Indeed, the Moon-landing program came to exemplify the best Americans could bring to any challenge and has been routinely deployed to support the nation’s sense of greatness. Actor Carroll O’Connor, portraying the character of Archie Bunker, a bigoted working-class American whose perspectives were more common in our society than many observers were comfortable admitting, perhaps said it best in an episode of All in the Family in 1971. Archie represented well how most Americans embraced the success of the Apollo program; he observed to a visitor to his house that he had “a genuine facsimile of the Apollo 14 insignia. That’s the thing that sets the US of A apart from . . . all them other losers.” In very specific terms, Archie Bunker encapsulated for many what set the United States apart from other nations: success in spaceflight.
More recently, another reference from popular culture points up the lasting nature of this sense of success granted the nation through its Apollo Moon landings. In the critically acclaimed television situation comedy Sports Night, about a team that produces a nightly cable sports broadcast, an episode in 2001 included a telling discussion of space exploration. The fictional sports show’s executive producer, Isaac Jaffee, played by African-American actor Robert Guillaume, is recovering from a stroke and disengaged from the daily hubbub of putting together the nightly show. His producer, played by Felicity Huffman, keeps interrupting him as he reads a magazine about space exploration. Isaac tells her, “They’re talking about bioengineering animals and terraforming Mars. When I started reporting Gemini missions, just watching a Titan rocket liftoff was a sight to see.” Jaffee affirms his basic faith in NASA to carry out any task in space exploration. “You put an X anyplace in the solar system,” he says, “and the engineers at NASA can land a spacecraft on it.”
Each Apollo mission captured the essence of American technological prowess. If there is one hallmark of the American people, it is their enthusiasm for technology and what it can help them to accomplish. Historian Perry Miller wrote that the Puritans of New England used technology to transform a wilderness into their “City upon a Hill.” They “flung themselves in the technological torrent,” Miller wrote; “how they shouted with glee in the midst of the cataract, and cried to each other as they went headlong down the chute that here was their destiny.” Since that time the United States has been known as a nation of technological system builders who could use this ability to create great machines of wonder, and the components of their operation. Perceptive foreigners might be enamored with American political and social developments, with democracy and pluralism, but they are more taken with U.S. technology. Not because it was intrinsically better, although that might be the case, but because it represented a communion of the human spirit with the eternal sublime of the universe. Apollo embodied that in ways rarely seen elsewhere. The technological virtuosity remains to this day. It has long supported an emphasis on national greatness and exceptionalism and offers solace in the face of other setbacks. At a basic level the Moon landings provided the impetus for the perception of NASA as a successful organization, and of the United States as the world leader in science and technology.
Scientific Return
“The direct scientific result of the Apollo Program, viewed collectively, can be summarized as fundamental new knowledge of the Moon, the Sun, and the Earth, and of the behavior of living and inanimate systems in the microgravity environment provided by orbiting spacecraft and space stations,” wrote NASA scientist Paul D. Lowman in 1999. That was an understatement. From a scientific perspective Apollo opened the Moon to understanding as never before. The landforms of the Moon, systematically investigated by scientists with data from the lunar expeditions, advanced knowledge of the regolith, volcanism, tectonic actions, impacts, and the creation of the lunar face. In this context, scientists came to appreciate in a new way the origin of the Moon and the early history of the solar system.
In the end, executing the science of the Apollo program involved three hugely significant efforts carried out by the science community—landing site selection, instrument and experiment selection, and training of astronauts for scientific fieldwork. The first of these was arguably the most important. While the scientists had been planning since 1962 for investigations during each landing, they also got involved at the beginning with the Apollo Site Selection Board established at NASA headquarters in August 1965. This board served as the primary vehicle for determining where each mission to the Moon would land, and therefore the nature of scientific observation and experimentation permitted. It was always a contentious, but necessary, activity that successfully reached consensus on a range of geologically interesting landing sites.
The second major area that caused contention in the program was the definition of science experiments on the lunar surface. Ongoing debates about the size and mass of experiments, as well as their power requirements, roiled the mission planning efforts throughout the middle 1960s. The scientists agreed that the first investigations should relate to geology (especially sample collection), geochemistry, and geophysics. They also agreed that the early landings should focus on returning as many diverse lunar rock and soil samples as was feasible, deployment of long-lasting surface instruments, and geological exploration of the immediate landing areas by each crew. These could be expanded later to include surveys of the whole Moon and detailed studies of specific sites in the equatorial belt.
Finally, as we have seen, the scientific community helped prepare the Apollo astronauts for geological fieldwork on the Moon. Despite the relative rarity of academically trained geologists in the astronaut corps—recall that the only Moonwalker was the Harvard Ph.D. in geology Harrison Schmitt, and that other geologists such as Brian O’Leary resigned from the program in disgust—the scientists nonetheless made every effort to guide the flight crews, making certain that when they reached the lunar surface, they were ready to perform their assigned tasks. Their success was a triumph for the scientists as well as the astronauts. While some astronauts deplored this emphasis, others embraced the scientific task. In the end, between 1964 and the times of the various missions, the crews undertook classroom study and fieldwork in a variety of settings to prepare for their time on the lunar surface. In the end, most would agree that the flight crews had sufficient formal education to earn the equivalent of a master’s degree in geology.
