Technology and Culture

Matthew Hersch

It should come as no surprise that the upcoming fortieth anniversary of the first journey by humans to the surface of the Moon has inspired new works on the program that took them there. There were, arguably, explorations more important in the history of humanity than Apollo 11’s flight in July of 1969, but none watched as closely by so many with such instantaneous professions of support or dismay. The New York Times, shortly after the lunar module Eagle touched down, printed them all: quotations from celebrities awed, inspired, and perplexed by humankind’s first landing on another world.{1} Project Apollo’s achievement was hardly dimmed by the finding that the Moon’s “magnificent desolation” offered human visitors little of comfort or value; never before had the discovery of nothing been so heralded. Even the ostensible purpose of the trip—to demonstrate that the Soviet New Man would not inherit the Earth—hardly seemed to matter once human feet hit lunar dirt.

One person’s faith is another’s fantasy, and those who look upon Apollo as either a blessing or a waste are unlikely to be dissuaded. Choosing one or the other, though, isn’t really the point. What made Apollo special is the fact that for once, the inmates actually did have the keys to the asylum—and the treasury.

Apollo soon earned the kind of literary canon reserved for major wars, with thousands of works produced ranging from pop-up books to solid institutional histories. For Walter McDougall, military service in Southeast Asia in the summer of 1969 provided little respite for contemplating interplanetary spaceflight. His Pulitzer Prize– and Dexter Prize–winning 1985 political history of the early years of the space age (and warnings of its consequences for the American polity), . . . the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, informs virtually every history of the subject written since.{2} So does Tom Wolfe’s uproarious The Right Stuff, disabusing people of their illusions about America’s earliest astronauts while still somehow burnishing their reputations.{3} In recent years, a spate of biographies and memoirs of astronauts and engineers have further broadened the story of the first great space age.{4} And these have been joined by scholarly treatises on Apollo’s innovative management, resonance in popular culture, unique workplace, foreign competition, and gendered construction.{5} Meanwhile, popular media have found renewed inspiration in homeric retellings of the Apollo missions themselves, with contributions like Ron Howard’s 1995 film Apollo 13, Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts (1994),{6} and Tom Hanks’s 1998 miniseries adaptation From the Earth to the Moon. These works, if offering little new to experienced space scholars, combined stirring narratives with hyperrealism and visceral awe, a formula that made them hits.

Authors tackling the legacy of Apollo these days must grapple with a literature already so vast that it would seem to leave few historical Moon rocks unturned; new works from Gerard DeGroot and the interplanetary tag team of Francis French and Colin Burgess confront this problem in different ways. For DeGroot, trawling through libraries for evidence of the collective insanity of lunar flight in Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest, well-worn anecdotes take on a sinister gloss as the characters and motivations of the Moon race are reimagined as less reasoned than they may have once seemed.{7} For French and Burgess, the technical and political histories of Project Apollo are the backdrop for the almost mythic accounts of participating individuals, whose recollections the authors exhaustively compile and lavishly annotate for In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965–1969.{8}

Until Dark Side of the Moon came along, freeing people of their illusions about Apollo appeared to be going out of style; spaceflight historiography had mostly wrested free of the cold war. Lest we forget that Apollo was expensive and pointless, though, DeGroot reminds readers of the paranoia that spawned the Moon race and the zeal that sustained it. Like “two bald men fighting over a comb,” DeGroot writes (p. xiii), the United States and Soviet Union expended vast sums in the 1960s pursuing a goal with no intrinsic worth to either of them. The public that supported this Moon race was irrational, misled by starry-eyed fantasists, political opportunists, and greedy industrial profiteers who recognized that rockets accomplish much more through what they influence on Earth than what they discover in space. These crooked dreamers, DeGroot argues, had been hawking the idea of piloted flight through space at least a few hundred years before Apollo, always with the same mix of utopianism and pandering. He concedes that some of them may have earnestly believed that humankind’s future required the colonization of distant worlds, but others were hucksters and showboats willing to sell their souls to the war machine to see their beloved rockets “raping the atmosphere” (p. 12).

If readers know what happened next, it is no doubt due to the work of McDougall and others, from which DeGroot liberally draws. Flush with victory, cash, and German engineers, postwar America at first seemed ripe for space travel, but military rocket researchers like Wernher von Braun spent the late 1940s and early 1950s killing monkeys and writing magazine articles while American military leaders debated spaceflight’s future. A cautious President Dwight D. Eisenhower at first doled out limited funds for space research, but the Soviets, desperate for a weapon to pierce the North Atlantic shield, shoveled money into rockets with intercontinental reach. The Soviet launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 changed everything, and nothing—instead of fundamentally altering the power balance between the United States and Soviet Union, artificial satellites merely provided them with another arena in which to battle for the world’s hearts and minds, and an opportunity for a variety of politicians to make their reputations.

