CHAPTER 11

Project Moon Base

“I ENVISION EXPEDITIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROPOSAL TO establish a lunar outpost to be of critical importance to the U.S. Army of the future. This evaluation is apparently shared by the Chief of Staff in view of his expeditious approval and enthusiastic endorsement of initiation of the study, “ General Trudeau wrote to the chief of ordnance in March 1959, in support of the army’s “Project HORIZON, “ a strategic plan for deploying a military outpost on the surface of the moon.. It was the army’s most ambitious response to the threat from extraterrestrials and, by the time I arrived at the Pentagon, it was one of the projects that General Trudeau had handed off to me to get moving.
“The boys at NASA are taking over the whole rocket launching business, Phil, “ he said. “And the army’s not even getting the scraps left on the table. “

I had just left the White House when the National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed in 1958, and I knew what that had portended. It transferred the responsibility of space from the military services to a civilian run agency that was supposed to fulfill the U.S. promises to other countries for the demilitarization of space. It was a laudable goal, anyone would argue : demilitarize space so that countries could explore and experiment without the risk of losing their space vehicles or satellites to hostile activities.

For the United States and the Russians the agreement meant that our respective astronauts and cosmonauts wouldn’t make war on each other. Good idea. But someone forgot to tell it to the extraterrestrials, who had been systematically violating our planet’s airspace for decades, if not centuries, and had already set up a base of operations on the moon.

For General Trudeau and much of the U.S. military command, the Soviets’ ability to put high payload vehicles and cosmonauts into orbit with relative ease was a frightening prospect. Unless the United States challenged Soviet technology with our own ongoing launch program and expanded our satellite surveillance, the army believed it would cede an all important strategic advantage to the Soviet Union. By 1960, we were reaching a critical juncture. Because of the development window and the time it took to get projects through development, programs started too late in the 1960s would be hopelessly obsolete by 1970, when the Soviets were expected to have established a presence in space.

As in the U2 program, we had another agenda that concerned us more than just the Soviets’ ability to threaten us with a nuclear missile capability from space. We were also very much aware of the ability of a dominant military power on Earth to establish its own version of a treaty with extraterrestrials. We had already seen how Stalin negotiated a separate non-aggression pact with Hitler, allowing the Germans to stabilize its Eastern front and invade Western Europe. We didn’t want to see Khrushchev gain so much unchallenged power in space that the extraterrestrials would readily agree to some kind of accommodation with him guaranteeing both of them a degree of freedom to dominate the political affairs of our planet. This may seem paranoid now, in the 1990s, but in the late 1950s this was exactly the thinking of the military intelligence community.

General Trudeau’s concerns were the concerns of anybody who knew the truth about an alien presence around our planet and their abilities to drop on top of us from out of nowhere just like they had done in Roswell, in Washington, D.C., in 1952, and in countless other places around the world. And we didn’t know if any one of these sightings could turn into a full-fledged landing in force or if an invasion hadn’t already begun.

If they could turn the Soviet government into a client state with a proxy army, there might be no checking their ability to exercise their will to colonize our planet, appropriate our natural resources, or, if the cattle mutilations and stories of abductions were true, conduct with complete impunity an organized experimentation or testing program on the life forms of this planet. In the absence of any information to disprove our fears, it was the military’s obligation to project the worst possible scenario. That’s why the army pushed for Project HORIZON. We had to have a plan.

The Horizon documents were straight forward in expressing their concerns: We needed to put a fully armed military outpost on the moon first because if the Soviets achieved this objective before we did, we would be in the position of having to storm a hill or secure a military position. We would rather be the defenders of a strongly fortified enclave than the attackers. Our outpost had to be strong enough to withstand an assault and have enough personnel to conduct scientific experiments and continual surveillance of the earth and its airspace.

Initially, General Trudeau argued, the outpost must be of sufficient size and contain sufficient equipment to permit the survival and moderate constructive activity of from ten to twenty personnel at a minimum. It must allow for expansion of the permanent facilities, resupply, and rotation of personnel to guarantee the maximum amount of time for a sustained occupancy. The general not only wanted the outpost to establish a beach head on the moon, he wanted it to be permanent and able to sustain itself for long periods without support from the earth. Therefore, location and design were critical and required, in the army’s view, a triangulation station of moon to Earth baseline space surveillance system that facilitated:

(1) communication with and optimum observation of the earth,
(2) routine travel between the moon and the earth,
(3) the best possible exploration capability not only of the immediate area of the lunar surface but long range exploration expeditions and, most importantly from the army’s perspective,
(4) the military defense of the moon base. The army’s primary objective was to establish the first permanent manned installation on the moon and nothing less. The military potential of the moon was paramount, but the mission allowed for an ongoing investigation of the commercial and scientific potentials of the outpost as well.

