CHAPTER 4Lunartics!

A New Theater of War

To understand how some nooks of the US defense establishment began to take an interest in moon bases, satellite bombardment, and space-based warfare generally, it is necessary to briefly consider popular culture. Before the mid-1960s, after all, what little knowledge Americans possessed about outer space derived from the era's copious science fiction, which often described space as a source of great danger and argued that military solutions to that danger were the most reliable. On other planets and aboard their spacecraft, human beings in contemporary films, comics, television shows, and novels come into frequent contact with hideous and violent creatures, but ultimately defeat them with bravery and ingenuity. A freakishly powerful Martian sucks its victims dry in It! The Terror from Outer Space (1958). The spacefaring crew of Forbidden Planet (1956) is stalked by an invisible monster. In movies such as Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956), Invaders from Mars (1953), and War of the Worlds (1953), viewers could feast their eyes not only on civilizational threats from cunning aliens and their often-superior technology but also on the military's heroic means of fighting back despite relative weakness. In the words of one film historian, militaristic imagery constituted the “basic flavor” of these stories; it was the “glue” holding them together.¹²

One important aspect of the era's science fiction, particularly in terms of the impact it would have on US conceptions of military possibilities in outer space, was its proximity to the conflicts, technologies, and politics of the day. There were, of course, light-speed spaceships, sexless aliens, and medicines that would instantly cure any affliction. But often such futuristic imagery comingled with more pedestrian depictions of technology, politics, and culture in space. Countless stories simply repackaged the Cold War in more futuristic wrapping. The inaugural issue of the comic Major Inapak the Space Ace (1951) is illustrative: it describes a world divided into two political spheres, the totalitarian “East” and the democratic “West,” which builds “several rockets … to circle the world like small satellites loaded with atomic death and ready to fall on the East zone if they started a war.” The available technology is little more foreign. When the West learns of an alien attack on Denver, the brave Major Inapak (so named for a nutritional supplement children were to put in their milk) rockets to the moon to find a weapon powered by a crude electric relay that more closely resembles a Bell Telephone network than any future technology. In stories from other comic serials, characters often communicate through satellite radio and wear pressurized suits then under production at NASA.¹³

Fictional accounts of space war in the United States similarly relied on real-world politics, even racial hatreds. In creating alien characters to be conquered by American protagonists, comic book artists and science-fiction authors exhumed World War II–era stereotypes of Asians and Africans as sub- and superhuman, and often simply cast pugnacious and evil space aliens as aliens to the white American nation.¹⁴ In a 1963 issue of Space War, a humanoid cat creature, caricatured to remind readers of Japanese militarism, attacks a rugged space-cowboy, but is predictably defeated. Another story in Space Man reflected anxieties of rising Chinese power in its portrayal of an alien government called “the Great Revolutionary People's Republic.” Its leader is a Fu Manchu–like villain bent on galactic conquest. The cunning-yet-arrogant miscreant holds the US moon base hostage but is defeated by the US-led “Galactic Guard.”¹⁵

Fictional stories, of course, did not by themselves shape factual conversations about the prospect for conflict in space. Although military and political leaders often referenced Buck Rogers or flying saucers in serious discussions about future military policy after Sputnik, science fiction was merely the cultural and imaginative gelatin for studies such as Project Horizon. These and similar projects required intermediaries to translate the fanciful into the plausible. Over the course of the late 1950s and early 1960s, advocates of spaceflight—frequently referred to as space “boosters”—proved themselves such able traffickers in ideas about the military implications of exploration. Equipped with knowledge of the technical aspects of space technology and feverish anticipation for the future, science writers—even “interplanetary” authors such as Willy Ley and Arthur C. Clarke—became, wittingly or unwittingly, conduits between the fantastical world of science fiction and the very real world of military policy.

Their greatest advantage was ubiquity. They were helped along by popular magazines including Time, Collier's, Life, and Nature, which ran special issues on space exploration, as well as popular trade journals dedicated to the topic, of which Aviation Week and Space Technology and Space World were only the most popular. Some of the early Cold War's most widely distributed books, too, dealt explicitly with the prospect of human spaceflight. Ley's The Conquest of Outer Space (1949), Clarke's The Exploration of Outer Space (1951), and Wernher von Braun's Space Frontier (1968) introduced millions of Americans to the technical prospects of exploration, as did a procession of marquee essay collections.¹⁶

Space boosters emerged as key actors in the ferrying of “space war” from fantasy to formulation because they were able to translate the technological abstractions of science fiction into digestible accounts of how given military systems might work. Most conspicuous in this regard was von Braun, whose dream of human spaceflight mixed with a troubled history of engineering implements of war.¹⁷ Von Braun spoke across the country between the late 1940s and early 1950s, for example, on the feasibility of a military space station capable of bombing targets on Earth. Even to lay audiences, he spoke with great specificity about the technical prospects of such a weapon. “If we fire a small rocket missile from the station in the direction opposite to its orbiting around the earth, so that its final velocity becomes but 1,600 feet per second slower than that of the station,” von Braun told a crowd at the University of Illinois, “the missile will tangentially enter the earth's atmosphere near the perigee of its elliptical path.” Using radar observation and remote controls, the missile then could be guided to any target on the globe, a capability that would adorn the United States with “military omnipresence.” Nearly a decade before the space age had begun in earnest, von Braun invoked what would, in the wake of Sputnik, become an axiomatic proposition: “It appears to me that that in the atomic age the nation which first owns such a bomb-dropping space station might be in a position to virtually control the earth.”¹⁸

To be sure, enough naysayers existed to throw such ideas of spacefaring warships into serious doubt, a fact von Braun perceived as well as anyone. Would not such a station be a “sitting duck” for enemy countermeasures? Might a bomb in space simply fail to “drop” without the gravity of the Earth's atmosphere? Eisenhower's NSC would later dismiss the idea of orbital bombardment as inefficient and costly compared with traditional land- or submarine-launched ICBMs. Yet von Braun considered this shortsighted. There would always be people, he was fond of saying, who gazed upon a donut and saw only the hole. Rarely did the cynics consider the costs of too much restraint. Technology would not stand pat, after all, and more ill-intentioned powers were standing by, waiting to take advantage. “We’ve got mighty little time to lose,” von Braun told a San Diego audience in 1952, “for we know that the Soviets are thinking along the same lines. If we do not wish them to wrest the control of space from us, it's time … we acted!”¹⁹

