When the Moon Hits Your Eye, Hit Back!

I don't want to pigeon-hole myself as the guy who's always uncovering secret conflicts about which the public has been misled or excluded from the know, but this opportunity was too important to pass up. You see, for years--nay decades--we've been at war with the Moon. In fact, a few days ago, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of our first attack on lunar soil (well, it's not technically soil, but I'll get to that later). While the major news networks would have you believe that our landing on the moon was a mere "accomplishment" of a "scientific nature", the facts tell another story.

Since man first took to the skies, in the early 1900s, there has been much ado about those skies, and their boundaries. The Wright brothers, who first successfully flew a manned mission to the skies, had a long-standing feud with the Moon, which had been mostly one-sided. However, once the two brothers backed their threats with a flying vehicle, the Moon had to take the men more seriously. Lunar foreign policy was more liberal than that of Earth, so the idea of an attack was last on the agenda. The U.S., however, was more hawkish in its approach as the century entered its halfway point. In 1958 NACA was dissolved as the governmental body governing the exploration of the skies. In a move to unequivocally threatening the Moon, the United States created NASA, a much more warlike entity by its nature, with the stated purpose of putting men in space.

This period of human history, aptly named "The Space Race", was fueled by attempts by the United States and the Soviet Union to push farther into space. As the U.S. was still following the Wright Brothers' plan to overthrow the Moon, their policy was more cautious, and took a slower approach. But with the U.S.S.R's launch of Sputnik I, the U.S. became fearful that the Soviets were trying to actively recruit the moon's help in a two-front war against the U.S. In a memo to then President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates said:

Given the recent Soviet activity in space travel, more aggressive moves must be made to initiate policy goals regarding the Moon. It is crucial that we mount a preemptive attack on the Moon within the decade, in an effort to stop an attack from a Lunar-Soviet Alliance.

President Kennedy, taking this advice seriously, even said in his now famous "Moon Speech";

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

I don't expect everyone to pick up on the coded message contained in Kennedy's rhetoric, especially not if you are watching footage of it, as his charm overpowers even the most discerning of ears. But allow me to explain. When Kennedy says "the other things", he is referring to inter-celestial-body war. Sure, we're going to go to the moon, but we're also going to do "the other things", like mount an offensive and establish a moon base, thus keeping the moon in check and the Soviets thinking that the U.S. now has an alliance with the moon.

I don't want to say that landing on the moon in 1969 ended the Cold War by tricking the Soviets into thinking that the Moon had chosen to ally itself with us, I'll leave that to the experts. I also would never dare claim that one of the best kept secrets of astronomy is that the moon is made of cheese, but a different kind of non-cow's milk cheese. But I will say this. On the day of the moon landing's anniversary, I celebrated in a way that was symbolic and appropriate; I purchased a block of aged cheddar cheese and ate it--while reading the Communist Manifesto. Take that, Khrushchev!