The US's Surprisingly Recent Plan To Nuke The Moon In Search Of "Negative Mass"

In 2017, the US's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), and the related Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program (AAWSAP) were made public for the first time following an investigation by the New York Times. 

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The programs, funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), were pretty out-there. Operating between 2007 and 2012, AATIP investigated unexplained aerial phenomena (UAPs), while AAWSAP arguably had an even weirder job. According to documents released after Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the program looked at everything from warp drives to manipulating extra dimensions, despite no experimental evidence that any of these things are possible. 

In one particularly weird document, titled Negative Mass Propulsion, the authors propose nuking the Moon, as well as building a giant tunnel through its center. The idea, if you can call it that, was to mine "negative mass" from within it, and revolutionize space travel.

"It is easy to prove that there are negative masses all around us, albeit hidden behind positive masses. But their use for propulsion by reducing the inertia of matter, for example in the limit of macroscopic bodies with zero rest mass, depends on a technical solution to free them from their imprisonment by positive masses. It appears that there are basically two ways this might be achieved," the document reads, not bothering to adhere to anything resembling science. 

"1. By the application of strong electromagnetic or gravitational fields or by high particle energies; 2. By searching for places in the universe where nature has already done this separation, and from which the negative masses can be mined."

That is quite the claim, and there is no experimental evidence for the existence of negative mass. Mass is a difficult topic to get your head around. While people generally get confused between mass and weight, physicists divide mass up into three different concepts: active gravitational mass, passive gravitational mass, and inertial mass.

Inertial mass describes how resistant an object is to acceleration, while active gravitational mass is the mass that produces a gravitational field that other objects respond to, and passive gravitational mass is how the object responds to an external gravitational field.

According to the laws of conservation of momentum, your active and passive mass must be the same otherwise you would end up in strange situations where one body of equal mass is attracted to another more than they attract another, for example. Weirdly though, it doesn't seem to matter what sign you put in certain equations, and the laws of physics continue to function if you place a negative sign in there. 

"In Newtonian physics the law of action and reaction implies the equality of active and passive gravitational masses, but the equality of inertial mass with these other two is a separate empirical fact," a review of negative mass in general relativity explains. "The sign of both these masses can take either value and it is an additional empirical result that it is always positive."

Though mathematically fun, it has got some physicists wondering whether negative mass is possible. While the idea may sound out there (and it very much is), there is a intuitive analog that everyone can get their heads around: bubbles.

Bubbles can be thought of as acting in the opposite way of the force being applied to them. In (very) simplified terms, the force of gravity is down, and it results in bubbles going up. If you place a bubble (or a tethered ping pong ball, as shown below) in a body of water and then accelerate it, it moves in the opposite way to the one you'd expect from usual, positive mass.

It isn't literally negative mass of course. In a gravitational field, let's say on Earth, water and gases arrange in a pressure gradient, causing the observed effect.

If there is indeed negative mass out there in the universe (which people occasionally claim there is), it would have some very strange properties, and some very strange interactions with usual, positive mass. It would be repelled by other negative masses, for starters, and attracted to positive mass. Meanwhile, positive mass would be repelled by it, leading to runaway motion where negative mass chases positive mass forever. 

Though it might not be ruled out by our current best models of physics, that doesn't mean that it exists, and we have not seen evidence of it. That, apparently, wasn't much of a problem for the AAWSAP. For good measure, they also relied heavily on the concept of the Planck ether, though the ether was ruled out long ago, first by the Michelson-Morley experiment. They then speculated that this negative matter, which has not been shown to exist, may be abundant at the center of our natural satellite. 

"If appreciable amounts of negative matter have accumulated over billions of years in the center of the moon, it is more likely that this matter is in the form of ultra-light matter, perhaps by an order of magnitude lighter than ordinary matter," the document reads. 

"Suppose that in the center of the moon the accumulation of negative matter has led to a form of matter which is 100,000 times lighter than steel, but still has the strength of steel. This would not lead to a negative-positive mass self-chasing mass dipole as envisioned by Forward, but to something very important for space-flight, because it would dramatically reduce the energy requirements to accelerate a space craft made from such ultra-light material."

While most scientists might wait for other evidence of negative mass, the report suggests we go nuclear, stating:

"The question as to whether there is such an unusual substance in the center of the moon can probably be answered by seismic wave tomography, obtained by nuclear explosions set off on the surface of the moon."

The team then goes on to provide detailed calculations on how we might blow a giant cylindrical tunnel through the Moon using nuclear weapons. This is proposed in order to access the negative matter, with blowing a similar hole through the Earth deemed impractical.

"Now it just happens that the center of the moon is a potential well, not too deep that it cannot be reached by making a tunnel through the moon, not possible for the deeper potential well of the earth, where the temperature and pressure are too high," the paper suggests. "Making a tunnel through the moon, provided there is a good supply of negative mass, could revolutionize interstellar space flight. A sequence of thermonuclear shape charges would be required to make such a tunnel technically feasible."

As mentioned above, the report slips firmly into the sci-fi realm, and is not something that anybody but the most hardened and reality-denying supervillain is looking into. The Moon shall remain safe, and hole-less, for the foreseeable future.

All the documents, made available by VICE, are readable on the Document Cloud.