The stature, technical acumen, and wide readership of boosters like von Braun opened the floodgates of speculation. A caravan of writers—many attempting to make serious predictions but others simply trying to increase circulation—rushed to speculate what else the future might hold for the US military in space. As early as 1948, the astronomer Robert S. Richardson could anticipate a newfound capacity to launch nuclear weapons to targets on Earth from bases on the moon. In a special article for Collier's, Richardson surmised that launching nuclear-tipped rockets from the moon would be simpler than on Earth, for the moon's gravity was one-sixth of that on Earth, and there was “not a breath of air” to interfere with initial liftoff. “In an artillery duel between the planets,” he explained, “the advantage would be all on the side having the lower surface gravity to cope with.” Targeting Earth from the moon would be “like throwing rocks downhill.” Such environmental conditions made the moon “the world's ideal military base.” Two illustrations by the talented space-fiction artist Chelsey Bonestell Jr. accompanied Richardson's harrowing technical account. The first depicts a rocket lifting off from a military base on the lunar surface, suited military personnel and a second rocket—ready to launch—looking on. The second image is an aerial view of the rockets’ target, New York City. Two enormous mushroom clouds billow up from midtown Manhattan and Queens. It was, as Richardson captioned the drawing, “the beginning of the end for New York.”²⁰

Subsequent renditions of the future were no less dramatic. In a clear adaptation of the superweapon from The War of the Worlds, space writer Robert Granville foresaw a “Death Ray” that could deflect the sun's thermal energy with inflatable mirrors. Such a weapon could melt warships, set towns ablaze, or boil seawater into hurricanes that would strike coastal cities. Jurist Stephen Gorove, who helped pioneer the study of space law in the late 1950s, was equally vivid; the “masters” of space, he foresaw, would have the capacity “to change the weather, to cause drought and flood … to control the tides and the levels of the sea, to alter the course of the Gulf Stream and change temperate climates to frigid.” For Gorove, the geopolitical dictums of Mackinder and Spykman, who in the early to mid-twentieth century maintained that nations capable of presiding over a central “heartland” would reap political power, seemed inadequate in the space age: “He who controls the Cosmic space,” he prophesized, “rules not only the Earth but the whole Universe.”²¹

The business of divining future wars in space became so popular by 1962 that Otto Binder, editor of Space World, devoted a special issue to the topic. In “War in Space: Can Americans Win It?” commentators ranging from Willy Ley to Walter Dornberger, Bell Aerospace vice president (and former director of the German V-2 program), speculated about the shape of space conflicts unfolding just over the horizon. One booster anticipated the conversion of interplanetary space into “a vast battleground” in which space planes, rocket bombers, and orbital “dreadnaughts” duked it out for space supremacy. Another predicted that the Soviet Union might soon detonate hydrogen bombs in space and on the moon to intimidate Americans or perhaps someday would divert meteors from their trajectories toward US territory. Ley wrote of space planes whose machine guns, “doubly effective in the vacuum of space,” would be more difficult to defend than larger weapons like rockets. Camouflaged with black paint and coated with a “radar-absorbing” substance, such craft would menace enemy outposts or defend the United States’ own space “fortress.” The fictional flavor of the special issue did not preclude comment by serious military officers. Major General Osmond J. Ritland, chief of special weapons at the Air Force Space Command, remarked that although the weapons featured in the report resembled “wild dreams” to most, he had no doubt that given enough time, these systems would prove technically feasible.²²

Nor was Ritland's sanction an anomaly. When weapons analysts, political scientists, war strategists, and other, ostensibly more sober “experts” began outlining the contours of space war in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they did not leap far from the more reasonable expectations of conflict that science-fiction authors and space boosters had envisioned in publications like Space World. Some baldly compared the two. Donald Cox and Michael Stoiko argued that the power to police outer space should be vested in a special UN space force that would “patrol the interplanetary regions in a fashion similar to the modern science fiction heroes.” While similar theories disputed the idea that such a collaborative, international force would determine space politics, all agreed that space would soon become heavily militarized, heavily weaponized, and perhaps even a new theater of war. The picture of future space conflict that Cox, Stoiko, and other defense intellectuals painted, the New York Times remarked late in 1958, seemed “no longer [to] belong to the Buck Rogers category.”²³

This assessment emerged from a growing sense that the technologies needed to establish space as an arena for warfare were already at hand. One could flip through British analyst M. N. Golovine's detailed study, Conflict in Space: A Pattern of War in a New Dimension, for a survey of the dizzying complex of space weapons that would soon occupy orbital space. In addition to the ICBMs that had already traversed space, several offensive systems were on the docket: Delayed Impact Space Missiles (DISMs), for example, would make programmed deviations from the normal trajectory of traditional ICBMs, and could be destroyed by the launching station during flight. The Positive Control Bombardment System, a recallable ICBM, consisted of three-ton nuclear-armed satellites in one-hundred-mile orbits. Nuclear-armed bombardment satellites (NABS) “virtually the ultimate in mobility and a powerful psychological deterrent,” would remain in high, variable orbits and threaten to deliver hundreds of megatons worth of TNT using retrofire rockets to slow their payloads out of orbit. Gradually, ballistic missiles would give way to orbital weapons completely.²⁴

A panoply of defensive systems lay just around the corner as well. Satellite Protection for Area Defense (SPAD), a system of hundreds of early warning satellites, would provide global coverage against enemy ICBMs; Random Barrage System (RBS) involved launching 20,000 to 100,000 satellites in random orbits to destroy enemy vessels using their own orbital trajectories; Project Needles, which the Pentagon successfully implemented with the help of MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, orbited hundreds of thousands of tiny copper needles to create an artificial ionosphere from which communications could be bounced. Project SAINT, though canceled in 1962, endeavored to engineer a satellite capable of inspecting and, if necessary, destroying an enemy space vehicle. Offensive and defensive systems alike would be maintained by agile repair craft (Project SMART) and supplied by small, manned vehicles (Project SLOMAR) that would also serve in rescue missions. Eventually, large manned space platforms would oversee the logistical interplay between offensive, defensive, and support systems that would, of course, include the seemingly numberless collection of reconnaissance, early warning, weather, communications, and mapping satellites already being developed and deployed.²⁵

From novel technologies flowed novel strategic considerations. Analysts believed that the implications of these military systems would be nothing short of decisive. Journalists wrote of bombers, battleships, submarines, and Earth-based defense grids becoming “obsolete” in space-age warfare.²⁶ Spaceborne armies would replace the slow-moving brigades that had defeated fascism in World War II. Even jet power seemed retrograde. “Crack divisions will embark in rocket gliders,” wrote James B. Edson, the Army's R&D director. “They will rise like flying fish above the atmosphere, re-enter, and glide to their destination.” Within two hours such forces could respond to problems a half a world away. They would soon appear aboard large satellites, on lunar bases, and perhaps even on other planets.²⁷

Flowing naturally from the idea that space technologies would eclipse weapons as recent as the B-52 Stratofortress and the Polaris submarine was the notion that warfare itself would transition from Earth to space. If the most important military technologies were housed in orbit, the thinking went, conflict would surely follow. Initially, of course, conflicts in space would involve a “mix” of Earth-based and space-based systems. Albert C. Stillson, a defense analyst at the Library of Congress, reminded readers of Air Force Magazine that “fighting in outer space would automatically involve earth-bound military power, and fighting on earth would automatically involve outer space military power.” Space weapons would be essential to future wars, but not decisive on their own.²⁸ Over time, however, conflict would involve a greater percentage of space-based systems, become more automated, and shift the spatial burden of war from Earth to space.

