11
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. Spagnulo, The Geopolitics of Space Exploration, Springer Praxis Books,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69125-7_2
2
The Space Race: Moondust
“Houston, here’s Tranquillity Base. The Eagle has landed.”
Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11 Commander,
July 20
th
1969
John O’Keefe was a young American astronomer of the 1950’s. Brilliant and confident, he seemed a typical middle-class business man taking part in the flourishing American society post-WWII. O’Keefe was a man deeply in love with his job,
and – as many astronomers like him – he measured life through a different lens
than ordinary people. He often worked alone at night on top of a mountain, observing stars and galaxies in the infinite silence. He knew that if even a single star in
the universe had a planet like ours, there could be billions of planets like Earth –
and maybe people like us – out there.
In 1956 O’Keefe was called to work for a secret office of the Army Map Service,
which was in charge of a very precise task: to find out where the city of Moscow
exactly was. At that time, no one really knew the exact geographical location of
the Russian capital, and an error of few miles could have been decisive for a ballistic missile headed to the Kremlin. The Army Map Service recruited the most
brilliant minds to solve this problem, and O’Keefe was one of them. Like his
astronomer co-workers, he knew that such a measurement could be done by placing people on each continent to take note of the exact moment when the Moon
passed before a known star. But placing a military astronomer on Russian territory
was not an easy task, and the Moon was too big to achieve such precise calculations. What was needed was a small artificial moon the size of a basketball, made
and launched into space. O’Keefe was fascinated by the idea of a manmade moon
crossing the skies and didn’t care very much about the transatlantic distance to
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. Spagnulo, The Geopolitics of Space Exploration, Springer Praxis Books,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69125-7_2
2
The Space Race: Moondust
“Houston, here’s Tranquillity Base. The Eagle has landed.”
Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11 Commander,
July 20
th
1969
John O’Keefe was a young American astronomer of the 1950’s. Brilliant and confident, he seemed a typical middle-class business man taking part in the flourishing American society post-WWII. O’Keefe was a man deeply in love with his job,
and – as many astronomers like him – he measured life through a different lens
than ordinary people. He often worked alone at night on top of a mountain, observing stars and galaxies in the infinite silence. He knew that if even a single star in
the universe had a planet like ours, there could be billions of planets like Earth –
and maybe people like us – out there.
In 1956 O’Keefe was called to work for a secret office of the Army Map Service,
which was in charge of a very precise task: to find out where the city of Moscow
exactly was. At that time, no one really knew the exact geographical location of
the Russian capital, and an error of few miles could have been decisive for a ballistic missile headed to the Kremlin. The Army Map Service recruited the most
brilliant minds to solve this problem, and O’Keefe was one of them. Like his
astronomer co-workers, he knew that such a measurement could be done by placing people on each continent to take note of the exact moment when the Moon
passed before a known star. But placing a military astronomer on Russian territory
was not an easy task, and the Moon was too big to achieve such precise calculations. What was needed was a small artificial moon the size of a basketball, made
and launched into space. O’Keefe was fascinated by the idea of a manmade moon
crossing the skies and didn’t care very much about the transatlantic distance to