Nuking the Moon: And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

by Vince Houghton

The way things were set up, the pilot would be only a hundred feet above the ground while waiting for launch, with the space plane’s nose facing straight up in the air. Ejecting from this low height—and since the plane was vertical, ejecting sideways—was an insane and almost certainly deadly task. So the pilot had some figuring out to do. He decided to test things out in another aircraft, a Douglas Skylancer, which could somewhat mimic the conditions on the launch pad—with some imaginative flying. He flew two hundred feet off the ground at almost 600 mph, and then pulled straight up and screamed to eight thousand feet. He flipped the plane around, got it upright, and then softly landed the aircraft. It was a crazy maneuver, and this written description doesn’t do it justice. But it proved a point—if the rocket began to explode beneath the Dyna-Soar, the pilot could just kick the plane’s engine in gear and blast off as fast as he could. The acceleration of the plane would allow the pilot to escape the fireball below and reach an altitude at which he could roll it over, turn it around, and find a good place to park. The pilot who discovered this maneuver ended up leaving the program. It’s not because he did anything wrong, or that he didn’t like the work he was doing, or even that he didn’t think the Dyna-Soar was a cool plane. He just got a better job offer. His name was Neil Armstrong.