“Cis-lunar” space, the broad swath of emptiness between the geostationary orbits of Earth and the moon's own gravitational field, would soon become the focal point of the most decisive military exchanges. To control this critical zone, the United States, the Soviet Union, and future spacefaring powers would have to inundate the region with space vehicles, both to stake a claim to as many orbits as possible and to defend them from enemies. Attrition in outer space would be decided not by the country that first accomplished military feats in space, argued Russian-American aircraft pioneer Alexander P. deSeversky, but the one that achieved “the fustest with the moistest.”²⁹

Emblematic of the importance to which US defense analysts ascribed cis-lunar space was the “gravity well,” a celestial phenomenon—first introduced by Robert Richardson in a 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction—whereby the gravitational force that a large body exerts gradually widens and weakens as one moves farther out from that body into space.³⁰ As futurist and General Electric engineer Dandridge Cole explained, the Earth was positioned at the bottom of its own funnel-shaped well, roughly 4,040 miles deep. As the prodigious quantities of fuel necessary to propel rockets into orbit attested, it was far easier from an energy perspective to “drop” objects into the well toward Earth than it was to throw objects out of it. The military utility of Earth's gravity well was simple: the nation capable of taking possession of positions at the top of the well could attain a supreme advantage. G. Harry Stine, a rocket enthusiast and science-fiction author who later interviewed Cole, drew an easy analogy: “Put one person at the top of a well and another person at the bottom of a well. Give them rocks to throw at one another. Which person is going to have more time to see the opponent's rocks coming, more time to get out of the way, and more room to maneuver? Which person has the best opportunity to dodge rocks? Which person has the greater opportunity to do something? Which person stands the greatest chance of being hurt the worst?” As defense analysts would continue to proclaim into the twenty-first century, “a military space regime at the top of the gravity well would be a dominating position to initiate military activities for both offensive or defensive operations.”³¹

In much the same way, military thinkers came to view the moon as a critical staging area for military operations in space. From both a strategic and tactical point of view, lunar outposts presented several stimulating possibilities. A missile base on the moon, many claimed, would strengthen nuclear deterrence, for any Soviet attack on such a base would require “about four and three-quarter days” to arrive, giving the United States ample time to retaliate not only with its Earth-based, second-strike forces but also with lunar-based, first-strike capabilities. Although enemies could feasibly destroy a moon base with their own space forces, such a facility would prove “impregnable” from Earth given the distance between them. In the case of a successful Soviet nuclear attack on the American homeland, a remote lunar base would vengefully respond in kind. Stillson thus predicted that a moon base “might cancel out the advantages to be gained by initiating total war.” Edson suggested, moreover, that the military could make a moon base self-sufficient with the nickel, steel, and other minerals stored in meteor craters on the lunar surface. Moon bases, if self-supporting, could even “provide an important extension of the human habitat, and thus decrease the risk of self-extermination of the human race in a terrestrial conflict.” Edson imagined a time when “the destruction of mankind on any single planet will be like the loss, in earlier times, of a city or a culture—a tragedy, but not the end of everything.”³²

The idea that a lunar military base would be decisive in a future war extended beyond the prognostications of experts like Golovine, Stillson, and Edson to the highest offices in the US Air Force. Brigadier General Homer A. Boushey, the first director of advanced research in the USAF, reasoned that because the moon lacked an atmosphere, a base there would not only make an ideal site for astronomical observation and communications relay but also an efficient platform from which to launch missiles. “From an energy standpoint, only one-fifth or one-sixth the energy is required to shoot a warhead from the moon to earth, as vice versa,” he told the National Press Club in January 1958. Manned or unmanned stations could thus “catapult” missiles from shafts deep in the lunar soil, and those weapons could be then observed and guided from launch to impact. Any attack on a moon base from Earth-based platforms, moreover, would take forty-eight hours to arrive, giving personnel time to predict impact locations and to hide underground. The editors of Air Force Magazine seconded Boushey's recommendation that the United States install its base on the “dark side of the moon” to avoid detection by enemy governments. The base's “reception committee” for enemy weapons and landing parties could be built on the light side of the moon, while its offensive capabilities would remain harder to reach and monitor. Moon bases, therefore, provided significant advantages over Earth-based launching facilities, which required extensive tracking stations and were beholden to cooperative weather conditions. The lunar station appeared to represent “a retaliation base of unequalled advantage.”³³

From 1958, but particularly after Kennedy's September 1962 pledge that the United States would land men on the moon by the end of the decade, military leaders and aerospace enthusiasts insisted that despite their technical ambition, the construction of lunar military bases lay just around corner. At a symposium hosted by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Aerojet-General Corporation, Boushey predicted that moon bases would be commonplace within twenty years (a US base would appear within ten), for while science and commerce were powerful motivations for exploration, “there is not the overwhelming urgency as for a military space capability.”³⁴ The legal complications surrounding the use of outer space had to be tackled with rigor, of course, but if the superpowers could not come to terms on appropriate behavior in space, then it was “inevitable” that the moon would emerge as a strategic military asset. In its report on Project Horizon, the Army concluded that there were no technical obstacles to establishing a base on the lunar surface. Would-be space engineers could dig “holes or caves” into the moon and seal them with pressured bags. Early in 1958, the Martin Company, a prominent aerospace technology firm, proposed a “lunar housing simulator” consisting of inner and outer spheres of varying pressures, connected by vacuum-sealed airlocks. Westinghouse created plans for a moon-based nuclear power plant.³⁵ American Aviation Incorporated went on tour in 1962 with its model for a housing unit specifically designed for the three-man Apollo spacecraft that NASA planned to launch to the moon by 1969.³⁶ “Some persons will be quick to contest this concept [of a moon base] as ‘Buck Rogerish thinking,’” wrote Army colonel Robert B. Rigg, “But they are wrong.”³⁷

