by Robert Stone
When the Cape Town Sunday Times reported that Michael Collins’s wife, Pat, had been astounded to learn the reason why South Africa had not seen the moonwalk broadcast, her reaction induced a sense of shame in much of the country. Not long after, South Africans got a glimpse of what they had missed: Edited films of the moonwalk television broadcast were screened to segregated audiences at the Johannesburg Planetarium. After viewing “Moon Television”—as it was billed—South Africans began to realize that television wasn’t the evil medium they had been informed for many years, and a vigorous national debate ensued, leading to the introduction of a national television service.
The citizens of the Soviet Union and China had been prevented from seeing the live lunar telecast as well, but for entirely different political reasons. When Russians heard the news of the moon landing, many reacted with disappointment not unlike the way Americans responded upon hearing of Gagarin’s flight eight years earlier. In Moscow, Sergei Khrushchev, the son of the former Soviet premier, noticed that citizens, upon learning of Armstrong and Aldrin’s accomplishment, tried to ignore the news; some were insulted. It seemed to him that most were not overly concerned, though, as they had their own day-to-day problems. Pro-Soviet news outlets derided Apollo as a wasteful extravagance that could have been accomplished much more cheaply with automated probes, and implied it was a stunt intended to distract from America’s situation in Vietnam. On East German television, a news program informed its viewers that space stations and unmanned satellites were far more important; the Moon was a pointless destination and Apollo little more than a symptom of capitalism’s failure. But, unlike some sensationalist American magazines that had made the case that the entire Soviet space program was, in fact, a clever propaganda hoax, there was no active Soviet disinformation campaign to spread rumors that the American government and media had faked the moon landing.
Within the privileged inner circles of the Soviet scientific world, 16mm copies of the Apollo moon-landing film were studied and discussed. And among those with access to the film was Sergei Khrushchev. For much of his career as an engineer, he had worked in the Soviet Union’s missile-and-space program. He had personally witnessed his father’s surprise when the news of Sputnik caused political shock waves in the West and had shared his country’s pride on the day Vostok 1 was launched into space. In the early part of the decade it had seemed as if the Soviet Union was always one step ahead of the United States, even when some of the Soviet achievements—such as Leonov’s perilous Voskhod 2 spacewalk—had been hastily improvised.
But following those early triumphs, much had changed. Concerned about the tremendous expense and hampered by infighting within the Soviet space program, Nikita Khrushchev didn’t approve a plan to put a man on the Moon until more than three years had elapsed since Kennedy’s moon-shot speech. The Russian lunar program didn’t officially begin in earnest until after Khrushchev’s removal in late 1964. Not long after, the untimely death of designer-manager Sergei Korolev came as an additional setback. In any case, the Soviets’ decentralized management, the N-1 booster’s fundamentally flawed design, and the expense of undertaking such an ambitious competitive program while lacking the financial, technical, and manufacturing resources equal to those of the United States practically doomed Russia’s lunar quest from the beginning. The single reason for its existence was to best the United States, and once Apollo 11 had returned, the Russian program was quietly brought to an end without any acknowledgment that it had ever been under way.
In the course of a visit to his father’s dacha in the late summer of 1969, Sergei brought along a copy of the Apollo 11 film. Together, father and son watched it with a mixture of emotions. Sergei felt both pride and envy—pride that human beings had actually achieved this astounding feat, and envy that America had done it first. His father was dismayed, unable to understand why the Soviet Union hadn’t accomplished it but reluctant to cast blame or criticize those currently in power.
Quietly, at his dacha on the Black Sea, one of the two principal protagonists in the great space race that began eight years earlier watched it end.
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ON THE AFTERNOON of July 20, CBS News correspondent Bill Plante and a camera crew found seventy-five thousand people gathering in the rain at New York City’s Mount Morris Park. The crowd was not there to watch the moon landing but to see and hear Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and other Motown stars at the Harlem Cultural Festival. One attendee enthusiastically said he thought the moon landing was incredibly important. But, he then added, no more relevant in his life than the Harlem Cultural Festival. “I think they’re equal.”
Like many other American dailies, Chicago’s leading African American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, ran a huge headline on the cover of its July 21 edition: WORLD STANDS STILL: MOON SHOT UNITES U.S. FOR INSTANT. The story on page three was remarkable for its singular opening line, which managed to be both celebratory and ironic: “The first non-racist moment in American history came at 3:17 P.M. [Chicago time] Sunday, when two Americans—nestled snugly in their lunar craft—became the first men to land on the Moon. At this moment, people of every race, nationality, age and condition were united in praise for an achievement symbolic of the American genius.”
During his three weeks in quarantine, Neil Armstrong likely read accounts of the SCLC’s protest at Cape Kennedy and may have seen Nona Smith’s letter in The New York Times confessing a difficulty identifying with those in the space program since not one black face was shown on television representing NASA. When the Apollo 11 crew landed in Los Angeles to dine with the president, a reporter present noticed Armstrong’s reaction when he spotted a small African American boy kneeling among the cheering crowd. Armstrong deliberately pushed past scores of outstretched hands to reach the boy and shake his hand. Aldrin and Collins followed his lead, prompting thunderous applause from the crowd.
