An expose arguing that the Apollo Program conned taxpayers and
provided a lavish, risky ego trip for technocrats and
politicians.DeGroot (The Bomb, 2004; History/Univ. of St. Andrews,
Scotland) crafts a winning formula: While peeling away layer after
layer of the deceptions and spin that sold NASA's lunar program to
the funding public, he indulges readers with a nostalgia binge of
epic proportions. Although cautioning against finding any heroes in
his reading of the case, he does isolate President Eisenhower as a
voice in the wilderness, protesting, however faintly, against the
massive expenditures he correctly foresaw would ultimately be
required to administer a "$35 billion happy pill" to a depressed
America. We were never behind, the author stresses, in the
so-called "space race" when it came to developing technology with
direct national-security implications; Ike knew it but couldn't say
it because intelligence-gathering was top-secret. What the public
saw instead was a Soviet circus with brutish booster-rockets
throwing into space seemingly at will the first orbiter, then the
first dog, man, woman, etc. All their failures were cloaked; all of
ours screamed in headlines. The villains? DeGroot first fixes on
Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi wunderkind whose rocketry, built
by slave labor, had rained death on London. Ike and anyone else
counseling restraint had no chance against the salesmanship of a
visionary scientist with the requisite foreign accent. But it was
John F. Kennedy, the author says, who insisted on a manned,
space-based world-opinion coup-forget science-the gargantuan budget
of which he would later come to rue. The author provides lots of
philandering-astronaut stories and similar fun stuff to go along
with the overview, all metaphorically topped by Enos, second chimp
in space, who yanked off his diaper at his post-flight press
conference and tried to fondle himself.Top-flight debunking takes
all the air out of the moon race. (Kirkus Reviews)
A selection of the History, Scientific American, and Quality
Paperback Book Clubs For a very brief moment during the 1960s,
America was moonstruck. Boys dreamt of being an astronaut; girls
dreamed of marrying one. Americans drank Tang, bought "space pens"
that wrote upside down, wore clothes made of space age Mylar, and
took imaginary rockets to the moon from theme parks scattered
around the country. But despite the best efforts of a generation of
scientists, the almost foolhardy heroics of the astronauts, and 35
billion dollars, the moon turned out to be a place of "magnificent
desolation," to use Buzz Aldrin's words: a sterile rock of no
purpose to anyone. In Dark Side of the Moon, Gerard J. DeGroot
reveals how NASA cashed in on the Americans' thirst for heroes in
an age of discontent and became obsessed with putting men in space.
The moon mission was sold as a race which America could not afford
to lose. Landing on the moon, it was argued, would be good for the
economy, for politics, and for the soul. It could even win the Cold
War. The great tragedy is that so much effort and expense was
devoted to a small step that did virtually nothing for mankind.
Drawing on meticulous archival research, DeGroot cuts through the
myths constructed by the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson
administrations and sustained by NASA ever since. He finds a gang
of cynics, demagogues, scheming politicians, and corporations who
amassed enormous power and profits by exploiting the fear of what
the Russians might do in space. Exposing the truth behind one of
the most revered fictions of American history, Dark Side of the
Moon explains why the American space program has been caught in a
state of purposeless wandering ever since Neil Armstrong descended
from Apollo 11 and stepped onto the moon. The effort devoted to the
space program was indeed magnificent and its cultural impact was
profound, but the purpose of the program was as desolate and dry as
lunar dust.
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