One unsettling conclusion that contemporaries could reasonably have drawn from theories about the transplantation of warfare from Earth to space was that it would soon become more difficult to model. The tangled interplay of the weapons systems outlined in Golovine's book, for instance, represented a quantum escalation in the complexity of deterrence calculations: velocities increased, but so did warning times; delivery systems would be less susceptible to attack, yet so too would enemy targets; satellites, while improving reconnaissance, communication, and mapping, were delicate and hence vulnerable instruments. General Thomas S. Power, then commander of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), wrote that space warfare would be defined by “the operational relationship between space and time.” The ballistic missile and its ancillary systems would create four-dimensional warfare, “a new regime of strategic operations in which utilization of the space medium will place a fantastic premium on action and reaction times.” Future war seemed, if not more likely, then at least more difficult to predict.³⁸

But the space-war oracles tried nonetheless. They conjured an image of space packed with advanced military systems interacting in lightning-fast but programmed trajectories. Tracking satellites would detect enemy ICBMs immediately on ignition, signal space-based defense platforms and ground stations, which in turn would mobilize ASAT ordnance. Satellite decoys and “barrages”—concentrations of orbiting debris—would provide suitable defense against enemy satellites and other space vehicles. Defense platforms in fixed positions would coordinate the entire enterprise. In reading accounts of how these electronic battles would unfold, one was tempted to wonder if human beings would eventually lose control of the process. With time, “remote-controlled” conflict would evolve into cool, dispassionate “robot warfare” whereby automated systems would respond reflexively to perceived threats.³⁹ In a letter to a colleague, USAF general Thomas White wrote that the United States might soon face “an era that is neither cold war nor hot war, but is characterized by a semi-overt-duel in the no man's land of outer space.”⁴⁰

Many strategists welcomed this eventuality as a civilizing one, for if wars would inevitably transition to outer space, perhaps they could be contained there. The constellation of orbital bombardment satellites, space vehicles, ASAT weapons, and interceptors, many theorists projected, would obviate the need to fight on the ground. Nuclear-tipped satellites could replace earthbound missile silos as the strategic targets of a major war. Offensive space vehicles could replace armies that had fought only to a bloody stalemate in Korea. Advanced technology might even enable militaries to engage in pitched space battles with remote, operational soldiers. But most important, space war could decide political outcomes without involving noncombatants. In the vacuum of space, argued economist Thomas Schelling, war “may involve few, if any, civilian casualties.” Space war, in fact, could make large-scale conflict possible without initiating nuclear holocaust. Golovine proposed that orbital war could replace peripheral Cold War conflicts and inaugurate a strategic situation in which a preponderance of space weapons systems would decide the outcome of war. Dornberger wrote of the possibility for a limited “hide-and-seek” war in outer space in which the United States and Soviet Union would settle differences simply by destroying the other's spacecraft. Edson suggested that the moon be converted into “an agreed arena” for space weapons to decide political outcomes. All sides could avoid “terrestrial damage,” and a clear winner would emerge to bloodlessly impose her will on the losers. “Full-scale orbital war,” Golovine concluded, “might be the only human solution to the East-West ideological and political opposition.” Though suspicious of the prospects for space war, Klauss Knorr, director of Princeton's Center for International Studies, agreed. Space, he wrote, was in many ways “an ideal theater for limited hostilities.”⁴¹

Because the relevant technologies were so novel, and because their strategic implications were so radical, predicting how war would change in the age of space came to resemble a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Political commentators and journalists with few technical skills gestured vaguely toward what they perceived to be the next generation of weapons. Engineers and defense contractors with little knowledge of bureaucratic politics or budget constraints simply guessed the extent to which practical decisionmakers would pursue their vision of the future. All seemed to ignore executive initiatives to preserve space from weaponry. None had complete information, and so all, in their own way, were stabbing in the dark. To compensate many writers reached back to similarly revolutionary moments in history. Some compared the inauguration of the space age to Columbus's “discovery” of the New World in the fifteenth century. Others went further back to the copper age invention of the wheel, or the Cambrian emergence of primordial life from rivers, lakes, and swamps onto dry land 430 million years before that.⁴²

In the realm of military strategy, however, the space war oracles referred to texts that had been in circulation for less than seventy years. None seduced the space power strategists more than Alfred Thayer Mahan's “choke point” thesis, elucidated in the admiral's seminal 1890 treatise on geopolitics, The Influence of Sea Power upon History. In it, Mahan pointed to Great Britain's exceptional naval force to explain the growth and power of its empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and recommended that the United States build a force of similar strength if it were to compete as a world power. Mahan conceived of the open oceans as a “great highway” to be controlled at strategic points: the Strait of Hormuz in the Red Sea, the English Channel in the North Atlantic. Britain had controlled both at the height of its empire, and so had controlled trade flowing east and west across the Mediterranean and over the Indian Ocean to Asia. Mahan's theory came to have an enormous impact on Theodore Roosevelt, who surmised that if the United States was to control the Isthmus of Panama, it could enjoy a substantial share of all the wealth that passed through it.⁴³

Space power theorists quickly adapted Mahan's thesis to outer space, what even discerning observers referred to as “the new ocean.” In what they called the “Panama hypothesis,” strategists articulated a vision of space geopolitics that substituted “space” for “sea” in crude fashion. “There are strategic areas of space,” wrote Dandridge Cole in Astronautics magazine, “which must be occupied by the United States, lest their use ever be denied [to] us through prior occupation by unfriendly powers.” The Soviet Union could claim “lunar Panamas” that would make US commercial or military action there impossible. Comparisons between outer space and the open seas were so widespread that New York publishing giant Hill and Wang reprinted Mahan's book in 1957.⁴⁴

Extrapolations of Mahan's thesis to outer space took on greater weight early the following year when the US orbital Explorer I confirmed the existence of layers of ionized radiation in the upper atmosphere, what came to be known as the Van Allen belts (named for the University of Iowa scientist who pioneered the engineering behind the satellite). When the US government discovered that high-altitude nuclear detonations dispersed dense clouds of electrons, thus adding onto the particles occurring naturally in the Van Allen belts (see chapter 5), military planners began to speculate that by creating a thick layer of radiation in the upper atmosphere with nuclear weapons, one could control access to space through the Arctic and Antarctic poles, where, because of the Earth's magnetic field, radiation would be negligible. NATO planners surmised that the West could control access to space through these holes in the radiation cloak—a modern-day Panama Canal.⁴⁵

The Panama hypothesis extended beyond Earth orbit as well, to points in cis-lunar space called libration points. In celestial mechanics, libration points (what astrophysicists refer to as Lagrange points for the French astronomer who helped discover the phenomenon) are distinct locations between two orbiting bodies at which the gravitational pull of each are in perfect balance. At such “L” points, an object will retain its position relative to the two larger heavenly bodies rather than enter its own orbit around either. In any given gravitational relationship between two large bodies, there are five Lagrange points. Within the Earth-moon system, because of the gravitational pull of the sun and the type of orbit that the moon performs, objects stationed at three of the Lagrange points—L-1, L-2, and L-3—would eventually drift away, making them “unstable.” In contrast, the other two points, L-4 and L-5, are stable and therefore a capable home for a spacecraft. They are, in short, parking spots in space.

