Starfish Prime

This is an important and little-known event that relates to space travel (or the lack of it) today. It's possible that the government was trying to blow a hole through the Van Allen Belts, rings of deadly radiation that surround our planet. A hole would let rockets with men aboard travel through the belts without irradiating them to death.

Instead, Starfish Prime made the Van Allen Belts bigger and more radioactive. In hindsight, releasing a nuclear weapon in space seems like a terrible idea.

When NASA talks today about taking men to the moon or to Mars, they sometimes mention the problem of the Van Allen Belts. NASA has never explained how the Apollo astronauts were to have traveled through these regions without being fried to death.