they're going back to this idea that we have to make the entire thing modular, starting out really small, so the first time we land there on the moon and we're going to start an outpost, we put a tiny little thing down there that's not going to be fully functional. Essentially, it's just going to be a little outpost that we're going to continue to build each time we go back. We're not just going to get there and plant a base on the moon.
And we're also not going to throw anything away. If we can help it, it'll all eventually become a piece of this.
Outpost, right exactly.
So the idea here is that they could start getting their collective ducks in a row in nineteen sixty four, and they even thought about how this would be designed. The basic building block for the outpost would be these metal cylindrical tanks three meters or ten feet in diameter and twenty feet or six point one meters long, and two nuclear reactors would also be built there. They're building nuclear well, they're transporting nuclear reactors.
They have to there. It's weird they're not building it as it feels like legos to me, like nuclear reactor parts that you kind of put in.
A place right Ikia style assembly. But did you ever play that, Let's think about it this way, did you ever play that game where you had to have a relay with an egg and a spoon. Yeah, now, I had never deal with it.
That's a brutal variation.
Ah, would you imagine running either one will work mouth or the spoon. Imagine holding the spoon in your mouth, is what I meant. Oh okay, yeah, yeah, well either way, imagine imagine that egg is a nuclear bomb, and imagine the run is running from Earth to the Moon. That's insane, that's what That's what they were proposing.
Yeah, and then there again, it's so crazy to me. It's not even getting to the moon. It's the last jump from the orbit of the Moon to the surface of the Moon with with a nuke or a nuclear at least nuclear material material that is radioactive in that way.
Right.
So the idea was, Okay, we'll figure out the details. We'll take these nuclear reactors. They'll provide shielding and power for the operation of the initial quarters and the equipment we used to make the permanent facility. We'll use every empty cargo propelling container to store more supplies, life essentials, and of course weapons.
Don't tell anyone, gotta have those space guns.
Gotta have your space guns.
Yeah, I mean, honestly, what they didn't have lasers. You know, they were really developing guns they could fire in space, as we learned in another episode. Yes, there was a pistol right on board with the Apollo program.
Yeah, there was a pistol with the Apollo program with the lander, yes, right, just in case. Yeah, and I think cosmonauts had something like that too, if they landed in territory where they might be attacked by wildlife.
Oh so it was really about coming back to Earth.
It was about coming back. It was about coming back. But they knew they would have to have some of weapon, if not a projectile weapon, they would have to invent something.
That's a big wink there by the way, just for me, that was in case there were aliens. I'm just saying, yes.
Yes, they had two types of surface vehicles. One was lifting, digging, scraping, because naturally you would end up mining, right for long term viability, in other words, for extended distance trips, a little lunar road trip, you know, hauling reconnaissance, rescue, maybe a great sound system, who knows.
Just playing music across the whole of the Moon.
And they had this mapped out in phases as you said, at the conclusion of the construction phase, the original camp quarters would be converted into a laboratory and the basic outpost just to get the basic stuff that we've already talked about, would need about one hundred and fifty launches, specifically Saturn rockets.
One hundred and fifty launches.
Didn't quite get there.
Yeah, that's so many. And you know, we were talking with Marshall on our Mars.
Episode Marshall Brain Yes.
About how many trips it would essentially take to get all the equipment and personnel out there, and it was a lot. But the simple proposition of saying we need to launch rockets, they cost x amount of dollars one hundred and fifty times in order to establish this moon base. Hm wow.
And then also another sixty four launches every year to keep it supplied and to rotate crew members back and forth. So the idea was that in a perfect world, that people wouldn't be spending their entire lives keeping nuclear weapons at the ready on the moon.
Yeah.
Yikes.
See that's the tenuous script. Though we managed as a species to officially do this kind of trip all only six times, yes, ever with a tiny crew and in the post World War two economic boom of the US getting people to the moon. Now, like, what happens if you're on the moon and nuclear war breaks out in the US or you know, in the world entire right, Yeah, what do you do? I guess you start counting how many days or months worth of food you have left?
Yeah. Yeah, Well, in this case, you're talking about ten to twenty personnel that they wanted to have in this base at any time, and that's a minimum. They wanted a minimum of ten to twenty personnel to run this thing. I don't know.
They also started game planning how to survive on the ground attacks from Soviet forces. Yeah. They wanted to surround this thing with claymore minds that would poke holes and pressure suits.
Yeah, that sounds scary.
They also wanted to have the give the inhabitants small sub kiloton nuclear weapons similar to things that were used in anti tank weapons called Davy crocketts, that were already existed. They were already in play, and the idea was that they could use these to blow up Soviet moon tanks.