As with Earth's gravity well, the military significance of Lagrange points was apparent. Nations in control of the L-4 and L-5 points could regulate space traffic, deny enemies the use of particular orbits, and launch targeted strikes against the Earth, moon, and positions in cis-lunar space. Dominating stable Lagrange points, as Stine later put it, would permit a space power to “detect and take action against any threat originating anywhere in the Earth-Moon system.” Like the moon itself, these points constituted invaluable high ground positions: “uphill” from both the Earth and the moon, the occupying force could monitor and control the entire spectrum; without a gravity well, it could “maneuver at will.”⁴⁶

The strategic lesson of “choke points” and of nineteenth-century geopolitics more broadly was clear: if the United States were to maintain its military and economic hegemony, and if it was to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring a preponderance of power, control of space was nonnegotiable. In an essay titled “Reflections on Sea and Space,” Peter Ritner, an editor for the Saturday Review, recalled the degradation of French military power in the seventeenth century and pointed to the empire's fateful decision not to build a state-of-the-art armada to match that of Great Britain. The United States should heed the lesson in space. “Admiral Mahan was neither the first nor the last philosopher to realize that new rules make a new game,” he insisted. “We Americans are playing today with new cards and for new stakes. Only a generation of gamblers and pioneers—such as we must again become—can hope to enjoy the game. Or win it.”⁴⁷

Space Power Is Peace Power

By 1960 science-fiction authors, space boosters, and the new cadre of defense intellectuals had together built the intellectual scaffolding on which powerful interests attempted to advance substantive military programs like Project Horizon. When John F. Kennedy, who had criticized his predecessor for reacting so nonchalantly to the military implications of the Soviets’ space feats, took office in January, these forces became more sanguine about the prospects of a more robust national effort to weaponize space. But their hopes proved illusory. Within months it was evident that the new president was little more interested in satellite bombardment, moon bases, or other weaponry for space than Eisenhower had been. Johnson would later disappoint the space war oracles still further by ratifying the OST, which, in addition to forbidding nuclear weapons from space, banned military installations, maneuvers, and weapons testing on celestial bodies (see chapter 6). Though advocates of a robust national defense effort in space would fight an uphill battle throughout the mid-1960s, they accepted their charge with urgency and conviction.

“Advocates” of a comprehensive defense program in space counted ordinary citizens, politicians, aerospace executives, and many others in their ranks, but the term can reasonably be said to be synonymous with the USAF, space war's most visible and powerful proponent. The Air Force's vanguard support of space power and the technologies needed to achieve it was a natural outgrowth of the branch's leadership. Between 1953 and 1965, each of the three Air Force chiefs of staff—Generals Nathan Twining, Thomas D. White, and Curtis LeMay—were vocal proponents of preempting Soviet influence in space through intense military modernization. Eugene Zuckert, secretary of the Air Force from 1961 to 1965, spoke in cities across the country on the emergence of near-Earth orbit as “the new high ground” of modern warfare. The USAF's R&D agencies, especially, were replete with forward-thinking engineers focused on achieving space dominance. Bernard Schriever, director of the high-profile Western Development Division; Homer Boushey, first director of the USAF's Directorate of Advanced Technology; and Donald Putt, director of R&D at the Office of the Chief of Staff, were among a spirited coterie of USAF personalities who propounded the necessity of American military supremacy in space.⁴⁸

Aside from the USAF's top brass, the notion that the United States should attempt to control space unilaterally emanated directly from its incipient “aerospace” doctrine, which held that space represented merely an extension of the air medium and that given its doctrinal and technical experience, the Air Force should inherit the most relevant DoD space projects. That the USAF would be the military's branch of the future was signaled early on, when at the end of World War II the AAF's commanding general, Henry “Hap” Arnold, instructed the eminent scientist Theodore von Kármán to come to the agency's headquarters to study the next big weapon: missiles.⁴⁹ After Sputnik, when it was clear that space technology would be crucial to national security—and that space projects would attract the most federal dollars—the USAF's legislative liaison urged the branch's leaders to “emphasize and reemphasize” the USAF's claim to military space projects until “no doubt exists in the minds of Congress or the public that the Air Force mission lies in space as the mission of the Army is on the ground and mission of the Navy is on the seas.”⁵⁰

And emphasize they did. None insisted on the indivisibility of air and space more forcefully than the USAF's chief of staff, General Thomas D. White. In the national press, in military trade journals, and before Congress, White chipped away at external claims to the space pie. “I look upon the Air Force's interest and ventures into space as being as logical and natural as when men of old in sailing ships first ventured forth from the inland seas,” wrote White in Air Force Magazine. “Similarly, ventures into outer space require men who know the air.”⁵¹ For White and other USAF leaders, space power was merely the next evolutionary step in the development of air power. The X-series of aircraft—with a mandate to go ever “farther, higher, faster”—reflected the service's purportedly inherent claim to space missions. Following the historic flights of the Bell's X-1 and X-15 aircraft, shortly after Sputnik, Boeing began development on the X-20 Dyna-Soar, which would reach space on an ICBM and remain there by “bouncing” on the atmosphere before gliding back down to Earth. Such technological and strategic considerations were effective in establishing “aerospace” as a legitimate military concept. Early in 1958 Air University revised its service manual to reflect the fact that air power had moved “naturally and inevitably to higher altitudes and higher speeds until now it stands on the threshold of space operations.”⁵²

By 1961, the Air Force had accomplished its goal becoming of the Pentagon's “executive agent” in military space technology. NASA had swallowed the Navy's Minitrack satellite tracking network, its Vanguard facilities, and the NRL. It had also absorbed the Army's JPL and the ABMA, including von Braun's Redstone team. And though it lost its manned space projects to the Mercury mission, the USAF emerged comparatively unscathed from the expansion of civilian space activities. It furthered its influence by contributing Thor boosters for NASA's lunar probes and cloud cover satellites; constructing new facilities at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida; and donating Atlas boosters and personnel to Project Mercury among numerous other activities.⁵³