The army wanted to make Horizon conform to existing national policy on space exploration, even insofar as the demilitarization of space was concerned. But it was tough because all of us in the military services who had come in contact with the Roswell file believed that we were already under some form of attack. Demilitarizing space only meant playing into the hands of a culture that had displayed a hostile intent toward us. But we also realized that overtly establishing a military presence in space would encourage the Soviets to match us step for step and result in an arms race in outer space that would exacerbate Cold War tensions.

Armaments in space might be more difficult to control, and the chance of an accidental military exchange could have easily precipitated a crisis on Earth. Thus, the whole problem of what to do about establishing a military presence in space was a conundrum. Horizon was the army’s attempt to accomplish its military objectives within the context of the government’s demilitarization policy.

The army faced another obstacle in its plans from the members of the Roswell working group who were still establishing and enforcing policy at levels above top secret. The working group correctly saw that any independent military expedition into space, especially for the purpose of establishing an outpost on the moon, had a high probability of encountering extraterrestrials. In this encounter, there was no guarantee that a military exchange would not ensue or, at the very least, a military report would be filed.

Even if these reports were kept top secret, given the military bureaucracy and the presence of legislative oversight it was highly unlikely that the press would not learn about military encounters with aliens. Thus, the basic premise of the working group and its entire mission, the camouflage of our discovery of alien life forms visiting and probably threatening Earth, would be undermined and years of successful operations might easily be brought to an unsatisfactory end. No, the working group would rather have the exploration of space in the hands of a civilian agency whose bureaucracy could be more easily controlled and whose personnel would be handpicked, at least at the outset, by the members of the working group.

Thus, the stage was set for a Byzantine bureaucratic struggle among members of the same organizations but with different levels of security clearance, policy objectives, and even knowledge of what had taken place in years gone by. And underlying it all was the basic assumption that the world’s civilian population was not ready to learn the real truth about the existence of extraterrestrial cultures and the likely threat these cultures posed to life on Earth. General Trudeau was as undaunted as I had ever seen him.

In Korea, he charged back up Pork Chop Hill into the face of an enemy attack so fierce that the soldiers who had volunteered to go up with him believed they were going to breathe their last. But they couldn’t let him go up there alone, which is exactly what he was set to do when he threw away his helmet and clasped one on from a wounded sergeant. He chambered the first round into his automatic and said, “I’m going. Who’s with me?” I imagined he had the same look on his face now, as he handed me the report for Project Horizon, as he did then.

“We’re going, Phil, “ he said, and that was all I needed to hear.

When the civilian space agency supporters told the army that all of the issues the military raised about the need to establish a presence first would be accomplished with civilian missions, General Trudeau argued that the civilian plans did not explicitly call for a base on the moon, only for the possibility of an outpost in earth orbit that may or may not be capable of serving as a way station for flights to the moon or to other planets.

And the time frame for the construction of an orbiting space station made it seem obsolete even before it reached the drawing boards. Besides, General Trudeau told the scientists on Eisenhower’s aeronautics and space advisory committee toward the end of the President’s administration, you can’t trust a civilian run agency to complete a military mission. It hadn’t happened in the past and it wouldn’t happen in the future. If you wanted a military operation completed, only the military could do it. President Eisenhower understood that kind of logic.

In the late 1950s, the White House had forwarded queries to General Trudeau about the army’s research and development policy regarding Project Horizon and why, specifically, the military needed to be on the moon and why a civilian mission couldn’t accomplish most of the scientific objectives. This was at the time when the White House was supporting the National Aeronautics and Space Act and was supporting the creation of the civilian National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

General Trudeau responded that he couldn’t immediately lay out the full extent of the military potential. “But, “ he wrote in the report, “it is probable that observation of the Earth and space vehicles from the moon will prove to be highly advantageous. “
Later he wrote that by using a moon to Earth baseline, space surveillance by triangulation - in other words, using a point of reference on Earth and a point of reference on the moon to pin point the positions of enemy missiles, satellites, or spacecraft - promised greater range and accuracy of observation. Instead of having only one point of observation, we would have an additional angle because we would have a base on the moon as another point of observation.