Nothing sold papers quite like people in space; before either nation knew it, both were readying rockets for piloted flight. Degenerate, foulmouthed drunks, America’s test-pilot astronauts made poor role models, but at least they did not masturbate in front of the cameras like their chimpanzee colleagues. Again, in 1961, the Soviets beat the Americans to the punch by shooting the first undertrained human being into space, but the Americans’ eventual success in matching this feat with Project Mercury emboldened the young National Aeronautics and Space Administration to think big. For President John F. Kennedy, the manned Moon shot of Project Apollo would be the great propaganda equalizer, requiring only $35 billion in pork barrel congressional handouts and a few dozen expendable pilots. Before too long, DeGroot writes, Apollo had a life of its own, and no amount of political second-guessing could extinguish it.

As American space mania grew and congressional districts became wealthy on appropriations, astronauts risked death trying to master the space environment, while on the other side of the world, Soviet cosmonauts did the same, racing each other to the imaginary lunar finish line. The Americans’ arrival in lunar orbit in December 1968 marked a major milestone for the Moon program but also let the wind out of its sails: there was nothing there. Nevertheless, not even the civil rights spoilsports could dampen enthusiasm for Apollo 11’s flight the following year, so drunk were the American people on the glamour of their real-life rocket men. Compared to the windup, though, the Moon landing was a metaphysical bust. If Americans drank themselves silly on the promise of spaceflight, the buzz was short-lived and followed by one heck of a hangover. Even before the Apollo 11 astronauts returned to Earth, President Richard M. Nixon had slowly begun to chip away at the edifice of American human spaceflight.

DeGroot’s spaceflight hatchet job is, as one might imagine, a blast: his prose is short and pithy and awash in clever turns of phrase. But readers are likely to have encountered the author’s arguments in a variety of other places, and some are a bit overbroad. If all a historian can conclude about an era is that those who lived in it were insane, one must wonder if more work remains to be done. DeGroot quite admirably refuses to allow himself to be flimflammed by NASA propaganda, but he has little sympathy for the motivations of those in the space program who were quite sane, quite decent, and quite reasonably convinced that what they were doing would be remembered. The existence of a book like Dark Side has proven them right.

If doubts about the space program emerge in French and Burgess’s In the Shadow of the Moon, they are never enough to derail a respectful account of space navigation as told by those who wore the diapers. The second book in a series from the University of Nebraska Press edited by Burgess, Shadow picks up the space race in 1965 (where the authors’ Into that Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961–1965 left off), telling the story of human spaceflight through the eyes of its most direct participants: astronauts and the people who knew them.{9} Burgess’s series is subtitled A People’s History of Spaceflight, but social history of the downtrodden is not on the menu—unless one considers Apollo’s lunar module pilots (LMP) downtrodden. (As it turns out, many LMPs actually do.) Shadow, rather, eschews Marxism for character vignettes so affectionate that few of the individuals discussed are likely to have their feelings hurt. Walter Cunningham, an Apollo LMP whose own 1977 memoir pulled few punches about the astronaut mystique,{10} introduces Shadow with his usual pizzazz, but French and Burgess are far more sympathetic to their sources, even when criticizing them.

The story of spaceflight between 1965 and 1969 has been told elsewhere and offers little opportunity for artistic deviation: American spaceflight was never more energized than during this period, which began with America’s Project Gemini flights into Earth orbit and ended with the first Apollo Moon landing. Shadow jumps right into the former, dissecting early two-man Gemini missions commanded by veteran astronauts Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper and rookie pilots Jim McDivitt and Frank Borman, who would become central figures in Project Apollo. Over the first three chapters, French and Burgess complete the Gemini saga, lavishing attention on the difficulties each crew encountered and surmounted while tumbling through space with overheating spacesuits and faulty thrusters. These accounts create an image of one of the most capable groups of individuals any nation has ever assembled for any purpose.

DeGroot caricatures NASA’s astronauts as overgrown kids rushing headlong into a foolishly dangerous endeavor; French and Burgess cannot help but lionize them. Minute detail and lesser-known facts pour from the pages of Shadow, but to complete their accounts of men they clearly respect, the authors occasionally deviate from the master narrative to dwell on the astronauts’ later lives and eventual passing, lending the work the mournful tone of their previous volume. This elegiac spirit is never more apparent than in chapter 4, where the authors examine the 1967 deaths of Apollo 1 crewmembers Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, and the demise of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov on the maiden flight of his Soyuz spacecraft. Following this somber interlude is an equally jarring chapter on Apollo’s return to flight in 1968 by Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Cunningham, centering on the clash of personalities among the members of the mission team in space and on the ground. In discussing the “enigmatic” Eisele, French and Burgess wrestle with issues of marital discord and lackluster job performance, but they seek to redeem rather than condemn the now-deceased astronaut, one of many efforts at image rehabilitation the authors have attempted of late. (Unheralded LMPs like Apollo 8’s Bill Anders and Apollo 9’s Rusty Schweickart also enjoy their well-earned moments in the Sun.) As with Silent Sea, the ascendance—and, occasionally, decline—of the space program’s minor somebodies provide readers with most of the book’s new insights.