Since Ed Dwight’s experience in 1963, there had been occasional appeals to try to integrate the astronaut corps. In the summer of 1967, the Air Force announced that Major Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr., had been selected as an astronaut for their military surveillance space program, which would use Gemini equipment. Lawrence’s introduction was featured on the evening newscasts and on the front page of The New York Times under the headline NEGRO AMONG FOUR CHOSEN AS CREW OF MANNED ORBITING LABORATORY. Tragically, Lawrence died less than six months later, in a crash at Edwards Air Force Base. A trainee pilot flying the F-104 Starfighter lost control of the aircraft during a steep descent, and Lawrence was killed when his ejection seat fired sideways as the jet struck the ground. Had he survived, it is likely he would have been among the first astronauts to fly the space shuttle in the 1980s.
During the summer of Apollo 11, an integrated astronaut corps was even featured in American toy stores. No newspapers or television newscasts marked the occasion when Mattel introduced the black astronaut Jeff Long, a blue-space-suited action figure marketed as the “space buddy” of Major Matt Mason, Mattel’s “Man in Space.” In a Mattel television advertisement, Jeff Long drove a lunar tractor on the Moon, heading for Tranquility Base.
Geopolitics may have led to the creation of the lunar program, but culturally the emotional message of Apollo 11 reminded everyone of the determination conveyed by the words of President Kennedy’s stirring Rice University address. On Broadway, the hit musical Man of La Mancha was in its third year, with its most popular song, “The Impossible Dream,” embraced by audiences as a late-1960s anthem of optimism. Apollo demonstrated to the world that not only was it possible “to dream the impossible dream” but that it was achievable. While the world of the late 1960s was rife with turmoil and division, a better future seemed certain. We would be able to solve our problems and differences. Change was under way. We were smart enough to leave the planet and walk on another world. We would now be able to take on other projects here at home as well, the challenges
that President Kennedy alluded to when he said, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard.”
Much as David Lasser had predicted in The Conquest of Space, the first missions to the Moon contributed to a philosophical shift back on Earth, though it was hardly the immediate dramatic global transformation that he had optimistically forecast four decades earlier. The photographs of our fragile home planet accelerated an emerging environmental consciousness that a few visionaries had foreseen during the post-war era. But those images, along with personal reflections of the astronauts who traveled to the Moon, contributed to a second political and philosophical consciousness, which was given the name “the overview effect.” Looking upon the Earth from a distance of nearly 240,000 miles and being able to obscure it from sight by raising a thumb prompted many of the astronauts to realize that the political, geographical, religious, and tribal differences that divided the peoples of the globe were glaringly trivial and dangerous for the future of the species.
For those who had put humans on the Moon, meeting Kennedy’s mandate was only the beginning. Poppy Northcutt, who served on Mission Control’s third shift during Apollo 11— Glynn Lunney’s Black Team—had been elated as she watched the moonwalk on television. She, and the more than four hundred thousand other Americans whose work had led directly to that moment, knew that their efforts had made a lasting mark on the history of the human race. Julian Scheer thought that life on Earth had been changed for the better and as a result a new era of exploration had begun. Might the concerted energies and talents that had placed a human on the Moon now be applied to the nation’s other priorities as well?
Arthur C. Clarke and Wernher von Braun looked forward to a new age of pioneers inhabiting colonies on the Moon and exploring Mars before the end of the century. Von Braun confidently predicted that a human would be born on another world by the year 2000.
Apollo 12 would visit the Moon in November, the next in what were to be nine more Apollo lunar expeditions, perhaps, many believed, to be followed in the early 1970s by extended stays of two weeks of more.
The possibilities ahead appeared practically limitless. The planets were waiting.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE FINAL FRONTIER
(1970–1979)
PAN AM AIRWAYS was taking reservations for passenger flights to the Moon. There were no scheduled departure dates, the price was undetermined, and placing a reservation didn’t require a down payment. But by the summer of 1969 they had issued more than twenty-five thousand personalized and numbered First Moon Flights Club cards to interested customers. Pictured on the back of the card was the space shuttle from Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which in the film displayed a prominent Pan Am logo on the outside of the passenger compartment.
California governor Ronald Reagan, Senator Barry Goldwater, and Walter Cronkite were all reported to be among the card-carrying members of the First Moon Flights Club. For many Americans, there remained little doubt that the future depicted in Kubrick’s film would happen in their lifetime. Humanity had just put its foot on another world. It seemed assured there would be human settlements on the Moon and Mars before the end of the century.
Yet just a year after Apollo 11, there was little such talk in the White House. Vice President Agnew no longer spoke of going to Mars. Instead, he gained new prominence by delivering alliterative attacks on the administration’s critics in the media and on college campuses. In his role as the administration’s hatchet man, he derided political pundits and academics as “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” The vice president’s performance as the voice of the conservative “silent majority” soon overshadowed his position as the National Space Council’s chairman. Agnew’s brief infatuation with the Red Planet was soon forgotten.