Emboldened by new their authority in the space field, USAF leaders called for a national drive toward “space superiority.” In fact, argued Bernard Schriever, the United States should immediately create an independent military service for space operations, one that would serve as a “a protective umbrella” for the other branches struggling to coordinate projects, goals, and funding. Military space missions had “special requirements,” he wrote, and therefore deserved special considerations—designated research departments, laboratories, testing facilities, and personnel.⁵⁴ In 1958 Eisenhower had created ARPA to collect and manage all military space projects under one roof and had created a new office for a director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E) to advise the defense secretary on basic and applied research, development, and evaluation of new weapons systems. But these measures had not gone far enough. With a series of stunning “firsts” in space, after all, the Soviets had demonstrated an unambiguous commitment not only to exploration, it seemed, but also to establishing the foundations for a military presence in space. Their rocket boosters had much greater thrust, and Soviet researchers had achieved extraordinary progress in the field of space medicine, a sign that the Kremlin entertained high ambitions for manned flight. The Soviets, Schriever observed, regarded their accomplishments in space with “militant pride.”⁵⁵ He demanded a similar commitment from his civilian government.

The purportedly nefarious intentions of the Soviets were, from the start, the USAF's principal justification for American military preponderance in space. Schriever, Boushey, Putt, and a host of others argued that given the USSR's aggressiveness, deviancy, and furtiveness, it could not be trusted to abide by international agreements to govern outer space in the interest of all. Observers in and outside of the USAF argued that at heart, the Soviet Union remained a “slave society” that benefited only Communist Party leaders. They agreed that the Soviet people, “joyless but dedicated,” had been churned into missiles.⁵⁶ Those who accepted these basic characterizations quickly concluded that if the United States permitted the Communists to station military bases on the moon and orbit offensive satellites, they would use such technologies to either blackmail the West into submission or initiate a war to dominate the globe. Indeed for half a decade after Sputnik, Air Force leaders demonstrated a marked preoccupation—one could reasonably call it an obsession—with the prospect of Soviet “world domination” from space. An internal USAF policy planning document fretted that Soviet preeminence in space would spell the end of the Cold War. Without sufficient ASAT countermeasures or offensive space capabilities of its own, the United States would be incapable of using space for either peaceful or military purposes. Americans would eventually have to cow to Soviet coercion.⁵⁷ Schriever appeared before the House Armed Services Committee equipped with maps charting the Soviets’ step-by-step plans to achieve a “strategic aerospace envelopment” of the globe. The Soviet Union was “attempting to complement their significant progress in taking over Free Countries through political aggression by creating a global space capability to dominate the world” (figure 14). If the Kremlin were to achieve its aims, Schriever suggested, Americans’ recent fascination with bomb shelters would be justified. Fenced in by the Communists, Schriever concluded, quoting the anthropologist Margaret Mead, Americans would be reduced to eking out meager lives in “screwed down garbage cans.”⁵⁸

FIGURE 14. Bernard Schriever envisioned Russia extending its aerospace influence toward “borders to infinity.” China, South America, and Africa all become “Red.” “Soviet World Domination under Preparation,” Statement by General Bernard Schriever before the House Committee on Armed Services, n.d., box 25, Bernard A. Schriever Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.

The alternative outcome—American domination of space—would look quite different, USAF leaders insisted. For all tough talk of war in space, “peace” was their operative word. In an international political environment undergirded by US military primacy in space, peace and stability would reign. Schriever recalled that when SAC emerged after World War II as the nation's preeminent offensive force, Americans understood that despite the organization's capacity for raining hellfire onto enemy cities, “air power is peace power.” The Cold War, he reminded readers of the New York Times, was kept cold by US bombers. Similarly, Americans should now understand that “space power is peace power.”⁵⁹ The fact that both Eisenhower and Kennedy had repeatedly elucidated US policies intended to preserve space for exclusively peaceful purposes did not preclude the establishment of military supremacy in space, Schriever and other USAF officials agreed. In fact, US space power was consistent with the policy of “space for peace,” for it would provide “the means for insuring that the policy is carried out.”⁶⁰ Peace would be guaranteed by the threat of a war that could not be won.

This conception of peace differed markedly from others voiced in the State Department, the White House, and many congressional circles. For US officials whose policy orientations hedged closer to the sanctuary doctrine, “peace” implied international controls, disarmament, and diplomatic initiatives to strengthen cooperation in space. It meant the surrender of national sovereignty to international institutions, especially when the matter pertained to all humanity. Senator Henry Jackson (D-WA), for example, proposed that US satellites be launched “at the service” of the United Nations.⁶¹

Champions of US control of space, in contrast, equated peace with deterrence. Schriever, Boushey, and countless others envisioned a world in which US power ensured safety for all by threatening massive retaliation against any would-be aggressor. The United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and other international bodies could not be trusted to achieve global peace and justice, they reasoned, for such structures had failed historically to produce any enduring change. The enemies of peace and freedom could clandestinely develop space weapons, abandon treaties outright, or use the organs of international power to chip away at the foundations of global order. Only US military preponderance in space could guarantee peace and prosperity into the distant future. “We believe that space can be free to all for peaceful activity only if somebody keeps it free,” General Zuckert intoned in an article for Aviation Week and Space Technology. “We are that somebody.”⁶² Chester Ward, judge advocate general for the Navy, recalled that previous periods of lasting peace had been undergirded by the unquestioned military prowess of a single political hegemon: the so-called Pax Romana relied on the prowess of the Roman Legion and the Pax Britannia on the Royal Navy. By extension, unrivaled US supremacy in space would produce an enduring Pax Americana.⁶³ In two decades’ time, predicted another officer, the Earth's children would thank American “men on the moon” for world peace.⁶⁴

The emphasis on “men” exists in the original document, and it underscores the masculine overtones of the military claim to outer space in the name of freedom and peace. Those who supported US control of outer space envisioned Americans as the stewards—the protectors—of Earth. They considered their nation to be the world's bastion for liberty, democracy, and peace, protecting the world from Soviet totalitarianism and militarism like Batman did Gotham from the city's numberless villains. In the USAF's rendering of the future, nothing short of Earth's survival was at stake in the absence of US control. “We cannot afford to be second-best in the conquest of space,” wrote USAF Major General Dan C. Ogle, for anything other than space supremacy would “invite the binds of subjugation, the humiliation of inferiority, or the oblivion of destruction.”⁶⁵

