WARNING: Not for use with space exploration. (PhotoLink/Photodisc/Getty Images)

There’s a lot of renewed pride and awe going around regarding the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, but what if we’d explored an alternate method of collecting lunar samples and bringing them back home? What if we’d just lobbed an atomic bomb at the old ball of cheese and simply scooped up the debris with a net?

Yes, as utterly deranged as it may sound today, the United States Air Force actually had a top secret plan called Project A 119 in the 1950s. This Cold War scheme entailed detonating a nuclear weapon on the lunar surface in order to see how  the mushroom cloud would expand and contract in a low gravity setting.

Even more interesting, a young Carl Sagan was part of the project — the very man who would go onto champion nuclear disarmament and the dangers of nuclear winter. According to Space.com, he even later tried to use his research from the project to acquire an academic fellowship, possibly breaching national security in the process.

As far as benefits to science go, Sagan figured that the resulting dust clouds from the blast would yield a great deal of interesting soil data — including the possibility of organic material. According to Scientific American, some scientists even recommended sending two rockets: the first to nuke the moon’s surface and the second to fly through the giant dust cloud to collect samples. Obviously, this would have likely even changed the way the moon and its “face” appeared from Earth.

Fortunately, we never put Project A 119 into action, but the line of thinking follows an interesting scientific trend — one that I’ve discussed with fellow science blogger Allison Loudermilk on a number of occasions. What is it about our desire to throw a nuke at something in the name of science?

Hurricanes, global warming, asteroids — even the moon? It’s as if we feel some nagging, Freudian desire to pit our ultimate technological achievements against the biggest and baddest that nature has to offer.

Sail to the moon at HowStuffWorks.com:
How Lunar Landings Work
How the Moon Works
How Nuclear Bombs Work
What and where is the dark side of the moon?