This was especially the case for the types of lunar and Mars missions NASA was planning as early as 1960. He said that the types of earth based tracking and control networks currently in the planning stages were already inadequate for the deep space operations that were also in the planning stages in the civilian agencies. So, it made no sense to spend money developing communications and control networks that would be obsolete for the very purposes for which they were being designed. Military communications would be improved immeasurably by the use of a moon based relay station that would cover a broader range and probably be more resistant to attack during a conventional or nuclear war that took place on Earth. But General Trudeau had the real bombshell waiting to be dropped.

“The employment of moon based weapons systems against Earth or space targets may prove to be feasible and desirable, “ he wrote the army chief of ordnance, revealing for the first time that he believed, along with Douglas MacArthur, that the army might be called upon to fight a war in space as well as on Earth. General Trudeau foresaw the possibility that a moon based communications network would have an advantage in tracking guided missiles launched from Earth, but he also realized that weapons could be fired from space, and not just by Earth governments but by extraterrestrial craft. It was the moon base project, he believed, that would be able to protect civilian populations and military forces on Earth from attacks launched either from earth orbit or from space. But a moon based defense initiative had an added feature.

“Moon based military power will be a strong deterrent to war because of the extreme difficulty, from the enemy point of view, of eliminating our ability to retaliate, “ he hypothesized. “Any military operations on the moon will be difficult to counter by the enemy because of the difficulty of his reaching the moon, if our forces are already present and have means of countering a landing or of neutralizing any hostile forces that have landed. “

 

And, the general told me, this would apply whether those hostile forces were the Soviets, the Chinese, or the EBEs. The situation would be reversed, however, “if hostile forces are permitted to arrive first. They can militarily counter our landings and attempt to deny us politically the use of their property. “

The army conceived of the development of a moon base as an endeavor similar to the building of the atomic bomb: a vast amount of resources applied to one particular mission, complete secrecy about the nature of the mission, and a crash program to complete the mission before the end of the next decade. He said that the establishment of the outpost should be a special project having authority and priority similar to the Manhattan Project in World War II. Once established, the lunar base would be operated under the control of a unified space command, which was an extension of current military command and control policy, and still is.

Space, specifically an imaginary sphere of space encompassing the earth and the moon, would be considered a military theater governed by whatever military rules were in force at that time. The control of all U.S. military forces by a unified command had already been in effect by the late 1950s, so General Trudeau’s plan for a unified military space command was no exception to an ongoing practice. The only difference was that the general didn’t want the unified command to exercise authority solely over the moon base itself; he wanted it extended to control and utilize exclusively military satellites, military space vehicles, space surveillance systems, and the entire logistical network installed to support these military assets.

To the general, being second to the Soviet Union in deploying and supporting a permanent lunar outpost would have been disastrous not only to our national prestige but to our very democratic system itself. In Arthur Trudeau’s estimation, the Soviet Union was currently planning to fortify a lunar base by the middle 1960s and declare it Soviet territory. He believed that if the United States tried to land on the moon, especially if we tried to establish a base of operations there, the Soviets would have propagandized the event as an act of war, an invasion of its territory, and would have tried to characterize the United States as the aggressor and our presence as a hostile act.

If they defended the moon as one of their colonies, or if they were the proxy force on behalf of the extraterrestrials with whom they had forged a military treaty, the United States would be in a weakened position. Thus, General Trudeau concluded and so advised his chief of the Ordnance Missile Command, it was of the utmost urgency that the U.S. Army devise a feasible plan to have a manned landing on the lunar surface by spring 1965, with a fully operational lunar outpost deployed on the moon by late 1966 at a cost over an eight and a half year period of $6 billion.

The first two astronauts, the spear head of the scouting crew, were scheduled to touch down on the lunar surface in April 1965, in an area near the lunar equator where, according to the surveys, the army believed the terrain would support multiple landing and lift off facilities and the construction of a cylindrical, ranch house type of structure with tubular walls built beneath the surface into a crevice that would house an initial twelve personnel. The bulk of the construction materials for the lunar outpost, about 300,000 pounds, would already be on the site, having been transported there over the previous three months. According to the army plan, an additional190,000 pounds of cargo would be sent to the moon from April 1965 through November 1966. And from December 1966 through December 1967, another 266,000 pounds of cargo and supplies would be scheduled to arrive at the now operational moon base.