Given their dogged pursuit of advanced weapons in space, one is tempted to cast these generals in the mold of a Buck Turgidson or Jack Ripper, the pugnacious air force commanders in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove—insensitive to the politics of war, ignorant of technical details, and apathetic in the face of death on a massive scale. Yet the collection of military officers who promoted military missions in space were much more thoughtful than their zealousness may at first suggest. For starters, nearly all were well grounded in the technical aspects of the military space mission; indeed, they represented the vanguard of R&D within the Air Force. Boushey served as deputy director of R&D at USAF headquarters and was the first director of the Office of Advanced Technology under the deputy chief of staff for development. Zuckert was active in the technology field both before and after his tenure as Air Force chief of staff. In the early 1950s he served as a member of the AEC, and later was both chair of the board at the Nuclear Science and Engineering Corporation, a pioneer in radiation chemistry, and of AMF Atomics, the atomic energy branch of American Machine and Foundry, Inc. Donald Putt held a master's degree in aeronautical engineering from Cal Tech, and served as director of both the Air Research and Development Command and the R&D branch of the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Air Material. He was a member of the National Research Council, the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences, the Society of Navy Architects, and several similar groups. Schriever took courses in aeronautical engineering from Stanford and came to head NASA's most important development agency. James Doolittle earned one of the nation's first doctorates in aeronautical science—from MIT no less—and served on Eisenhower's PSAC and later as chair of Space Technologies Laboratories.

These men, World War II veterans all, were keenly aware of the profound impact new technologies could impose on warfare, and each was shocked and embarrassed by Soviet achievements in space during the late 1950s and early 1960s, achievements they were convinced had military implications. While many of these leaders applauded diplomatic overtures aimed at preventing the extension of the arms race to space, they argued the United States should hedge its bet against a foe it did not trust. For a brief window after Sputnik, these leaders could reasonably suggest that US military preparedness had few negative repercussions: it would boost the economy by creating jobs; encourage education in the sciences; generate new technology; protect the United States from space-based blackmail; and, in case the Kremlin had no interest in space weapons, an American military buildup in space would accelerate and protect the development of peaceful exploration. “You will note I have stated that the United States should win and maintain a capability, and I repeat the word capability, to control outer space,” Putt reminded Congress in 1958. “I do not say that we must exercise control of space, but we must have the capability to do so. There is an important distinction between the two. We in the military fervently hope that all nations join together in whatever measures need to be taken to ensure that space is never used for any but peaceful purposes.”⁶⁶

Lunartics!

Disciples of space power made a compelling case for preemptive national efforts to dominate outer space. The very liberty and security of the so-called Free World, they argued, depended on it. It is in light of their substantive efforts that failure to achieve even a modicum of success is put in stark relief. Piece by piece, Schriever's vision of US military preponderance in space crumbled. McNamara's budget-conscious whiz kids “lowered the boom” on the most relevant projects.⁶⁷ The X-20 Dyna-Soar, after $400 million dollars, succumbed in 1963 to concerns about the lack of a clear goal for the space plane. Why, many asked, should the Air Force have a manned program alongside NASA's?⁶⁸ Later that same year DoD downgraded and then canceled Project SAINT, when the Soviets reversed position on the legality of spy satellites. Kennedy's campaign for a test ban treaty ended hopes for ASAT weapons equipped with nuclear warheads, as well as Project Orion, which sought to achieve nuclear rocket propulsion. The Dyna-Soar's follow-on, the MOL—a manned, stationary reconnaissance vehicle—collapsed in 1969 to concerns of redundancy and suspicions about its mission. Advanced projects including lunar bases, satellite bombardment, and armed space platforms, which had never left the stage of preliminary investigation under a skeptical Eisenhower, wasted away in neglect.

How did this happen? Considering the obvious military utility of space, the DoD's colossal research budget from the 1950s through Apollo 11, and the vision exhibited by USAF leaders, the defeat of “space war” as an American military paradigm is startling. The reasons for this defeat are multivariate, but three stand out. First, as the widespread support for a civilian-controlled space agency and a UN committee for space activities revealed, the political standing of the sanctuary doctrine was robust, and into the mid-1960s it continued to be a cultural force against which planners and theorists of space war found themselves competing for legitimacy.

Consider the Cold War, for a moment, from the widest possible lens: at heart, it was a struggle over whether the United States or the Soviet Union, democratic capitalism or revolutionary socialism, was better fit to lead humankind into the future. Crucially, by the time Army researchers began to draw blueprints for a manned lunar outpost, it was widely assumed in both countries, and in others around the world, that a significant part of that future was destined to occur in outer space. The idea that space technology would have profound implications for civilizational development on Earth was beyond doubt. Cold War competition in the space field thus necessitated more than a struggle over which nation's engineers could create the superior technology, or which could create it first. Bound up in the battle over the future were questions of war and violence, morality and ethics, technology leveraged for national power or technology for the common good. That governments should close off the cosmos—the human future—from warfare had become a near-axiomatic proposition even before spaceflight had become a practical probability. In the contest of images US officials waged with their Soviet counterparts, pursuit of advanced space weapons and military space infrastructure was, simply, a losing strategy.

The Cold War contributed to the declining appeal of space war in another way. As historians have amply demonstrated, the primary interest of US policymakers in military space technology was satellite reconnaissance. Through SAMOS, CORONA, and other spy satellite programs, defense planners would finally have reliable data on Soviet force levels, the location of airfields and launching facilities, and the ability to accurately detect nuclear weapons tests. Legitimizing these invaluable technologies required distinguishing them from “aggressive” and “active” military space projects akin to those favored by USAF leadership. “Passive” spy satellites would monitor arms agreements, provide early warning of enemy attack, and expand worldwide communications. In a balance of terror, these instruments were just what the doctor ordered. In contrast, controlling the pace and direction of futuristic space weapons seemed impossible. Although certainty about the coming military revolution propelled much DoD research on military space technologies, fear proved equally decisive in quelling that revolution. It was best, many agreed, to keep the genie in the lamp.⁶⁹

And what if there was no genie in the first place? A third explanation for space war's failure is that so many educated observers rejected its basic premises. As swiftly as plans for advanced military space projects left the Bell Aerospace boardroom, appeared in the pages of Aviation Week and Space Technology, or left the lips of boosters like von Braun, they became subject to criticism in scientific, engineering, and political circles. Lee A. DuBridge, founding director of MIT's Radiation Laboratory and president of Cal Tech, referred to lunar outposts and other futuristic military technologies as “useless Buck Rogers stunts” and “utter nonsense.” Why, he asked, would the United States attempt to launch missiles from the moon—over 240,000 miles away—when any conceivable target in a future war would be no more 5,000 miles from ground-based ICBM platforms? Moreover, the laws of physics precluded the use of the moon or satellites as platforms for bombs. Without gravity, bombs “just won’t drop.” At a conference in Los Angeles, DuBridge argued that occupying the moon had “not the slightest military value” and that constructing a lunar outpost would likely provoke conflict with the Soviet Union. Humankind's astounding technological achievements, he worried, rather than inaugurating a program of cooperative and practical research, risked transforming the United States “into a nation of space cadets” in which vast resources were squandered on “fanciful and fruitless” instruments of war. “There is plenty to do,” implored the Manhattan-project veteran, “without trying to nail the American flag on the whole solar system by next week.”⁷⁰

