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on Earth. General Trudeau was as undaunted as | 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?" | 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 | 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 Il. 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 64