The part that doesnt show in pasadena Public Schools is all the classrooms had the floor to ceiling windows. You are under your halfinch of formica with a huge sheet glass window is the bomb just going to shut up get under the desk that is the setting, if you will, of the stories we are talking about. One of my favorites is project horizon, this was turned into the Eisenhower Administration in 1958, very short study of four to six month, werner von braun was part of this but i dont think he was as intimately involved as he would like to have been. I have read this a couple times. It doesnt to the attention to deal about detail but the general idea was we needed to build a base on the moon before the russians got there. To hold that piece of real estate against invasion and by the way, we are not going to talk about it much but we could put Nuclear Weapons there. It would take two days to get here but that was a consideration. Here is the moon base, this proposal is graphically challenged, that is as good as illustrations get. You see the general idea was they were going to dig these trenches and fly these Cargo Containers and assembly lunar base on the surface using a number of large rockets. This was the u. S. Army. The first flight would be in 1965, they were going to send three men in a rocket. When i say rocket they didnt have the saturn 5 back yet. We are talking about smaller rockets at the time that have to fly into orbit, fuel up there, fly another one up, then take off for the moon, land directly, none of this rendezvousing in orbit that apollo did. Like the bugs bunny cartoon, straight to the moon, do your thing, come back. The first three would spend 90 days record ordering on the surface. You had never seen it through anything but a telescope at this point so they were going to select a landing site for the base, then fly upwards of 100 to 130 cargo runs with rockets, 130, not the 16 with apollo but 130, launching out of the central pacific, could launch from Cape Canaveral but this was the army and Cape Canaveral belong to the air force. They said we will ship everything to Christmas Island and lunch from there. Obviously didnt work. Big plans, big ideas. Once they decided where to put this, and they sent 9 people, in the 1950s, they had 15 days to dig these trenches, put together their block and tackle, build their moon tractor, move everything over, connect the wires, build the bunks, build the office, get the weapons situated, ready to go, it was a little bit ambitious. The crew by 1966, if theres anything good about this, besides blind ambition, it would be open as a program and might still be there which is something we didnt get from the Apollo Program but the best part is last, the moon soldiers. You cant have an army moon base without folders, right . These arent just astronauts, these are soldiers. Here they moon soldier in full combat it up for being on the lunar surface the entire time, which my favorite part, these arent ice skate, these are large footpads because we know how much dust there was, he might step in a crater and sink up to his antenna. They had ways to deal with bodily functions, heat radiators, that was all they marked up on not sure why it was so incomplete. That is what a welldressed moon soldier is wearing. People say that is not quite how we did it. If you have soldiers on the moons ymoon you got to have weapons. In the vacuum in the moon they were concerned about shooting a. 45 pistol in a vacuum, the metal might seize up due to temperature or metal rubbing against each other, they were concerned because there was no air the smoke might collect in front of the gun and obscure the view but my favorite concert was using a rifle at the right angle at the right caliber of bullet you might fire, miss the bad guy and it goes all the way around the moon and hits you in the back of the helmet so that is very bad. They decided rather than have Something Like that lets have Nuclear Bazooka instead. Surely that is a good weapon against the invading soldiers over the crater so this is the Davy Crockett and 28, and 29 nuclear mortar with an instruction book on the right and 51 ton warhead just under a kiloton, moves 10 or 15 kt so you get the general idea, big explosion in the range of 2. 3 miles, wasnt very accurate but when you are talking Nuclear Explosions accuracy doesnt matter. Hit the trigger, ducked down behind rocks and hope they dont get swelled up at the nuclear blast. If you deploy these things, they send them to europe. This is a large backpack, if you test them here is a test on a sunny day in nevada. Thrill physicists with dark sunglasses, getting radiated with about 8 million equivalents of their yearly xrays. We knew that it worked, that was good. The other weapon they wanted on the moon was the lunar play horn which they resurfaced. Widely used us up through. Anybody in the military, and eat it is good to have instruction on things. It is important. It is bad enough to get hit by one of these on earth. You dont want to kill anybody, dragging them off the surface this was really kind of an ideal moon weapon, they didnt have anything taken. If that wasnt enough, a few years later after this project was shelved it was turned into the Eisenhower Administration, my understanding, although it is not written down as such, he looked at it, took off the glasses and said you got to be getting me kind of looks. He didnt want to see, despite his background in world war ii, he didnt want to see war extended to space, he said we are not going to do this, we have a civilian Space Program. That is not going to stop the armory. In 1965 i never did find the name of the person who wrote it. The meanderings of a weapon oriented mind when applied in a vacuum such as the moon. I assume he is applying it as a problem of weapons. This is a study complete with welldressed lunar soldiers, flying tank or something over there. What kind of firearms you might want to use on the moon. A very buck rogers example, there are six, and this fires pellets are little darts here. It is roughly the power of