A key question answered by the Apollo science program involved the origin of the Moon. Before Apollo three principal theories existed about its origins:
1. Fission, a theory holding that the Moon had split off from Earth;
2. Co-accretion, a theory that proclaimed that the Moon and Earth formed at the same time from the Solar Nebula;
3. Capture, a theory that held that the Moon formed elsewhere and was subsequently drawn into orbit around Earth.
These theories all lost adherents because of the Apollo samples. After a decade of analysis, at an October 1984 conference of lunar scientists in Kona, Hawaii, a consensus emerged rather unexpectedly that the Moon had been formed by debris from a massive collision—the “big whack”—from a very large object (as big as Mars and named after the fact Theia) about 4.6 billion years ago. This “big whack” theory explained well what had been learned about the geology of the Moon during the Apollo program. While there are still details to be worked out, the impact theory is now widely accepted. Lunar scientists are eager to return to the Moon to answer additional questions about the Moon’s origins.
Most scientists would probably agree with Ph.D. geologist and Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who recalled that we learned because of Apollo that “the Moon moves through space as an ancient text, related to the history of the Earth only through the interpretations of our minds, and, as the modern archive of our sun, recording in its soils much of immediate importance to man’s future well-being.”
The Space Race: Pride and Prestige
Central to any discussion of the space race is its role as an engine of national pride and international prestige for the U
nited States in the context of Cold War rivalries. Prestige, for all its ubiquity in the literature of human spaceflight, is an imprecise term, which perhaps obscures more than it illuminates. It signifies a demonstration of national superiority over a rival. Both the Americans and Soviets pursued prestige. But this superiority has many facets and audiences. It both elicits a “gut-level” reaction and calls for a more sophisticated explication. It is driven by politics of many sorts—international, bureaucratic, and domestic—none of them sufficient on its own to explain the primacy of human spaceflight in American and Soviet cultures, but all complexly intertwined.
There may well be four distinct attributes of the issue of pride and prestige in the space race:
• Prestige on the international stage, using the space race as a means for influencing the attitudes of nonaligned populations toward either the Soviet Union or the United States;
• Pride at the national level, drawing the nation and its many peoples, priorities, and perspectives together;
• Definition of national identity, introducing important ingredients into a national narrative of exceptionalism;
• Valorization of the idea of progress, with the space race a symbol for national forward thinking.
This application of prestige is a classic application of what analysts often refer to as “soft power.” Coined by Harvard University professor Joseph S. Nye, the term defined an alternative to threats and other forms of “hard power” in international relations. As Nye contends:
Soft power is the ability to get what you want by attracting and persuading others to adopt your goals. It differs from hard power, the ability to use the carrots and sticks of economic and military might to make others follow your will. Both hard and soft power are important . . . but attraction is much cheaper than coercion, and an asset that needs to be nourished.
Such activities as the space race represented a form of soft power for both rivals, the ability to influence other nations through intangibles such as an impressive show of technological capability. It granted to the nation achieving successes an authenticity and gravitas not previously enjoyed among the world community. At sum, this was an argument buttressing the role of spaceflight as a means of enhancing prestige on the world stage.
There is no question but that all the human spaceflight efforts were initially about establishing U.S. or Soviet primacy in technology. Spaceflight served as a surrogate for war, with the United States and the Soviet Union in a head-on contest of technological virtuosity. The desire to win international support for the “American way” became the raison d’être for the Apollo program, and it served that purpose far better than anyone imagined when the program was first envisioned. Apollo became primarily a Cold War initiative that helped to demonstrate the mastery of the United States before the world. At the height of the Apollo Moon landings, world opinion had shifted overwhelmingly in favor of the United States. The importance of Apollo as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy—not necessarily identical with national prestige and geopolitics, but closely allied—should not be mislaid in this discussion. It served, and continues to serve, as an instrument for projecting the image of a positive, open, dynamic American society abroad.
The Space Race and the Idea of Progress
The iconic space race, especially the Moon landings, served very specific needs for both the United States and the Soviet Union, and it has largely been mobilized to bolster the stature of these nations in the period since. This represents a fulfillment of the dominant narrative of Soviet/Russian and American triumph, exceptionalism, and success. Through the process it served as an exemplar of a grand visionary concept for human exploration and progress. Given this observation, the space race has been celebrated as an investment in technology, science, and knowledge that would enable humanity to do more than just dip its toes in the cosmic ocean, to become a truly spacefaring people.
