Apollo astronauts played "the Moon game" in Alaska

Apollo astronauts played "the Moon game" in Alaska

In the summers of 1965 and 1966, astronauts headed to Katmai National Park for field-geology simulations in Moon-like terrain. The exercise was simple and strange: pairs of astronauts were dropped at unfamiliar sites and told to pretend they were on the Moon — collecting representative geologic samples and practicing how to describe what they saw to scientists back home. The setting was the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, a volcanic landscape packed with debris from the 1912 eruption of Novarupta — later identified as the true culprit, after scientists had spent years suspecting the wrong volcano entirely.

Gobble's Take: For lunar rehearsal space, NASA picked a place that looked like the Moon, smelled like sulfur, and was very much still on Earth. Source: NASA News Releases

A Moon-training ground born from a monster eruption

The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes earned its name from the fumaroles that vented gas and steam across the landscape for a decade after the eruption — some persisting well beyond 10 years, a handful lasting all the way to the 1990s. Landsat 9 images acquired on September 29, 2025 show the ash flow Novarupta left behind: up to 660 feet thick, laid down at a searing 1,380 degrees Fahrenheit. For Apollo, that raw volcanic terrain offered an "excellent opportunity to view volcanic materials and landforms in nearly pristine condition," as William Phinney put it.

Gobble's Take: Earth's most violent 20th-century eruption accidentally built the Solar System's best Moon simulator. Novarupta didn't know it was helping NASA. Source: NASA News Releases

Space has always had a war problem

The arc of modern space history runs from Jules Verne's 1865 "From the Earth to the Moon" straight into militarization — through the V-2, the Redstone, and eventually the Saturn V, with Wernher Braun threading uncomfortably through all of it. Then came clandestine U.S. and USSR planning for military personnel in Earth orbit, followed by spy satellites, Sputnik, Project Corona, and a long tail of wartime science pressed into service. The question the discussion lands on is blunt: is there any realm humanity hasn't somehow exploited for war?

Gobble's Take: Humanity looked up at the infinite frontier — and immediately started arguing about who gets to put weapons there first. Source: Perplexity Search (community news)

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