Von Braun's Last Card Warning Was Never Aliens. It Was Space Weapons!

There is a scene in Cameron Crowe’s 2015 film Aloha that almost no one remembers, because almost no one saw the film and anyone who did was probably busy being annoyed by the plot. I know I was. Bradley Cooper plays a disgraced military contractor named Brian Gilcrest, brought back to Hawaii by tech billionaire, Carson Welch, to run a satellite launch. The public and most of the Air Force chain of command is told the satellite is a civilian communications project. It’s not. It is carrying a nuclear payload, and only a few people in the entire operation know the truth. The film moves through a poorly told love story that probably could have been interesting if the director had made better choices, but it’s the rest of the story is what got my attention.

The film flopped. Critics called it a mess and audiences didn’t respond well to how the love story was told. And yet the premise sitting quietly underneath the romance plot was this: a private billionaire, working through the cover of a military partnership, plans to launch a nuclear weapon into space, disguised as peaceful communication infrastructure, with even the people closest to the operation kept in the dark. Crowe wrote that as fiction in 2015, and I find myself asking what he was really describing, because ten years later, the story he portrayed shows up almost exactly, minus the terrible love story, in four or five separate places most people would never connect.