It is April 1965, and a lunar vehicle with a crew of two astronauts has just touched down on the moon’s surface. Although the vehicle has an immediate lift off capability to return the astronauts to Earth, their scouting from orbit has determined that the area is safe and that there are no threats from either the Soviets or any extraterrestrials. The radio crackles with the team’s first instructions.

“This is Horizon control, Moonbase. You are go for the first twenty-four hours,“ Horizon control at the Cocoa Beach, Florida, Cape Canaveral Space Command Center advises the astronauts. They secure their lander, which, if they receive the go to stay for additional periods, will ultimately become their cabin for the next two months as the construction crews arrive from Earth to begin the assembly of the lunar outpost.

However, even before the first manned cargo ships arrive, the advance crew of two astronauts will confirm the condition of the cargo that has already been delivered to the site, refine the environmental studies that have been conducted by the unmanned surveillance probes, and verify that the initial measurements and assumptions for the site of the moon base are correct.

By July 1965, the first crew of nine men arrive to begin laying the cylindrical tubes in the crevice beneath the surface and install the two portable atomic reactors that will power the entire outpost. A number of factors influenced the army’s decision to sink the main structures beneath the lunar surface. The most important of these were the uniform temperatures, the insulation of the lunar surface material itself, protection from a potentially hazardous shower of small meteors and meteorites, camouflage and security, and protection from the kinds of radiation particles that are normally prevented from reaching Earth by our atmosphere.

Army engineers designed the cylindrical housing units to look and act like vacuum tank thermos bottles with a double wall with a special insulation between. The thermos design would prevent heat loss and so insulate the housing unit so that just the heal radiated by the internal artificial lighting system would be more than adequate to maintain a comfortable temperature inside. The crew’s atmosphere was to be maintained by insulated tanks containing liquid oxygen and nitrogen with the waste moisture and carbon dioxide absorbed by solid chemicals and recycled through a dehumidifier. Eventually, as the base became more permanent and new crews were rotated in and out, a more efficient recycling system was to be installed.
 

The initial construction crew was assigned to live in a temporary configuration of cylindrical quarters as their numbers were increased by an additional six men and more supplies. Like the permanent facility, the temporary construction cabin would be buried in a crevice beneath the lunar surface, but it would be smaller than the permanent cabin and have none of the laboratory facilities that were to be built in the permanent structure.

From the component parts already shipped to the landing site, the construction crew was to assemble a lunar surface rover, a digging and trenching vehicle - similar to a backhoe - and a forklift type of vehicle that would also serve as a type of crane. With just these three devices, the army believed, a crew of fifteen workers could assemble a permanent outpost out of prefabricated components. The Horizon plan for construction of facilities in a weightless, airless environment ultimately became the model for the construction of both the Russian Mir and American freedom space stations.

While the construction of the permanent subsurface structure was under way, other members of the crew would lay out the multiantenna communications system that would rely on geosynchronous Earth satellites to relay transmissions back and forth from Earth ground stations. Lunar based tracking and surveillance radar equipment would also maintain a constant vigilance of the earth and be able to track any orbital vehicles from the earth’s surface as well as space vehicles entering the planet’s atmosphere from outer space. Members of the crew would communicate with each other: and with the outpost itself by radios mounted in the helmets of their space suits.

By the time the army was proposing Project Horizon, army engineers had already selected a number of launch sites. Instead of Cape Canaveral, the army chose an equatorial location because the earth spins fastest at the equator and this would provide added thrust to any rocket with an especially heavy payload. The army chose a secret location in Brazil where it wanted to start construction on an eight launchpad facility that would house the entire project.

The spacecraft would be monitored and controlled from the facilities at Cocoa Beach, where the army and navy were already launching their satellites.

We broke the program into six separate phases beginning with the June 1959 initial feasibility, which was written in response to General Trudeau’s first proposal and became Phase I of the entire plan.

Phase II, scheduled to be completed in early 1960, when I was to take over the project, called for a detailed development and funding plan in conjunction with preliminary experimentation on some of the essential components. During this phase, I had planned to use our regular Army R&D procedures to manage and review the testing and make sure that we could do what we said we could do under the initial feasibility study.