Other prominent scientists and engineers agreed. Dinsmore Alter, a lunar scientist and retired director of the Griffith Park Observatory, said the moon was too valuable as an astronomical observatory to use as a military base.⁷¹ Famed science writer Arthur C. Clarke remarked that moon bases “do not bear serious examination,” for the difficulties of supplying such a base outweighed any potential advantages. Lunar-launched missiles could be more easily detected than those launched from Earth platforms, and would take longer to arrive, thus giving the enemy more time to prepare defenses.⁷² “Outer space is new,” Space Technology Laboratories President Simon Ramo observed, “but so is the bottom of the ocean. This does not mean we should put our retaliatory force there.” C. C. Furnas, a former assistant secretary of defense for R&D, argued that ballistic missiles launched on Earth would always carry out their missions more efficiently, effectively, cheaply, and accurately. Another scientist insisted that even if the Soviet Union was able to control outer space, its new realm would be nothing but “a new Siberia,” only more difficult to reach, maintain, and defend.⁷³

Opposition to space weaponization extended beyond doubts of its technical feasibility. Commentators ranging from grassroots peace activists to executive-level officials questioned not only whether the United States could engineer a future of war in space but whether it should. Journalists often denounced the USAF and other promoters of advanced military space technology as “lunartics.” These advocates, many observers claimed, threatened to extend the Cold War indefinitely; they were blindly selling the future in the name of continued military advantage. In response to Space World's special issue on space war in 1962, a London-based reader remarked to the editors that he would have deemed the report “as the work of irresponsible fools” if it were not for the fact that so many US military officials were named as sources. The propensity to build armaments based not on realistic Soviet strength but exaggerated estimates amounted to “playing with matches in a gunpowder factory.” Peter Ritner, convinced though he was about the geopolitical importance of outer space, nevertheless scoffed at traditional military claims to the cosmos. In particular, he lamented that the DoD would continue to monopolize the government's plans for space stations, which Ritner considered the most significant achievement since the Agricultural Revolution. “Is any sane man actually thinking of extrapolating these disputes beyond Earth's skin,” he asked readers of the Saturday Review, “and waging political wars on battlefields of space and stars?”⁷⁴

The USAF's vision suffered another blow early in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson received an important, long-range policy planning document on space technology and national security in the 1970s. The interagency group that authored the report took a measured look at the potential need for advanced military hardware, including space weapons, but cast a jaundiced eye on the generals’ most fundamental assumptions. Much had been written—“probably too much”—about space as the high ground of future military operations, as well as the certainty that control of space meant control of the Earth. But space was neither predictably nor inevitably the key to future military power. The usefulness of space as a platform for military operations depended on the costs, technical feasibility, political favorability, and effectiveness of space-based technologies relative to existing, Earth-based systems. Moreover, the report stressed, shouting military voices were too certain of Soviet intentions in space. It was enough to speculate that the USSR “may try, and may succeed, in pursuing some promising avenues of development with important military applications. It is too much to say that they will do so; it is not a foregone conclusion.” On balance, therefore, it was incumbent on policymakers to consider at what costs the United States might extend the arms race to space. Any technical problem the United States might pose to the Soviet Union in space would also complicate the US strategic posture as well. Introducing more complexity into the strategic environment did not necessarily make the world any safer; there was, the report stressed, “a point of diminishing returns.”⁷⁵

Notions that the future of armed conflict rested in outer space would continue to enjoy popular resonance in American film, television, and literature. Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek (airing first in 1966), Brian Aldiss's edited collection of short stories Space Opera (1974), and George Lucas's Star Wars trilogy (1977–1983) beamed images of fantastic war in space to millions of Americans. But the USAF's dream of American “space superiority” had by the mid-1960s suffocated from government neglect and often outright hostility from scientists, politicians, journalists, and ordinary citizens. Considering the pervasiveness of space-based warfare in US popular culture, the seriousness with which boosters and defense intellectuals attempted to define its contours, and the energy that the Air Force expended in trying to create a future conducive to it, the brevity of “space war” as a military construct is surprising. In tracing federal R&D of satellite bombardment, moon bases, and ASAT weapons in the months after Sputnik to the demilitarizing initiatives of the mid-1960s, the national debate over transplanting armed conflict to outer space seems to have lasted little more than half a decade.

Space war ultimately proved ephemeral because it was tied to other fleeting ideas of the early Cold War. One was the widespread conviction that terrifying new weapons, though a menace to humankind, would provide lasting peace. This idea was nothing new, but it enjoyed a powerful renaissance in the atomic bomb, which, many were convinced, would shock the world into pacifism.⁷⁶ Eisenhower's New Look strategy, in which national security would lean heavily on the threat of massive nuclear retaliation, was the central manifestation of this line of thinking. The USAF's leadership and several other corners of the DoD, particularly their R&D teams, considered advanced space weaponry to be simply the next iteration of deterrent force. The Soviet Union—and technology itself—would not stand still. Why should the United States?

A second transitory historical moment on which “space war” relied was the Sputnik shock. From 1958 to 1963, the Soviets had achieved a series of stunning space feats that seemed to foreshadow an uneasy period of strategic parity if not outright Soviet military supremacy. Sputnik was far heavier than the United States’ first satellite, Explorer 1, for example. The R-7 Semyorka ICBM that boosted “fellow traveler” into orbit possessed far greater thrust than the Vanguard rocket that carried Explorer. The Soviet Union far outpaced the United States in space medicine; it orbited a human being before the United States; and, in 1962, it was able to return a satellite filled with biological specimens back to a prearranged target on Earth. Few questioned the USAF's charge that the Kremlin would attempt to leverage these accomplishments into bona fide space-based capabilities that would keep the United States out of space and menace it from above. But this, too, proved a temporary threat.

Ultimately, the appeal of converting outer space into a vast battleground replete with advanced weaponry could travel only as far as strategic conditions would take it. That support for “space war” was tied to contextual events at once comforted and concerned contemporary advocates of a space sanctuary. It was heartening, on the one hand, to know that brash calls for the next generation of weapons could prove fleeting as threats came and went. On the other, the revolving door of security and insecurity ensured that the quest for American preponderance in space always lurked just below the surface.