Yeah. So they add anti personnel tactics to defend, also anti vehicle tactics and you know, they're really again like it's this, it's this conceptual thinking of war on the Moon. That's really what they're imagining. They're using it for, you know, or at least they're imagining it as a as a weapon in itself, this moon base, but as well as treating it like a military outpost. It's so odd to me, but I guess it makes complete sense.
And of course speculation runs rife with this. They're planning anti personnel weaponry and they say it's for the Soviet army, but the Soviet Army, as far as they know, doesn't have the teche technology to do this. So going back to your question, Matt, who are they really planning to defend themselves against. It's a great unknown.
And so those moon rocks.
I have sound gardens. The entire time I was working on I said, sound gardens, spoon Man sucking mahapo is moon man, and I think it would be a worthwhile parody.
Is it? Spoonman with your hands?
Spoon man moon man? Huh? Yep?
Yet yep?
And we're suit no, no, I'll write the lyrics. It's fair use is as a parody if we write the whole thing, which I'm fine doing uh the so let's talk Turkey. Let's talk space Turkey, nuclear space Turkey. How much did this? How much would this cost?
Actually, so, the total cost for the basic structure of the study concluded would run in the neighborhood of six billion dollars. That's in modern dollars, roughly seven hundred mili per year. The study also made a note that this was not much more than the US was already spending on its nuclear missiles program.
So it's a win win, And I'm calling bs on those calculated numbers from nineteen fifty eight. I think it's easily three or four times that.
Easily easily. I mean you get private companies involved. It's this tale as old as time. You know, this is the land of three hundred dollars hammers.
Yeah, how wait, what was the estimate? I know, I figured you might know this, at least the ballpark estimate of building the wall like that, that whole thing. I think it was in the like tens of billions of dollars, right like forty It was something crazy twitch wall the border wall. During the twenty sixteen election, there were a bunch of estimates that occurred back around there around that time.
And if you're just imagining building essentially concrete and rebar structure or you know, whatever material it's built out of on Earth on Earth, now you're going to build a structure on the Moon, even with today's rocket technology.
Wow, So here's the question, did they really build it? They be in the US? Is that the stuff they don't want you to know? In the end, it looks like the same international politics that inspired Project Arise and also led to its early death. Neither President Eisenhower nor Soviet Premier Khrushchev wanted to spend tons and tons of money for a new arms race and outer space where there was already so busy waging multiple proxy wars on Earth.
So they started negotiating treaties and agreements, reaching the consensus that stands today, at least officially, which is there shall be no nuclear weapons in space. No nation can claim a celestial body as its national territory. We will see how long that holds. We'll see how long that is the case. As far as we know now, there is
no permanent base, no permanent crude base on the lunar surface. Again, as far as we know, horizon never progressed past the feasibility stage, Eisenhower rejected it, and the primary responsibility for America Space program was transferred to NASA, which is of
course a civilian agency. While there may not be any current proof of a permanent nuclear base today, recently leaked documents reveal that, no matter what was said at the time, the US government Uncle Sam never ever stopped thinking about building a Moon base. Secretly, when the microphones are off and things are closed at the Pentagon and people are just hanging out secretly, the US still very much wants to build a base on the Moon, and furthermore, is
planning to do so. They're worried now that new players have entered the.
Game, and that's what brings us to a little thing called Project Artemis, right, yes, or just Artemis. Let's just go Artemis.
So the Greek god Apollo, for whom NASA's Apollo program was named Apollo had a twin sister named Artemis, and NASA's pitch on this is that this will be the banner under which humans return to the Moon. The Artemis program was unveiled by NASA in mid May, and the ideas that will put astronauts on the lunar surface in twenty twenty four. Preparations have already begun, but the problem is we don't know how certain how we don't know how certain it is that this will actually come to pass.
So NASA is setting the maiden flight of its space launch system for next year twenty twenty. As we record this. It's a giant booster, it's taller in a thirty story building. It'll blast a crew capsule called Oryan on an uncrewede
mission to the Moon and back. They're doing a dry run, and then in twenty twenty two they will have a test with up to four astronauts, and then after that they'll construct a small space station orbiting around the Moon, and then they'll dock a lunar lander in twenty twenty four, assuming the world hasn't burned down by then, And then that same year, in twenty twenty four, the four astronauts fly in the rancapsule to the station, get on board the lander, descend to the lunar surface.
And then for the next three three to four years they continue to do that, and then they're really building a base. And one of the biggest problems the issues as tends to happen with space exploration, and I would say with NASA budgets in general, is this thing that
we call sticker shock. It's you know, we have all these aspirations to do these incredible things, but the moment that we realize exactly how much it's going to cost, everybody, and especially Congress because you've got elected officials, you know, in the House of Representatives, the Senate, they see that kind of thing and they think, well, how are we going to convince the American people that this is worth it?
