Popular opposition isn’t something you often hear about regarding the Apollo program. It is conveniently missing from America’s collective memory, in lieu of a tale of collective patriotic triumph. A narrative that appeals to Democrats as an example of successful big public programs - and Republicans - as a triumph of the capitalist west against the communist east.
The truth is, opposition was a constant, and even continued after man set foot on the lunar surface. Dr. Norbert Wiener - the ‘father of cybernetics’ - would coin the term ‘Moondoggle’ for the program in 1961, a neologism that would be adopted by Republican’s like Barry Goldwater (and a 1964 book of the same name.)
President Kennedy’s own head of Science Advisory Committee - Jerome Wiesner - opposed a manned mission, releasing a critical report on the notion before Kennedy had even been sworn in, or made his declaration.
In January 1962 The New York Times would note what else such a budget could afford the American people: over a hundred universities, millions of homes, hundreds of hospitals and cancer research. These concerns would be echoed by left wing opponents to the program, later memorialized in Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken word poem ‘Whitey on the Moon.’
In September, 1962 President Kennedy gave his famous Rice University speech where he spoke those famous words: “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.” This no doubt helped sentiment towards to mission.
However by November that same year Kennedy was expressing concerns privately about public sentiment saying “We’re talking about these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget, and all these other domestic programs are starving to death”, suggesting the cost could only be justified if framed in the context of military superiority over the Soviet Union.
1963 would really see opposition heat up. Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower - whose administration initially created and funded NASA - expressed his own reservations, dismissing Kennedy's lunar ambition as "almost hysterical" quipping: “Anybody who would spend $40 billion in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts…”
Kennedy would shoot back, noting the previous administrations record deficit spending. Some in the scientific community would push back too, a newly appointed editor of the prestigious journal ‘Science’ - Philip Abelson - would pen a critique of the mission - saying it was a moral outrage to not instead focus research expenditure on something like Cancer research. The Washington Post would cover Abelson’s criticisms, followed by a 3-part series in the same spirit titled ‘Moon Madness?’