Moonshot Madness
In 1966, Canadian engineer Gerald Bull had a dream: launch satellites into space using an enormous gun. Not rockets—just pure ballistic power. So he built one, deep in the forests of Quebec, and called it the High Altitude Research Project.
This “space gun” fired 400-pound projectiles 100 miles straight up. It worked… technically. But the engineering world shrugged. The military grew skeptical. The press stopped showing up. Bull kept going anyway, eventually partnering with Saddam Hussein. He was assassinated in Brussels in 1990—shot five times in the head and back, likely by Mossad.
His dream of conquering space with sheer firepower died with him.
But it wasn’t the first time someone tried to impress the world by launching something explosively stupid toward the heavens.
It was 1958, and America was nervous. Just a year earlier, the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, and suddenly the space race was no longer theoretical. The Soviets were in orbit. They were winning.
Worse still, the American public had watched it unfold in real time. News footage of a Russian-made object hurtling silently above U.S. soil had ignited a crisis of confidence. Could they spy on us? Attack from space? What if they got to the Moon first?
At the height of this Cold War anxiety, a small group of military and scientific advisors proposed a plan to make a statement—one the Soviets couldn’t miss.
Project A119.
The idea? Detonate a nuclear bomb on the surface of the Moon.
Not as a weapon, mind you. There were no enemies living there—yet. The point was visibility. The goal was to create an explosion so large and so dramatic that it could be seen from Earth with the naked eye. A glowing bloom on the lunar surface. Proof that America wasn’t just in the space race—it was dominant.
The logic, if you can call it that, was partly psychological. The Air Force believed such a spectacular show of strength would restore public morale, deter Soviet aggression, and underscore U.S. technological superiority. It was, in every sense, an attempt to flex on the global stage.
And they weren’t joking. The planning was meticulous. A team of top physicists and mathematicians—including a 25-year-old Carl Sagan—was assembled to calculate the explosion’s optics and fallout. They modeled everything from dust clouds to blast trajectory. The bomb would be about the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima—small by today’s standards, but large enough to leave a mark.
Scientists debated where to aim it. The dark side? Too hard to see. Near the lunar terminator—the line between night and day—was ideal for visibility. They even considered the potential “optical flash” visible from Earth as a kind of interplanetary firework.
Fortunately, the plan was scrapped. Not out of moral hesitation, mind you, but because officials feared the public backlash if it went wrong—or worse, if it worked and the world realized what the U.S. had just done. There were also concerns about lunar contamination and setting a dangerous precedent. You know… reasonable stuff.
The documents were classified until the 1990s, when the truth about Project A119 finally came to light. Carl Sagan never spoke publicly about it, and most Americans still have no idea how close we came to blasting the Moon as a marketing stunt.
But the lesson lingers: in moments of insecurity, spectacle often masquerades as strength.
This kind of thinking didn’t die with the Cold War. It just got smaller—and more personal.
People do it every day. They lease the car they can’t afford. They stretch for the house with the extra bedroom they don’t really need. They chase the image of financial success… instead of actually building it.
And the thing is, it looks like they’re winning. That’s the whole point. Just like detonating a bomb on the Moon would’ve made America look powerful, status-driven spending can create the illusion of wealth.
But it's just that—an illusion.
Real financial strength often hides in plain sight. It’s the couple who drives an older car, quietly maxing out their retirement accounts. It’s the person who rents in a modest neighborhood but has zero debt and a high savings rate. It’s the client who doesn’t talk much about investing but knows exactly where every dollar goes.
Vanity metrics—net worth on paper, square footage, Instagram-worthy vacations—aren’t inherently bad. But if they’re used to signal success instead of creating it, they become financial moon bombs. Expensive, risky, and ultimately hollow.
You don’t have to impress anyone. You just have to get where you’re going. And sometimes, the flashiest move is the one that sets you back the furthest.