a 22 pistol. No reason to have little heat fins here but it looks really cool if youre proposing a weapon in the 1960s, why not make it look cool . This would be thin stabilized micro guns. 19 little holes there and used interchangeably. With rocket propelled bullets that spin as they go. And you can whip out the sausage gun. These are two of six, they got progressively weirder but the ideal was you got to have special mood weapons. To close on project horizon. You got to have some generally realistic idea what is going to cost. We know project apollo because it is a matter of history, 11 flights cost 20 to 24 billion depending how you slice it in money at that time. Project horizon would have 155 plus with developments in the base in the caroline islands, a Permanent Moon base and so forth, i think they underbid a little bit but the government contract inflates a little bit, but 100 flights would have been a challenge on anybodys budget. That was probably a nonstarter. And we did not have the Apollo Program which was a much better decision. Scenario number 2, doing two chapters, atomic rockets. Up until now, including elon musk and jeff bezos and the buccaneers in the space project, all rockets leave the earth powered by chemical reaction. The big, powerful, great, have limits, they way a lot, they can only get so much in orbit at one time unless you ask elon musk who keeps thinking he will make them bigger and bigger which he may will do but how could you bypass that . What is a good way to do it . We are talking 1950s, Nuclear Power is all the rage. We are looking at everything from power plants to airplanes to military ships and submarines, one designed a car that would have a fission reactor in the trunk so had to fuel everything here. Would have been a shame if something went wrong in the neighborhood. In the 40s and 50s they had rockets like these, semichemical powered, some nuclear. They are cool looking, they are big, have a lot of cabin space for the crew, passengers, tiny engines and not a lot of room left over for fuel, chemical fuel, which is how we want to do it if we want to fly into space a lot but no one has figured that out. You may recognize this, destination moon, one of my favorite movies. This is what rockets were supposed to look like and they promised this. A nice big bridge where everybody could walk around and chat, some young maidens in their velcro miniskirts handing clipboards to the captain which he would sign and not meaningfully and these things. It was supposed to be like star trek, dont get hung up on the gravity, you push a gravity button but we didnt get this is what we got was more like this. This is the apollo capsule. A matting a imagine sitting in there for two weeks which they never did that long. They set two weeks in gemini which was two guys and much smaller, you have two astronaut to the gemini capsule two weeks, shoulders touching, this much clearance for the helmet and the hatch and you cant over it. No thank you. What we want is a bigger more robust environment that can go places faster and carry more stuff. We could have had this. Leslie nielsen, by the way. If we had done this, project orion. This was late 1960s in san diego, studies that had been done a few years before and we got a lot of Nuclear Bombs around the country, we can use those for propulsion and one of the other engineers said surely you seen it nuclear reactor. No, bombs. Think about it. They have a little bit of a push, right . They do. They designed a number of versions of spacecraft, this is one of the larger ones. Small, medium, large, mega large to interstellar, i like this one because it looks like a bullet. That is the orion spacecraft as proportion to the statue of liberty so you get an idea of size. 170 feet tall, weighed 22 Million Pounds at launch, the saturn 5 ways 7. 5 Million Pounds. This gives you 6. 5 million, this weighs a lot more but has 4000 times plus, it can carry 7 to 100 people as far as you want to go until you run out of atomic bombs, tons of cargo. Anywhere in the solar system worth going. It was studied as recently as a couple years ago and as of yet no engineers have found a reason it couldnt work. It would be challenging but all the numbers and everything seems to add up that it would be possible. The crew quarters is here. These are all atomic bombs. These are shock absorbers because you dont want atomic bombs going off down here with that bank being transmitted into you. The little tube is where the bombs go out and go back a couple hundred feet from the bottom of it, that is an apollo astronaut to give an idea of the scale. It would have been sensational. Freeman dyson was a part of the study. My favorite quote of his in 1965, saturn by 1970, he wasnt kidding, he was dead serious. It would have probably been the same cost or cheaper than the Apollo Program. What do you suppose the problem was . Atomic bombs are nonstarter. It was a Great Program with a sound engineering logic behind it but taking off of the ground using Nuclear Weapons was not the best way to go. Dyson calculated it would have only added 1 to the fallout in the atmosphere given how much Nuclear Testing was going on at the time. We all breathe some of it one time or another if we are a certain age and he said there are only one or two deaths prelaunch on average in the public. Which sounds bad until you realize 36,400 people were dying every year in their buicks and whatever large american monstrosities they were driving at the time. In terms of raw numbers the prices too high. Morally a little shifty. Is a nonstarter, could have been this. If they had launched with chemical records and they got into a but, they did test conventional explosives to make sure the idea would work. I thought i would show a little bit of that. Is 3 feet across, just setting off tnt as it goes up but it shows that it works. You have these things at the right time with a nice solid plate at the bottom to prevent the astronauts from getting cooked, they can function. What stopped it . The Nuclear Test Ban treaty was signed in 1963 