Kendrick Oliver on the Race to the Moon

Kendrick Oliver on the Race to the Moon | History Extra Podcast - History Extra

"The kind of rationales for engaging in the space race are very much related to questions of kind of cold war prestige, you know, main reason that John F Kennedy was interested in going to the moon is not because he had any particular personal interest in space exploration. But he was aware, this is one arena where people were looking at particularly in the kind of newly decolonized or decolonizing areas of the the global south, the third world that they were looking at SpaceX exploration and what the Soviets were achieving, and begin to that maybe this was a sign that the Soviet model of economic organization, central planning was the way to go. And that was not something that Kennedy was very keen...

The Americans become more and more concerned about the capacity of the Soviet Union to launch a surprise attack... overhead surveillance of the Soviet Union's territory. And this leads to such things as the U2 program as well. It's very, very difficult to do by any other means. Because you know, the Soviet Union is a closed society. And therefore, you can't, it's not that easy to have people sort of wandering around and having a look at seeing what's going on. And so the other device that they start thinking about is a satellite.

But of course, if you launch a satellite and name it as a surveillance satellite it’s most likely thereafter to get resistance from the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union will protest about it. And so what you need to do is cast the satellite, the first satellite, the precedent setting device, basically, as a scientific device, a peaceful device...

Initially, I think the Kennedy administration was thinking this was going to be costing about seven to $9 billion, it turns out to be closer in the region of 20. And as time goes on, as those costs become clearer and clearer, and as a sense of social crisis begins to affect the United States, from the mid 1960s onwards, when you have a whole series of kind of unrest in American cities, you have the Johnson administration announcing a war on poverty, which is subsequently partly as a result of, primarily as a result of the expenditures on Vietnam is unable to fund, people start looking at the Apollo program and saying is this really what we need? Is this the priority for us?

There are, of course, lots of people who still think it is and who still think of it as a important venture in cold war terms and well worth the investment. If you are an aerospace engineer, somewhere in California and Florida, you're making a lot of money out of this, you think this is great, but if you're African American living in Harlem, and there's a huge degree of kind of deprivation around you, you're much less likely to be a kind of cheerleader for this program. So by the 1967, 1968, there's a growing sense of sort of opposition and even within opinion polls, it's actually quite rare from the mid 1960s onwards for there to be majority support for the Apollo program…

Even as Armstrong and Aldrin are making their steps upon the moon, there was quite a lot of opposition, still being felt and still being rehearsed in various sectors of the press. Just prior to the launch of Apollo 11. The Reverend Ralph Abernathy whose, had been until he’d been associated with Martin Luther King who had been assassinated the previous year, led a group of what he called the poor people's campaign to the Apollo 11 launch site in Cape Canaveral to protest the expenditure upon the space program, to emphasize this wasn't a, the kind of priority, this wasn't the most important thing that that Americans should be investing in at this particular moment…

‘What, if anything, did it actually gain the US?’

‘That is sort of super controversial. And it's something that people are still arguing about. You know, what ultimately was the point of this?... a lot of the analogies that were being used around mid 1962, were comparisons to Christopher Columbus. Is this going to be the opening, the opening step in a kind of wide new kind of horizon of possibility, you land on the moon, you start creating a colony on the moon, you practice for going on to Mars and so on? Or is it more like Leif Ericsson? You know, many hundreds of years ago, going on a sort of ship around to North America and nothing really, you know, creating a settlement there. And nothing really follows as a result of of it.

And so those, you know, that question about what does it actually give the United States beyond the prestige of doing it? Well, certainly, you can count, there's some scientific knowledge that's produced in terms of the nature of the moon, the makeup of the moon, it helps to generate a new understanding of how the moon came to be. There are other sort of spin offs from the program, I mean, people talk about miniaturization, for example, people talk about Velcro, Teflon, those sort of things, that the things that were developed as a result of the Apollo program that might not have been developed anyway. But NASA always found it quite difficult to develop much, to sell the spin offs really, in terms of generating much enthusiasm for them. It never found there was a huge amount of interest in the scientific payoffs either for the Apollo program. And so I think it is actually quite difficult to judge that this had a, that the investment was really worth it.

And certainly that's a judgment that's beginning to be made within the Nixon administration... an achievement should have a legacy. And that's where the struggle comes in I think a little bit in terms of thinking about the Apollo program"