In Phase III, we scheduled the complete development of the hardware and the system integration for the entire project. This included the rockets, the space capsules, all of the lunar transportation and construction vehicles, the launch facilities at the proposed site in Brazil, and the lunar outpost components for both the temporary and the permanent bases. Also included in this phase was the development of all of the communications systems, including relay stations, surveillance systems, and the personal protective and communications gear that the astronauts would use. And finally, Phase III called for the engineering of all the actual procedures needed for Horizon to be successful such as the orbital rendezvous, orbital fueling of lunar transportation vehicles, transfer of cargo in orbit, and launching and testing of cargo rockets.

Under Phase IV, scheduled for 1965, the first lunar landing was to take place. The establishment of the first two man lunar observation outpost and the construction of the preliminary living and working quarters for the first detachment of the crew were all slated for completion. The plans stated that by the end of this phase, “a manned lunar outpost will have been established. “

Phases V and VI were the operational phases of the project and were scheduled to be completed over a two year period beginning in December 1966 and winding up in January 1968. Under these phases, the lunar outpost would progress from the preliminary construction phases to the construction of the permanent facilities. These facilities begin the surveillance of Earth, establish our military presence by the emplacement of fortified positions on the moon, and begin the first scientific experiments and exploration.

In Phase VI, based upon the success of the permanent outpost and the exploration of the lunar terrain, the army planned to expand the outpost with more landings and additional facilities and report on the results of biological and chemical testing and the first attempts to exploit the moon as a commercial entity. The army also believed, because that was the way we in R&D believed we could pay back the enormous development overhead we incurred, that by commercially exploiting the moon, perhaps through the same kind of federal land leasing deals the Department of the Interior currently grants for oil and mineral exploration, we could put the billions of dollars spent back into the federal coffers.

Project Horizon also outlined the development of an Earth orbiting station as an ancillary project to support the lunar landing missions. Under the “Orbital Station” specifications, the Army Ordnance project developers suggested the launching and assembly of an “austere, basic” orbital platform that would provide astronaut crews on their way to the moon with a rendezvous point for exchanging and increasing their payloads, refueling, and relaunching their spacecraft.

The orbiting station would also be important in the early cargo shipment stages of Project Horizon where army crews could handle the cargo loading in the weightlessness of space faster and easier than they could on Earth. Cargo could be shipped up separately, travel in earth orbit with the station, and then be reassembled by crews who would live in their own spaceship cabins instead of in the space station and then return to Earth when the refueling and reassembly of payloads was complete.
 

If the preliminary basic space station were successful, the army envisioned a more elaborate, sophisticated facility that would have its own scientific and military mission and serve as a relay station for crews on their way to or from the lunar outpost. This station would have an enhanced military capability and enable the United States to dominate the airspace over its enemies, blind its enemies’ satellites, and shoot down its missiles. The army also saw the enhanced orbiting space station as another component in an elaborate defense against extraterrestrials, especially if the military were able to develop high energy lasers and the particle beam weapon we had seen aboard the Roswell spacecraft. The space station would, according to the army plan, effectively provide the platform for testing Earth to space weapons, and these, General Trudeau and I agreed, would be primarily directed against the hostile extraterrestrials who were the real threat to our planet.

In its plan for a separate administration and management structure within the structure of the army, Project Horizon was designed to be the largest research, development, and deployment operation in the army’s history. Larger than the Manhattan Project, Horizon could easily have become a completely separate unit within the army itself. As such, Horizon was perceived as an immediate threat to the other branches of the military as well as to the civilian space agencies. The navy had its own pet plan for establishing undersea bases that would harvest the commercial and scientific opportunities at the bottom of the oceans while at the same time, and more importantly, establishing an antisubmarine defense that would counter the threat from Soviet nuclear submarines. We suspected that the navy plans, like our own plans for a moon base, also gave the navy the capability of carrying out surveillance tracking of unidentified undersea objects if, in fact, that’s what the EBEs were sending to Earth.

Despite the civilian opposition to the army’s plan, General Trudeau wrote that the army had no choice but to advocate its plans for a moon base.

“The United States intelligence community agrees that the Soviet Union may accomplish a manned lunar landing at anytime after 1965. “ This, he said, would establish a Soviet precedent for claiming the lunar surface as Soviet territory which, even in and of itself, could precipitate the next war if the United States also tried to establish a presence there. Being second was no option. “As the Congress has noted, “ General Trudeau continued, “we are caught in a stream in which we have no choice but to proceed. “ .

