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Can We Mine The Moon With Nukes? The US Government Thinks So
Tidbits from a wild declassified document
The United States government recently declassified a series of documents stemming from a secret program that was shut down in 2012. One such document, titled Defense Intelligence Reference Document — Negative Mass Propulsion, outlined a series of intensely esoteric equations revolving around the theoretical use of negative mass to propel ships through space. It was a part of a series of research projects that touched on everything from lasers to wormholes that the US government poured millions of dollars into up until 2012.
The contents of the report are extremely dense. There are pages and pages of equations and terms like betafunction. None of that interests me other than to highlight that there are some extremely smart people in the world working on some extremely weird stuff.
What did interest me was page 33 which is entitled “Making a Tunnel through the Moon” and covers the government’s hypothetical plan to blow massive holes in the moon in order to search for rare metals. The plan outlines how nuclear weapons would be used to essentially carve out the moon and create massive tunnels that someone (or something) could enter and look for precious materials.
