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moon.
     By this time, ABMA was beginning the initial planning work on its most ambitious project of all, the Saturn rocket. The launcher that would become NASA's workhorse during the lunar landing program originated as an Army project, the brainchild of Von Braun. The original design need was simple – to counter the obvious Soviet lead in launch payload capacity. Not merely to match it, but to surpass it, was the goal, and the target was an incredibly ambitious million pounds of thrust.
     The design was a quantum leap forward – the intent to have the launcher in service as early as 1961. To accomplish this ambitious goal, the concept of clustering engines was to be employed, instead of waiting on the larger engines that were then on the drawing board, but which would not be available for some years. This had the advantage that proven motors could be employed – indeed it was hoped to utilise some of the same basic designs for the Jupiter IRBM – in order to dramatically cut both testing time and costs.
     It was hoped that the Saturn could be employed in a wide range of missions, both civilian and military. Serious discussions on the possibility of putting a man into space were well advanced by 1959, and there were several projects beginning the relentless march from the drawing board into reality. The USAF 'Man-In-Space-Soonest' project was evolving into NASA's 'Project Mercury', and the USAF X-20 'Dyna-Soar' reusable spaceplane was in its early stages. The ability to launch large payloads into orbit would be vital for space exploration in the coming decade, and the Saturn was destined, it was hoped, to become the workhorse of space.
     As design work on the new launcher began, the Army began to consider what they might do with such a booster, and came up with one of the most ambitious projects considered in this period, or later – 'Project Horizon', the establishment of a military outpost on the moon.
     Even in 1959, there was nothing new about the idea of establishing a military outpost on the moon, though this was the first formalised planning document. The idea had been floating around for some years, pioneered both in science-fiction and in the popular perception of the future of spaceflight. The value of the 'gravity gauge' was considered as key here – that it would be impossible for any attack from outer space to be resisted by Earth-based defences, and that this would be the case for a considerable number of years. (Indeed, this is correct – there remains no reliable way to stop such an attack on a large scale, though projects for ballistic missile defence are as old as the first deployment of this weapon. The key here is that these missiles are based on Earth , not in orbit or on the moon.)
     A key plan of this period was setting up missile silos on the moon as an 'ultimate deterrent' – a true deterrent in fact, as the prolonged period between the launch of the missiles and their arrival at targets on Earth precluded the possibility of a first strike being launched from this base, but it would also be an extremely difficult target, making it an extremely secure command-and-control point. (At one point in the 1970s, the Soviet Union seriously considered establishing a military headquarters on the moon for precisely this reason, though it went no further than some planning documentation.) As originally projected, however, the Project Horizon base had no such weapons system, though it could be assumed that such would be added. Certainly Air Force plans – mostly still highly classified – were being made in this area.
     There were of other considerations as well. The presumed lead of the Soviet Union was apparently growing by the week, with a series of new space 'firsts', and the launch of Sputnik had a psychological effect on the American psyche that was still strongly in evidence; many feared waking up one morning to learn that the Soviet Union had claimed the moon, and had already