Like NASA itself, French and Burgess are unwilling to let bad vibes and a few dead bodies derail their adventure, and America’s conquest of space resumes in late 1968 after a brief return to Russia, where an almost stagnated Soviet space program struggles with a series of harrowing Earth-orbit missions probably less familiar to American readers. If Silent Sea toiled to maintain parity in American and Soviet narratives, Shadow resigns itself to telling the story of spaceflight in this period as mostly an American one, with cosmonauts making infrequent (though engrossing) appearances, slipping in the race to the Moon, and trying desperately to make their translunar Soyuz spacecraft work. In short order, American successes pile up in 1968 and 1969: led by a familiar cast of characters, Apollo crews prove out their spacecraft, circumnavigate the Moon, and put their lunar module through the rigors of flight testing. In this crescendo of milestones, Apollo 11’s triumph seems almost anticlimactic; the authors stress that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins reached the Moon on the shoulders of previous, less-heralded flights, and the point sticks.

In Silent Sea, French and Burgess suggested that the earliest astronauts were far more thoughtful than most people imagined, but Shadow leaves the reader with the impression that Apollo’s spacemen are far more important for what they did than for what they felt. The reverence of Shadow is more than mere naiveté. Apollo was cold war theater, but even to cold warriors it signaled what one steely-eyed missile man, the U.S. Army’s Major General John Medaris, described as “‘a new understanding of man’s relationship with the infinity of Divine Creation’” (DeGroot, p. 93). For true believers (and there were millions) space travel would rescue humanity from nuclear annihilation, resource depletion, and the Sun’s eventual extinguishment. A human footprint on the Moon, if tainted by nationalism, was an essential milestone from which mostly good would come.

One person’s faith is another’s fantasy, and those who look upon Apollo as either a blessing or a waste are unlikely to be dissuaded by either of these works. Choosing one or the other, though, isn’t really the point. What made Apollo special is the fact that for once, the inmates actually did have the keys to the asylum—and the treasury. Perhaps when the politics of the 1960s no longer have the same power to inflame, historians will feel less compelled to spill ink on the opportunity cost of the Moon program and focus their attentions more clearly on some of its more interesting implications, like where spaceflight fits into a long history of “big” science, “big” technology, and “big” government.

Nearly four decades after its first publication, Norman Mailer’s self-indulgent, often frustrating 1970 book, Of a Fire on the Moon, may still be the best account of the events of July 1969, precisely because it erupted from a man not inclined to give the squares gratuitous praise.{11} Apollo was ridiculous; it could be dull; the people involved were cartoonish in their obsessions and robotic in their attention to Apollo’s manifold details. As American counterculture crested, though, even the hippies had to admit that tie-dye and LSD seemed a little less radical in the light of the Moon; space travel was where it’s at. The latest books on Apollo reveal quite a bit of fuel still left in the tanks. History tends to remember each civilization for a single achievement: the Egyptians, their pyramids; the Chinese, their Great Wall; the Romans, their roads. Two thousand years from now, future humans may well remember of Americans only one thing: they went to the Moon.

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{1} “Reactions to Man’s Landing on the Moon Show Broad Variations in Opinions: Some Would Forge Ahead in Space, Others Would Turn to Earth’s Affairs,” New York Times, 21 July 1969, 6–7.

{2} Walter A. McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York, 1985).

{3} Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York, 1979).

{4} For example, James R. Hansen, First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (New York, 2005) and Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York, 2007).

{5} Examples include Stephen B. Johnson, The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs (Baltimore, 2002); Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington, D.C., 1997); David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Space Flight (Cambridge, Mass., 2008); Asif A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974 (Washington, D.C., 2000); Margaret A. Weitekamp, Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program (Baltimore, 2004).

{6} Andrew Chaikin, A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts (New York, 1994).

{7} Gerard J. DeGroot, Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest (New York, 2006, pp. xiv+320, $30).

{8} Francis French and Colin Burgess, In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965–1969 (Lincoln, Neb., 2007, pp. xix+425, $29.95).

{9} Francis French and Colin Burgess, Into that Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961–1965 (Lincoln, Neb., 2007).

{10} Walter Cunningham and Mickey Herskowitz, The All-American Boys (New York, 1977).

{11} Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon (Boston, 1970).

Mr. Hersch is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the 2007–08 Guggenheim Fellow of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.