Officially, the White House continued to assert that President Nixon was a committed space activist who favored “a vital and forward-thrusting space program.” But after the United States’s third mission to land men on the Moon, the president’s attitude toward the Apollo program had changed. Along with the rest of the world, President Nixon was caught up in the drama as Houston’s Mission Control toiled over four suspenseful days in April 1970, attempting to bring the crew of Apollo 13 back to Earth safely after the command-and-service module was crippled by the explosion of an oxygen tank.
Despite the mission nearly ending in disaster, Apollo 13’s safe return was celebrated as an astounding triumph of human ingenuity, bringing deserved attention to the resourceful teams of NASA flight controllers and the engineers in Mission Control. But it was a story that neither NASA nor the country wanted to dwell upon, and Apollo 13 was conventionally regarded as “the flight that failed” for the next quarter century—until it was retold for a new generation in commander Jim Lovell’s bestselling memoir, which subsequently served as the basis of a popular Hollywood film.
For President Nixon, Apollo 13 was a traumatic turning point in his relationship with the space program, one that had been ironically foreshadowed nearly four months earlier when he invited the crew of the second Apollo moon-landing mission to stay overnight at the White House. During the visit, Nixon entertained the Apollo 12 crew and their wives in the White House screening room with a newly released Hollywood motion picture. Marooned was a stunning selection to screen on such an occasion: The space-disaster film, starring Gregory Peck, David Janssen, and Gene Hackman, was about the plight of three Apollo astronauts stranded in orbit as they slowly ran out of available oxygen. The wife of one Apollo astronaut later revealed that Marooned had given her nightmares.
During Apollo 13’s ordeal, Nixon could do little more than helplessly watch a real-life version of the movie play out on national television. He closely followed NASA’s efforts to bring the crew home but began worrying that if another accident occurred before the 1972 election, it would reflect badly on his administration and undermine his diplomatic overtures to Russia and China. Nixon’s changing attitude toward the space program even became apparent in the White House décor. The Apollo 8 “Earthrise” photograph, which had hung prominently near Nixon’s desk in the Oval Office for the past year, was removed from display and was no longer to be seen.
A Pan American World Airways “First Moon Flights” Club reservation card issued in 1969 featuring a picture of the Orion space shuttle from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey on the back. So successful was the Pan Am promotion that their rival, Trans World Airlines, began taking customer reservations as well, shortly after the flight of Apollo 8.
NASA administrator Tom Paine had effectively won over Agnew during the early months of the administration. Despite the vice president’s later reticence to campaign for grand space initiatives, Paine remained hopeful the Nixon White House would eventually come through with a bold and expansive commitment to NASA’s future. With the successes of Apollo 8, Apollo 11 and the other four Apollo missions completed under his tenure as administrator, he believed the space agency had proven that it could deliver on its promise. In the months after Apollo 11, Paine went through rounds of frustrating negotiations with the White House’s money men concerning NASA’s upcoming budget, but with little resolution.
By 1970, NASA’s share of the federal budget had fallen to 2 percent, less than half of what it had been five years earlier. The country was in a recession, and concern about rising inflation was casting a shadow over all future spending. Internally, the White House explored a number of scenarios for NASA’s future, including a draconian option that would slash the agency’s allotment even further, close both Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center and the Marshall Center in Huntsville, terminate all piloted missions after mid-1970, and concentrate almost exclusively on uncrewed landers to Mars and probes to the outer planets.
Most Americans assumed the space program consumed
a far greater percentage of every tax dollar than was actually the case. Three months after Apollo 11 returned, an opinion poll indicated that 56 percent wanted Nixon to spend less money on space; only 10 percent spoke in favor of increasing NASA’s budget. It was hardly the ideal moment for NASA to make the case for an all-out program to put humans on Mars by the early 1980s.
A few weeks before the launch of Apollo 11, Time Life Inc. had given Norman Mailer a contract to write a book about the first moon landing. Selections would be excerpted in Life magazine and the entire book published by the venerable Boston firm of Little, Brown. But when he submitted his finished manuscript in mid-1970—ten months past the deadline and more than twice its contracted length—Mailer and his publisher took stock of how much had changed in the past year. Little, Brown had just released First on the Moon, a first-person account by the Apollo 11 astronauts, ghostwritten by Life magazine staffers. The sales had been modest. In an understated internal memo written exactly a year to the day after Apollo 11 touched down, the publisher’s sales manager noted, “I don’t think that the moon landing is exactly the most commercial subject to write on these days,” and suggested cutting the size of the proposed first printing of Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon in half. Mailer was also mystified by the public’s apathy and speculated about a possible marketing angle for his book. “Could we advertise the book by hitting hard on the fact that there was extraordinary interest in the moon shot just a little more than a year ago and now there is close to total indifference to the subject?” he wrote his editor.