How we remember Apollo is the question at the heart of two recent books by professional historians. In the first, Apollo’s Legacy: Perspectives on the Moon Landings by Roger Launius, a former historian at NASA who has also held senior positions at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC, explores this issue explicitly. In the second, Apollo to the Moon: A History in 50 Objects, Teasel Muir-Harmony, a curator at the National Air & Space Museum, revisits Apollo through its material culture, the detritus of the space age scattered in museums and collections across the world.
Both ask questions with no easy answers. Launius begins with a relatively simple one: “How might we interpret the Apollo adventure in the 21st century, in our postmodern world far removed from that of the late 1960s and early 1970s?” This is not just a question about memory but about legacy. Launius suggests that the triumphalist thread of Apollo — American exceptionalism triumphing during the Cold War — is the dominant narrative of the Moon landings.
Counternarratives, however, have periodically punctured this sanguine view, as he acknowledges. Indeed, Gil Scott-Heron, quoted in my opening, is hardly alone in his critique. Apollo, some critics have said, was a waste of national resources when the nation was racked with problems of inequality, poverty, racism, and sexism. Others have argued that Apollo actually exacerbated these problems by diverting American attention away from real-world issues; it was an expensive boondoggle that fed the egos of the white men in charge of the space program. Launius calls this the “left” critique of Apollo. He pairs it with a “right” critique, made by a number of political and academic commentators through the 1980s who argued that Apollo was a waste of state resources. In this reading, Apollo was the perfect exemplar of bloated big government spending and ought to have been left to private enterprise. A final strand in the afterlife of Apollo, one that waxes and wanes but taps into a deeper strand of American conspiracy theorizing, simply denies that it ever happened; the Apollo Moon landings are represented as, in Launius’s words, “products of some deep-seated plot or as part of a larger militarization scheme aimed at world domination.” He confronts and dismisses this last view, commenting simply that mass media’s eagerness to make money out of sensationalism has exacerbated the conspiratorial afterlife of Apollo. He does not address the alarming fact that the YouTube generation has intensified the ability of non-experts to spread false information, now armed with knowing winks and expert CGI simulations far surpassing the crude tools of conspiracy theorists of the ’70s.
What he does do, in crisp and lucid writing, is travel through a broad swath of American culture to chase down the most entrenched interpretation of Apollo, often shared in Congressional hearings or among space advocates, that Americans in the 1960s were generally united in their support of the Moon program. This is a myth, he tells us. In 1967, a New York Times poll found that the population of six American cities believed that “five other public issues [held] priority over efforts in outer space, including air and water pollution, job training for unskilled workers, national beatifications, and poverty.” In many ways, this misplaced belief that Apollo once had a consensus of support has had an insidious effect on current space politics, since this axiom has been invoked repeatedly to justify visionary goals or lament the lack of them.