which rained on their parade. The outerspace treaty was signed in 1967 saying you cant weatherize space and cant own anything. That was a downer for project orion because it was nuclear and earth day came along, we got environmental awareness and people said is a good idea . Even if you get stuff up there with regular rockets do you think it is a great idea to be launching wads of plutonium and uranium into space . Rockets blow up sometimes and these things come back down. We have launched plutonium on at least three mars missions. A couple deep space missions, all the apollo missions, apollo 11. We have done it a bunch of times. The russians have done it more times than we have. One or two came back, they are sitting at the bottom of the ocean not bothering anybody. It is not a good thing but not as dangerous as we thought. We are not talking the scale of orion. If it had gone bad it would have been a bad day. Other scenarios in the book, the idea of using the gemini spacecraft to land on the moon because the air force thought they could do that with apollo. To keep the apollo assemblyline in 1972, ideas, very seriously considered about flying loops with crews of 3 or more around venus or mars or both, it would take a few years. Do the math. It all works out. Radiation is a concern too. On braun defined an inflatable space station in 1953, the big ringshaped one that i had in the beginning, looks like steel but it is a bicycle tire space and would have worked. There are concerns with contractors, if some astronaut gets over exuberant and punctures a whole, this thing goes flying around like a balloon, wouldnt have it space stations and a lot more. What is coming up . What we are heading into, nasa retired the Space Shuttle in 2011, we have a wonderful space station that flies overhead every 90 minutes but since 2011 we havent had a way to get our people up there. We pay for most of it which is a problem. We have been buying rides from the russians on their soyuz spacecraft which ironically was designed to beat us to the moon when we were flying apollo. Didnt succeed at that. When we retired the shuttle, the soyuz is 38 million and is not like the fuel has gotten worse. That is what is remarkable there. A lot of people are not happy about this so nasa, the space lunch system, some call it the senate launch system. This is a saturn 5 rocket that does many things the saturn 5 would do, we can launch a number of them, a lot of uses for it, the problem is slow to build. If you are nasa that is something you are used to and how you have been doing business a long time with space contracts and so forth. This is an example how it would look in lunar configuration and things are going along, elon musk says 2002, i am starting a rocket, nasa, air force and i want to hire cargo. Basically that is nice, get out. Let us know when you are ready. Much to the surprise of a lot of us he did that and he is flying rockets regularly, large payloads, getting ready to fly astronauts probably later this year or early next year in tests of his new spacecraft dragon 2 capsule. Nasa with their sls have flown one test flight of the capsule in 2014, not with that rocket. Each year they are commissioned, that is fine. The next flight isnt until 2018, another unmanned test flight and then they will fly in 2021. We went from 15 minutes of time in space to landing on the moon in eight years but that has taken this long, there is a lot less money at stake and intent of the budget they used to have in the 60s so there are good reasons for that but it too long. In comes the trump administration, suggestion things could be sped up, they are studying, havent committed to but studying putting astronauts on it for major flight and sending it on a loop around the moon which is a cool idea unless you are the people you have to go, then it is rather scary. They announced that a couple weeks ago. 6 days later here comes elon musk in the news saying that is really great, by the way i meant to tell you i will be flying my falcon heavy rocket next year and once i test that once or twice i will let a couple paying passengers go on my spacecraft on a loop around the moon 6 months before yours does. That was an interesting moment that surprised a lot of us. The falcon 9, what is revolutionary about the rocket, amazon is doing this as well, they come back. The second stage continues, third stage comes back, it flies back to the launch site or a barge in the pacific or Atlantic Ocean depending on which launch sites they are it is completely autonomous. No one joysticking this, just talking the rocket. It comes down, usually landing perfectly and he is refurbishing them and getting ready to fly one soon. This is a major change because this is a huge reduction in cost. This is the falcon heavy, the big one going up in probably a year. Basically three falcon 9s put together that will separate and fly back. Pitched in september in guadalajara, mexico, interplanetary transport system. This is his idea for a huge solar system class rocket carrying crews to saturn so it is like orion that is it next to the saturn v so you get used to the scope. That is the passenger vehicle which could carry 70, 80 people. This is basically intended for his plan to colonize mars was the whole reason he got into the Space Business is because he wants to send humanity to mars, have this backup environment there so when we wreck this planet we can build on that one. It has a long way to go, mars is not a nice place but it is an interesting idea. Jeff bezos runs amazon, he has a rocket company, he wants to colonize space. He is not sure about mars. For scale here is an astronaut, it is big. If you want to go into space, youre like me, you break into a cold sweat when the elevator doors take too long to open, this is your rocket, not the one with the bucket here and the windows like the old guys. Before we end i have a spaceage quiz and three copies of the book to give away. There are a couple ringers in here so you shouldnt weigh in at for your civilians, you know what im talking about. Who was