Over the past 70 years, scientists have created detailed maps of the entire surface of the moon in minute detail, right down to every crater and rock formation. But those maps almost looked a lot different, considering the fact that the United States wanted to detonate a nuclear bomb on the surface of the moon a decade before we sent the first humans there.

That's right, Project A119 (which might as well have been called Project Nuke the Moon) was a real U.S. Air Force project to send an atomic bomb to the moon and detonate it in a spot where the explosion would be seen from Earth. Why? Because we could, and because we wanted the Kremlin to see that we could, in a nutshell.