Firing Guns in Space

Video Description

Space: the final frontier - or, if science fiction is to be believed - the final battlefield. In the land of sci-fi, no self-respecting Starfleet officer on an away mission or scruffy-looking nerf-herding smuggler would dare leave their spacecraft without a trusty phaser or blaster at their side. Even in universes where directed-energy weapons have not yet been invented - such as those of Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and Alien - everyone, it seems, is armed to the teeth with a variety of pistols, rifles, shotguns, and machine guns. But that is fiction; what about real life? Has anyone ever blasted into the wild blue yonder packing heat? As it turns out, yes - though not for the reasons you might think. Though today space travel is associated with peaceful exploration and scientific research, in the early days the conquest of outer space was a decidedly military affair, with the Space Race serving as a more peaceful proxy to the Cold War smouldering down on the surface. The Soviet R-7 rocket that launched Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957, was also the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, designed to carry a nuclear warhead from the Soviet Union to the United States. Indeed, most of the United States’ early space rockets, such as the Redstone and the Atlas, were modified nuclear missiles, while no sooner had the Space Race begun than both sides set out to militarize the final frontier. In 1958, for example, the United States Air Force authorized Project A119, a top-secret project to detonate a nuclear warhead on the surface of the moon. The project, which included among its research team a young Carl Sagan, was justified as a scientific experiment to study lunar geology. Its main aim, however, was to intimidate the Soviets and boost the morale of the American people in the wake of the Sputnik crisis. While A119 and its Soviet equivalent, Project E-4, were never carried out, between 1958 and 1962 both superpowers set off a series of 22 nuclear explosions in space and the upper atmosphere as part of research into anti-ballistic missile system This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here: https://www.youtube.com/@TodayIFoundOut?sub_confirmation=1