Red Flag Over the Moon

The United States has the means to make up the loss—if time permits. We have an industrial apparatus far superior to that of the Soviets, but do we have the time to spare?Are our leaders willing to take a stand quick enough and firm enough? What is more—are they willing to scrap fast some of the rubbish they have cluttered up our rocket projects with?

What exactly does a Soviet victory in moon-flight mean? Well, the moon is a permanent fixed space platform, from which every part of the Earth's surface can be surveyed telescopically down to the smallest detail. To construct a telescope in the low-gravity airlessness of the moon's surface is a simple matter compared with telescope construction on Earth. With great ease and speed, lenses can be arranged, on simple skeleton frameworks, virtually fixed on the Earth—which, please remember, is a fixed object in the lunar skies. Observations will be a hundred times clearer there because of the lack of an obscuring atmosphere.

It would be no problem to set, almost at once a spy observatory on Luna that will be able to spot every movement on Earth of a troop of soldiers or even of a single automobile. There will be no military secrets left.

The next step, following the observatory, would be the setting of a rocket-artillery base on the moon. From such a point, it would be no problem to fire direct rocket shots at any activity on the Earth's surface the Lunar Station didn't like. What is more it would be vastly difficult for the Earth to fire back.

In addition to these obvious military advantages, there is also the tremendous boost to science that working on the moon will give. Conditions of matter in low gravity and in outer space are still not subject to experiment to the Earth-bound. The certainty of making great discoveries and great strides in the conquest of nature is taken for granted once we have reached outer space. The qualities of various elements at temperatures near absolute zero are already suspected to hold tremendous potentials for energy liberation—and such temperatures could be had without much difficulty during the two-week long lunar nights. The world's chemists would sell their souls for a chance at such experimentation.

The Russians, who have had a bug on engineering education (they are outstripping us in the number of students and graduates—another scandal) since 1945, know all about these possibilities. They are giving their rocket and space travel men the same type of high priority drive that the U.S.A. gave the atomic bomb project during World War II.

The cold fact is that Soviet achievement of the moon is going to make them the masters of the Earth. They know it—and what is worse, until October 4, 1957, apparently the Pentagon didn't know it.

There are men among the rocket engineers of America who knew this, too. Such men as G. Harry Stine, whose book EARTH SATELLITES AND THE RACE FOR SPACE SUPERIORITY, published by Ace Books shortly before the advent of the Sputnik, put the case with clarity and passion. In his unique thirty-five cent newsstand paperback, Stine outlined what America planned to do in the launching of its own earth satellite, the Vanguard, and then went on to outline what American engineers saw as the next steps along the line.

These steps consisted of advanced designs of cargo-carrying rockets and man-carrying rockets—the ICBM—and then of a vast and elaborate project to construct a manned space station—an Earth Satellite as large as a small city, with a permanent crew of engineers and researchers. This space station in turn would serve as the place where the first moon-exploration rockets would be put together and then launched. It would act to serve the same defensive and research purposes that the moon would serve.

Possibly this is still the official United States program. If it is, it is going to be too bad for us. Because the Russians stated the answer quite clearly a few months ago. One of their scientists pointed out that construction of this colossal space platform was a waste of time and an evasion of the obvious. For the obvious, said this Soviet rocketman, is that a really permanent and stable space platform already exists—and that was Luna itself. The Russian logic called for by-passing any such man-made platform and for setting up shop without delay on the moon itself.