Spooks in Space
How a banal celestial lab kicked off a new age of warfare.
Back in 1968, three Apollo 8 astronauts circled the moon on Christmas Eve and returned home, where they were greeted with a ticker-tape parade and honored on the cover of Time. Far out of sight from these public celebrations, however, another group of astronauts was training to reach space. Unlike the Apollo program, these spacemen were part of a clandestine military operation that had less to do with peaceful exploration of the heavens and much more to do with wreaking havoc in them.
One of those secret astronauts was retired Vice Adm. Richard Truly, who later headed NASA. “You just couldn’t tell anybody about it,” he recalled to me in 2007. “Nobody.” The