However, as hard as we tried to get Project Horizon into full funding and development, we were stopped. The nation’s space program had become the property of the civilian space agency, and NASA had its own agenda and its own schedule for space exploration. We were successful in discrete projects like Corona, but it would not relinquish to the army the control necessary to establish a moon base under the terms of a Project Horizon.

I became General Trudeau’s point man for the project in Washington. I was able to lobby for it, and Horizon also became an effective cover for all of the technological development I was overseeing out of the Roswell file.

No one knew just how much of the Roswell technology would wind up getting into development because of the military issues Horizon implicitly proposed about the presence of extraterrestrials and their hostile intentions. After his first full year in office, President Kennedy also saw the value in Project Horizon even though he was in no position to dismantle NASA or order NASA to cede control to the army for the development of a base on the moon.

But I think we eventually made our point to the President because he ultimately saw the value in a moon base. Shortly after I testified before the Senate in a closed, top secret session about how the KGB had penetrated the CIA and was actually dictating some of our intelligence estimates since before the Korean War, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who read that secret testimony, asked me to come over to the Justice Department for a visit.

We came to a meeting of the minds that day. I know that I convinced him that the official intelligence the President was receiving through his agencies was not only faulty, it was deliberately flawed. Robert Kennedy began to see that those of us over at the Pentagon were not just a bunch of old soldiers looking for a war. He saw that we really did see a threat and that the United States was truly compromised by Soviet penetration of our most secret agencies.

We didn’t talk about Roswell or any aliens. I never told him about extraterrestrials, but I was able to convince him that if the Soviets got to the moon before we did, victory in the Cold War might just belong to them by the end of this decade. Bobby Kennedy suspected that there was another agenda to the army’s desire to deploy a lunar outpost for military as well as for scientific and commercial purposes and, without ever acknowledging that agenda, promised that he would talk about it with the President.

I can only tell you that it was a mark of achievement for me personally when President John Kennedy announced to the nation shortly after my meeting with Bobby at the Justice Department that it was one of his goals that the United States put a manned expedition on the moon before the end of the 1960s. He got it! Maybe he couldn’t let the army have another Manhattan Project. That was another era and another war. But Jack Kennedy did understand, I believe, the real consequences of the Cold War and what might have happened if the Russians had put a manned lander on the moon before we did.

The way history turned out, it was our lunar expeditions, one after the other throughout the 1960s, that not only caught the world’s attention but showed all our enemies that the United States was determined to stake out its territory and defend the moon. Nobody was looking for an out and out war, especially the EBEs who tried to scare us away from the moon and their own base there more times than even I know. They buzzed our ships, interfered with our communications, and sought to threaten us by their physical presence. But we continued and persevered. Ultimately, we reached the moon and sent enough manned expeditions to explore the lunar surface that they effectively challenged the EBEs for control over our own skies and sphere of space, the very sphere General Trudeau was talking about in the Project Horizon memoranda ten years earlier.

And although the Horizon proposal projected a lunar landing by1967, it presupposed that the army would begin creating the bureaucracy to manage the effort and build the hardware as early as1959. Because of NASA and civilian management of space exploration, the United States took longer to reach the moon than we had originally assumed and, of course, never did build the permanent base we had planned for in the original Horizon proposal.

I knew, even though I was no longer in the army in 1969, that our success at lunar exploration had demonstrated that we were exercising control and that the EBEs would not have free rein over our skies. It also demonstrated that if there were any deals to be made, any proxy relationships to establish, the Soviets were not the ones to deal with. By the beginning of the 1970s, as the Apollo lunar landings continued, it was clear that the tide had turned and we had gained some of the advantage in dealing with the EBEs that we were seeking way back in the 1950s.

But for me, back in 1961, staring at the mammoth Project Horizon report on my desk and realizing that the entire civilian science establishment was mobilizing against this endeavor, I knew that small victories would have to suffice until the big ones could be won. And I took out the printed silicon wafers we’d pulled from the Roswell spacecraft wreckage and told myself that these would comprise the next project I would get into development. I barely knew what they were, but, if the scientists at White Sands Proving Grounds were right about what they portended, this was a victory we would relish long after the political battles over Project Horizon were over.

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