by JOSEPH TREVITHICK
In space, no one can hear you scream. But in the early days of the space age, the Pentagon had a bigger problem—namely, earthly notions of ballistics and gun-design didn’t apply in vacuum.
As the United States had started to conquer space in the 1950s, the Pentagon envisioned troops in orbit and military bases on the moon. To defend themselves on these new battlefields, the U.S. Army believed soldiers would need a whole new class of weapon.
“Because of the entirely new and different environment and conditions facing man in space, we cannot wait until the eleventh hour to ‘crash’ a weapon program through with any hope of success, for we may even now be standing on the edge of the battleground of Armageddon,” engineers from the U.S. Army Weapons Command’s Future Weapons Office wrote in a now declassified 1965 study.
The entirely theoretical report had the colorful and lengthy title The Meanderings of a Weapon Oriented Mind When Applied in a Vacuum Such as on the Moon. Four years earlier, Pres. John F. Kennedy urged Congress to make putting an American on the lunar surface by the end of the decade a national priority.
The future-minded weaponeers had clearly taken the message to heart, in their own way.
