In 1958, a year after the Soviets put Sputnik into orbit and shook the confidence of an entire country, the United States Air Force quietly asked a physicist named Leonard Reiffel to study something that sounds almost too dramatic to be real: whether it was possible to detonate a nuclear weapon on the surface of the Moon, timed and positioned so that the flash would be visible from Earth. The goal had nothing to do with the Moon itself. The point was to send Moscow a message that it could not ignore. The plan had a name, Project A119, and a team of ten people behind it, including a young Carl Sagan doing some trajectory calculations. It never happened. Reiffel later said that the Air Force cared much less about science than what the explosion would look like from Earth, and he dismissed a different concern: what a nuclear explosion would do to a pristine lunar surface that future scientists hadn’t even had a chance to study yet. “I made it clear at the time that the destruction of a pristine lunar environment would have an enormous cost to science, but the US Air Force was primarily concerned with how the nuclear explosion would affect Earth,” he told The Observer decades later, once the study was declassified. I think about that archived plan every time someone tells me that the Moon doesn’t belong to anyone. Legally, that is still true. It practically stopped being the whole story a long time ago. A message addressed to Moscow, not the A119 Lunar Project, is a good reminder of what national pride does when it feels left behind. The United States wasn’t worried about lunar geology in 1958, it was worried about looking weak after Sputnik, and a mushroom cloud visible a quarter of a million miles away was considered, in some strange Cold War logic, a legitimate way to look strong again. The plan died in early 1959, officially because of the risk of consequences for future research, although a visible botched launch that humiliated the country in front of the entire planet surely didn’t help its case either. Nine years later, in 1967, the world tried to ensure that nothing like this could happen again, at least not as a matter of national ownership. The Outer Space Treaty declared the Moon and other celestial bodies to be “the province of all mankind” and prohibited any country from claiming them. It was signed in the middle of the Cold War, by the two countries with the least reason to trust each other, and it stood. Since then, no nation has planted a proprietary flag on the Moon. On paper, the impetus behind Project A119 – to demonstrate dominance, to claim the highest available ground – was eliminated by law. The same impulse, wearing a different coat Outside the role, it simply became quieter. No one said a country couldn’t own what it took from the Moon, even if it couldn’t own the land itself. In 2015, the United States passed a law allowing American companies to keep the resources they extract in space. Luxembourg followed two years later, then Japan, the United Arab Emirates and India. None of these are property claims within the meaning of the treaty. They are all aimed at the same nine zones of the lunar South Pole, the only places that combine almost constant sunlight with permanently shadowed craters containing frozen water, valuable for both energy and rocket fuel. The Artemis Accords added something called safety zones, areas around a mission that other countries must respect so that no one crashes into someone else’s equipment. It sounds reasonable until you realize how a respected exclusion zone around the land you arrived at first actually works. No one needs to plant a flag when the exclusion zone already does the same job. We made a video about exactly this, called “The Race to Own the Moon Has Already Begun,” and the part that caught my attention wasn’t the legal maneuver. It was learning that the Apollo flags were already gone in every important way. Scientists believe that fifty years of unfiltered sun have bleached the survivors. The most photographed objects in the history of exploration have quietly turned into plain cloth, waiting, as the video says, for someone to plant new ones. Whoever does it will not do it for a photograph. Nine places and a marker that no one expected In August 2023, Russia and India targeted the same stretch of the lunar South Pole a few days apart. Russia’s Luna 25, its first mission to the Moon since the Soviet era, crashed to the surface after a misfire. India’s Chandrayaan-3 soft-landed near the pole days later, a first for a country that had never before put anything on the Moon, and analysts described the crash and landing, which came within days of each other, as a visible sign of a changing global space race, not a symbolic one. China has clearly said it intends to send astronauts to the Moon around 2030 and then build a permanent base for South Pole resources. The United States, under the Artemis program, intends to get there first, although its own schedule for a manned landing at the South Pole was delayed again earlier this year. Russia and China never joined the Artemis Accords. Instead, they built their own framework, with an ever-growing list of partners, meaning there are now two sets of rules targeting a handful of the same coordinates, drawn by two groups that don’t recognize each other’s lines. The same fear, quieter tools. This is what gets me. We’ve already solved this exact problem once. In 1959, the same type of countries now pursuing lunar real estate signed a treaty that froze all territorial claims to Antarctica and then banned mining there entirely. A shared, frozen, resource-rich place, kept shared on purpose. It’s been done before. The Moon could have followed that model. A second treaty in 1979 tried, calling lunar resources the common heritage of mankind and calling for any wealth to be shared even with countries that would never get there. Almost no one signed it. The countries really capable of reaching the Moon tried to share everything and walked away. I keep coming back to something I believe about people in general: how you do something is how you do everything. Nations are not that different. The instinct that once wanted to light up the Cold War sky with a bomb did not disappear when the treaty made it illegal. He found a legal, patient, and much less photogenic way to want exactly the same thing. Sixty-odd years after a physicist convinced his own government not to bombard the Moon with an audience, it is gone and ambition is still alive.
