Why don’t we have a base on the Moon yet? As I’ve written before, it’s largely because you don’t need one to nuke Moscow—the primary reason we did pretty much anything during the space race of the 1960s. But back in the late 1940s you could be a little more honest about why the U.S. might want a base on the Moon. And the April 1948 issue of Mechanix Illustrated magazine did just that, complete with incredible illustrations.
“The first nation to establish a lunar military outpost will rule the earth,” science writer Willy Ley wrote in the 1948 magazine.
Ley fled Germany in the mid-1930s as the Nazis took power, first landing in the UK before making his way to the U.S., where he contributed to science fiction magazines. But this 1948 article wasn’t necessarily about fiction. The piece took the prospect of moon colonization seriously, explaining that whoever got to the moon and set up a base first may control the entire world of the future.
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