In 1958, a year after the Soviets put Sputnik into orbit and shook the confidence of an entire country, the US 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 the flash would be visible from Earth.
The goal had nothing to do with the Moon itself. The point was sending Moscow a message it couldn’t miss.
The plan had a name, Project A119, and a ten-person team behind it, including a young Carl Sagan doing some of the trajectory math. It never happened. Reiffel later said the Air Force cared far less about the science than about how the explosion would look from the ground, and he pushed back on a different concern: what a nuclear blast would do to a pristine lunar surface that future scientists hadn’t even had the chance to study yet. “I made it clear at the time there would be a huge cost to science of destroying a pristine lunar environment, but the U.S. Air Force were mainly concerned about how the nuclear explosion would play on Earth,” he told The Observer decades later, once the study was declassified.
I think about that shelved plan every time someone tells me the Moon belongs to nobody. Legally, that’s still true. Practically, it stopped being the whole story a long time ago.
A message meant for Moscow, not the Moon
Project A119 is a good reminder of what national pride does when it feels behind. The US wasn’t worried about lunar geology in 1958, it was worried about looking weak after Sputnik, and a visible mushroom cloud a quarter of a million miles away was, in a strange Cold War logic, considered a legitimate way to look strong again. The plan died in early 1959, officially over the fallout risk to future research, though a failed, visible launch humiliating the country in front of the whole planet surely didn’t help its case either.
Nine years later, in 1967, the world tried to make sure nothing like it could happen again, at least not as a matter of national ownership. The Outer Space Treaty declared that the Moon and other celestial bodies are “the province of all mankind” and barred 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 held. No nation has planted a flag of ownership on the Moon since. On paper, the impulse behind Project A119, prove dominance, claim the highest ground available, got legislated out of existence.
The same impulse, wearing a different coat
Off paper, it just got quieter. Nobody said a country couldn’t own what it dug out of the Moon, even if it couldn’t own the ground itself. In 2015 the United States passed a law letting American companies keep the resources they extract in space. Luxembourg followed two years later, then Japan, the UAE, and India. None of these are ownership claims in the treaty’s sense. All of them are aimed at the same nine or so patches of the lunar South Pole, the only spots that combine near-constant sunlight with permanently shadowed craters holding frozen water, valuable for both power and rocket fuel.
The Artemis Accords added something called safety zones, areas around a mission that other countries are asked to respect so nobody crashes into someone else’s equipment. It sounds reasonable until you notice what a respected keep-out zone around ground you got to first actually functions as. No one needs to plant a flag when the keep-out zone already does the same job.
We put together a video on exactly this, called “The Race to Own the Moon Has Already Started,” and the part of it that stuck with me wasn’t the legal maneuvering. It was learning that the Apollo flags are already gone in every way that matters. Scientists believe fifty years of unfiltered sun has bleached the surviving ones blank. The most photographed objects in the history of exploration have quietly turned back into plain fabric, waiting, as the video puts it, for someone to plant new ones. Whoever does it won’t be doing it for a photograph.
Nine spots, and a scoreboard nobody expected
In August 2023, Russia and India both aimed for the same stretch of the lunar South Pole within days of each other. Russia’s Luna 25, its first Moon mission since the Soviet era, crashed into the surface after a misfire. India’s Chandrayaan-3 landed softly near the pole days later, a first for a country that had never put anything on the Moon before, and analysts described the crash and the landing, arriving within days of each other, as a visible sign of a shifting global space race, not a symbolic one.
China has said plainly that it intends to put astronauts on the Moon by around 2030 and build a permanent base aimed at the South Pole’s resources after that. The US, under the Artemis program, means to get there first, though its own timeline for a crewed South Pole landing slipped again earlier this year. Russia and China never joined the Artemis Accords. They built their own framework instead, with a growing list of partners, which means there are now two sets of rules aimed at a handful of the same coordinates, drawn by two groups that don’t recognize each other’s lines.
Same fear, quieter tools
Here’s what gets me. We’ve solved this exact problem once already. In 1959, the same kind of countries now angling for lunar real estate signed a treaty freezing every territorial claim to Antarctica, and later banned mining there outright. A shared, frozen, resource-rich place, kept shared, on purpose. It has been done before.
The Moon could have followed that template. A second treaty in 1979 tried, calling lunar resources the common heritage of mankind and asking that any riches be shared even with countries who would never get there. Almost nobody signed it. The countries actually capable of reaching the Moon looked at sharing everything and walked away.
I keep coming back to something I believe about people generally: how you do anything is how you do everything. Nations aren’t so different. The instinct that once wanted to light up the Cold War sky with a bomb didn’t disappear when the treaty made it illegal. It found a legal, patient, far less photogenic way to want the exact same thing. Sixty-some years after a physicist talked his own government out of nuking the Moon for an audience, the audience is gone and the ambition is still very much awake.