It is somewhat trite to suggest that America was founded on the idea of progress, and that progress remains both an amorphous concept and one central to American national identity. In the 1830s an astute French interpreter of United States society, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed that Americans had a “lively faith in human perfectibility,” and that as a society they believed they were “a body progressing” rather than one that either declined or remained stable.
If anything, Tocqueville understated this principle, for the concept of America as a Utopia in process has permeated the national ideology since before the birth of the Republic. From Puritan leader John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill,” to Thomas Jefferson’s stirring statement in the Declaration of Independence that people must work to ensure that all receive their unalienable rights of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” to the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s, progress has been a major subtext of every aspect of American life.
The same was true of the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 sought to create a utopian world in which all people contributed what they could to the welfare of all and received what they needed in return. In practice this did not work, but the idea of progress toward equanimity and equality was everywhere apparent.
Of course, the way these ideas have evolved over time has changed in relation to the larger society, and space exploration, especially the race to the Moon, evinced these cherished conceptions. As political scientist Taylor E. Dark III has argued:
The idea of progress has typically advanced three claims: 1. There are no fundamental limits on the human capacity to grow, however growth is defined; 2. Advancements in science and technology foster improvements in the moral and political character of humanity; and, 3. There is an innate directionality in human society, rooted in societal, psychological, or biological mechanisms, that drives civilization toward advancement. American believers in progress quickly embraced space travel, viewing it as a vindication of the doctrine’s original claims about the near-inevitability of human improvement. With space travel understood in this fashion, the fate of the space program took on a far greater meaning than developments in other areas of technological endeavor, as it became symbolic of the entire directionality of human civilization.
Although progress had been present earlier in the works of such space advocates as the Russian Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, the American Robert H. Goddard, and the German Wernher von Braun, after the conclusion of the space race in the early 1970s space enthusiasts believed they were on the verge of a new golden age in which anything could be accomplished. Apollo raised the hopes of those dreaming of great human progress in space. Its transcendental qualities were not lost on those who believed that humanity could eventually attain this end.
Movement into space, first with exploring expeditions and later with colonies, offered an opportunity for humanity to move outward and start anew on an untouched planet. The space race had shown it was possible. It suggested that the spacefaring nations had both the capability and the wherewithal to accomplish truly astounding goals. All it needed was the will. As Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT) mused in 1969, “If men can visit the Moon—and now we know they can—then there is no limit to what else we can do. Perhaps that is the real meaning of Apollo 11.”
We see this in the imagery of the space race as well. The essence of progress present in space race photography is unmistakable, along with the dominant narrative of national triumph, exceptionalism, and success so much a part of the interpretation of space exploration. From an advertising perspective, the linkage of humanity to this grand endeavor was an easy sell. Is it any wonder that it would be central to positive elements of human progress since the 1960s?
Apollo as Nostalgia
Decades later, the Apollo program represents a powerful incarnation of nostalgia for the excitement of seeing astronauts walk on the Moon. While there were setbacks, the experience of the Apollo years, 1961 to 1972, included more triumph than tragedy, more heroic sacrifice, more strenuous effort than m
any wars, and certainly much more daring than the years of space exploration since. Many remember Apollo as an effort wrought with high drama and excitement. More important, Apollo was a government program that succeeded. Twelve American astronauts did indeed land on the Moon and return safely to Earth, the first of them “before this decade is out,” as John F. Kennedy had directed. All of this happened while the United States underwent social revolution, suffered defeat in Vietnam, and undertook the Great Society programs, many of which have since been widely branded as flawed, if not failed. And NASA accomplished Apollo within the confines of its overall budget targets. All this prompts many to reflect on the episode with nostalgia and longing for a return to a simpler time.
Apollo nostalgia manifests itself in several ways. It may be found in numerous popular conceptions of the program, especially in film, literature, music, theater, and advertising. In each of these arenas three great themes play out in evoking the past of Apollo. First, reaching for the Moon represented a spiritual quest, a purification of humanity, and a search for absolution and immortality. Because of this, much of the nostalgia for Apollo has all the trappings of a religion. Second, Apollo represented the next step in human evolution, and carried with it a Darwinian overtone of “survival of the fittest”; some look back on the winding down of the program as a missed opportunity. Third, and perhaps most important, Apollo nostalgia harks back to an era of the early 1960s in which order ruled and all seemed in its place. Clearly, this nostalgia is more a perception than a reality, but it bespeaks a belief about the period before the turmoil of the later 1960s and celebrates the place of Apollo coming out of an earlier time and circumstance. Whether appropriate or not—and in reality it was less so than many perceive—the dominance of the white male elite, the sense that Americans could accomplish anything they set their minds to, and the naïve emphasis that there existed a fundamental unity of American values and attitudes represented a powerful aphrodisiac for a lost past. Most important for reinforcement of this issue, the system worked and in memory enjoyed efficiencies lost in a postmodern, multicultural setting. This longing for a distant, dimly remembered, and ultimately inaccurate past represents perhaps the most troubling aspect of Apollo nostalgia.
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