Why did support for the space program decrease so sharply after
(or, really, even before) the first moon landing? Clearly this
decline had much to do with the waning of the original Cold War
impetus that had sparked the moon program to begin with. As Cold
War tensions with the Soviets eased by the late 1960s, and the
United States won the space race with the successful moon landing,
there was little incentive to continue to expand or even maintain
steady funding for a program that, for all its real contributions
to technological advancement, entertainment, and national esteem,
had largely come to be seen as a Cold War goal rather than a
continuing, sustained program of space exploration. In this
context, which a good number of Americans accepted, the moon was
not a starting point for a glorious era of exploration, but an
endpoint in a Cold War race with the Soviets. Unusual works on
space history, this fluidly written debut book looks at the Apollo
moon landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s from a cultural
perspective. Rather than examining them in their familiar Cold War
context, Matt Tribbe uses them to explore larger trends in American
culture and society during this period, specifically the turn away
from the rationalism that dominated social thought through the
1950s and early 1960s and found its fullest expression in the urge
to go to the moon. Rather than studying the space program itself,
he focuses more on the peculiarities of an American society and
culture that sent men to the moon semiannually over the 1968-72
period, and then stopped. Hippies used the event to comment on the
lameness of "straights," straights to lambast hippies.
Intellectuals on the Left discussed it in their critiques of
American society and culture; intellectuals on the Right discussed
it in their critiques of intellectuals on the Left. Those who
placed their faith in technocratic rationalism praised it as a
triumph of rational planning, while growing numbers of skeptics
pointed out the spiritual emptiness of such a rationalist endeavor.
The "man in the street," of course, had something to say as well,
and he or she expressed a wide variety of views in countless
newspapers and television interviews. Meanwhile, armchair
philosophers of all stripes, from newspaper editorialists to
politicians to NASA technocrats, waxed poetically about what it
revealed of "the nature of man" and "mankind's destiny." While not
a traditional space history, this book will appeal to those
fascinated by postwar culture and society and will particularly add
to the growing area of the history of the 1970s.
General
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