Well, even run into that with a podcast sometimes, you.
Know, certainly with everything because it is you really have to take it into consideration. In this case, I guess the biggest pro con thing that you put up there is if it does cost this much, we have to be at least achieving something that is worthwhile for us, both as investors and as a species. And sometimes it's tough to see that.
Right. And then there's that argument about private versus public ability or infrastructure.
Right.
We know that there are a lot of private companies who have taken up the flag of state supported space exploration agencies and they're making they're making some serious progress, but do they have enough hef to to get to the moon. Yeah, you know, that's a tough one, it really is.
And let's just get back to that price that we talked about with Project Horizon, that initial estimate from nineteen fifty eight saying that it would cost in what is nowadays now dollars, the entire program was going to cost around six billion dollars roughly seven hundred million a year. No way throughout the life of the project, there's no way,
but that was the estimate, right, Yeah. So we're looking at an ARS Technica article where they're they're citing sources that have told them that the internal projected cost is six to eight billion dollars per year rather than per the life. Because we're talking about a project that spans from today twenty nineteen until twenty twenty eight, that's a
lot of money. And that's on top of the already existing budget that NASA works with, which is twenty billion dollars a year, right right, which again they have problems getting funding for that a lot of the time.
So let's be clear about that. According to the internal estimates, the cost of the Artemis project is not six to eight billion a year, it's twenty six to twenty eight billion a year.
Which is which is because of the NASA budget which is.
Twenty got it.
Yeah, so it's it's sticker shock for sure. The question is if it's worth it. If there is a possibility of building a sustainable lunar colony of any sort, then there is. There's literally no price you can put on it.
There is no way to equate in numbers. No more capitalistic people hate this idea that some things can't be bought, but there is no way to equate with numbers the value of having a second franchise of humanity just in case, just in case, or in many cases, but arguably just before the old house burns down, you know what I mean. And I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that Earth is doomed, but I am saying it is good to have some insurance.
We're not doing a real great job at making sure we try and keep everything running swell.
Sure here, that's true. We're also we're also pretty in the dark still about how people would how a human population would reproduce and grow in a lunar environment. The gravity is so much lower, you're exposed to a ton of radiation. We don't know. We've never seen a child created and born on the Moon. There are a lot of unknowns, and twenty six to twenty eight billion dollars is a high price to pay for. For ex I mean,
what if we what if we do all this? What if our species does all this and it turns out that, for one unforeseen reason or another, it is completely impossible for people to live.
On the moon.
Can we just just to that point ben of how long people would need to be on the Moon to really understand having a child there, you know, having generations who live on the Moon for at least an extended period of time. Let's just talk about the length that the crew of Apollo seventeen, the final Apollo mission, actually stayed on the Moon at one time. How long was it seventy four hours, fifty nine minutes, thirty eight seconds. That is the longest amount of time anyone has spent on the Moon.
So we're basing it, That's what we're basing it on a crazy weekend on the Moon. It's like when someone goes to Las Vegas for a weekend and they say, I love it here, I want to live here.
Yeah. Well, albeit that's with suits and technol from the late sixties and early seventies. But still I don't know. Is the human body how well is it going to do for months at a time if you've got a you know, a stint on the moon.
The human body is custom made for a very specific environment. That's a problem. And when you first said that was with the suits and technologies at the time, I thought we were still talking about Vegas.
Gotcha, we've been through this before, I think. But you too would both be game for a moon stint, right, Yes, I.
It's the calculus is a little different now that I have wife and son. But I think if he was a game, my wife was game, we would do a family lunar mission, a moon stint.
Yeah, you have the first moon Boy.
That's right, moon Boy writer, you're gonna do this.
Moon Boy is also an obscure Marvel Comics character, so.
Oh TM writer, Sorry, we can't use that to get a different one.
He can be a little moon rock.
That's not bad.
Done, all right?
Cool. I don't know that i'd do it just for fun. If we were living in sort of a scorch Darth Poke post apocalyptic situation, I think I would give it a go. But I don't think I would just do it.
You know, for kicks, and that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts.
It's right let us know what you think. You can reach to the handle Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on Facebook X and YouTube on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy Stuff Show.
If you want to call us dial one eight three three std WYTK. That's our voicemail system. You've got three minutes. Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if we can use your name and message on the air. If you got more to say than can fit in that voicemail, why not instead send us a good old fashioned email.
We are the entities to read every single piece of correspondence we receive. Be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.