Project Horizon: America's Declassified 1959 Plan to Build a Military Base on the Moon

Long before astronauts walked on the Moon, the U.S. Army drafted plans to build a permanent military outpost there. Known as Project Horizon, it was one of the most ambitious proposals of the Cold War.

In March 1959, Lieutenant General Arthur G. Trudeau, the Army's Chief of Research and Development, ordered a 90 day study to determine whether the United States could establish a lunar outpost by 1966. The work was led by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, including Wernher von Braun's rocket team, and completed on June 8, 1959, as the multi-volume report.

"Project Horizon: A U.S. Army Study for the Establishment of a Lunar Military Outpost."

The proposal called for an American presence before the Soviet Union could gain a strategic edge in space. The outpost would monitor Earth and space, relay communications, support scientific research, and secure a permanent U.S. foothold beyond Earth if international tensions continued to grow.

Engineers designed the installation for 12 personnel, with expansion to 20. The living areas would be buried beneath lunar soil to reduce exposure to radiation, extreme temperatures, and micrometeorite impacts. Connected modules included sleeping quarters, laboratories, a hospital, storage rooms, dining facilities, recreation space, maintenance areas, and a command center.

Electricity would come from 4 nuclear reactors, allowing continuous operation through the Moon's roughly 14 day nights. The study also examined growing food, recycling water, and eventually using lunar resources to reduce the need for supplies from Earth.

Building the outpost required an enormous effort. The Army estimated 75 Saturn rocket launches to transport about 245 tons of cargo. After completion, another 64 launches each year would deliver food, water, fuel, replacement equipment, and rotating crews. One logistics plan projected 149 Saturn launches through November 1966, carrying approximately 220 metric tons of cargo to the lunar surface.

Construction was scheduled to begin with unmanned cargo landings in January 1965, followed by the first crew in April 1965. If the timeline had held, humanity's first permanent settlement beyond Earth would have been operating by November 1966.

The proposal never advanced beyond planning. After NASA was established in 1958, America's space program shifted toward civilian exploration. On March 25, 1960, the Army transferred Project Horizon to NASA, which focused its resources on the Apollo program. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty later prohibited military bases on the Moon, ending any possibility of reviving the concept.

Project Horizon remains one of the least known chapters of the Space Race. Nearly 10 years before Apollo 11, the U.S. Army had already mapped out how to build, power, supply, and operate a permanent installation almost 239,000 miles from Earth. It was not a rumor, a conspiracy theory, or science fiction. It was an official U.S. Army blueprint for putting soldiers on the Moon.

See the full (121 page) declassified file at the national archives below.

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB479/docs/EBB-Moon01_sm.pdf