[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":137},["ShallowReactive",2],{"episode-moon-man-myths":3},{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":8,"tags":13,"thumb":17,"excerpt":23,"content":24,"transcript":25,"transcript_file":26,"audio":27,"resources":31,"segments":36},141,"moon-man-myths","Moon, Man, and Myths","The 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11",{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},1563538520,"07.19.19","Jul 19, 2019","July 19, 2019",[14,15,16],"Apollo 11","space exploration","the Moon",{"src":18,"caption":19,"derivatives":20},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Fimages\u002Fmoon-man-myths\u002Fwebsite-Apollo_Show-Image.jpg","New York City welcomes Apollo 11 crewmen in a showering of ticker tape down Broadway and Park Avenue in a parade termed as the largest in the city's history. Image: NASA\n",{"square_small":21,"square_medium":22},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Fimages\u002Fmoon-man-myths\u002Fsquare_small\u002Fwebsite-Apollo_Show-Image.jpg","https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Fimages\u002Fmoon-man-myths\u002Fsquare_medium\u002Fwebsite-Apollo_Show-Image.jpg","In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, BackStory launches into the history of America’s race to the moon.","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, BackStory launches into the history of America’s race to the moon. We’ll hear from flight director Gene Kranz about what it was like in Mission Control during the moon landing. And we’ll explore a kind of Apollo nostalgia that has crept into movies and other forms of pop culture. Plus, stay tuned throughout the episode to hear from our listeners about their memories of the moon landing.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>This episode and related resources are funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this show, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.\u003C\u002Fp>\n",null,"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Ffiles\u002Fmoon-man-myths\u002Ftranscript\u002FMoon-Landing-MASTER.pdf",{"url":28,"duration":29,"formatted_duration":30},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fepisodes\u002Fmoon-man-myths.mp3","3874","01:04:34",[32],{"title":33,"content":34,"files":35},"Moon Landing Lesson Set","\u003Cp>\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Ffiles\u002Fmoon-man-myths\u002Fresources-inline\u002FThe-50th-Anniversary-of-Apollo-11-Lesson-Set.pdf\">Download the Lesson Set\u003C\u002Fa>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>On July 20, 1969, the United States celebrated an amazing scientific achievement: landing the Apollo 11 on the surface of the moon. As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first two men to walk on the lunar surface, the American public watched with nationalistic pride. This singular moment was the culmination of a decade of extensive efforts by the U.S. government and the scientific community. It also served as a public declaration of international supremacy during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>This lesson reflects on the legacy of the “space race” during the 1960s. Fifty years after the fact, the moon landing is still celebrated as one of the greatest achievements in human history. However, this era is also often treated with an uncritical nostalgia. For many Americans, the Apollo 11 mission represents a moment of unity at a calamitous time in American history. For other Americans, the “space race” was a distraction from the fight for civil rights and the intractable conflict in Vietnam.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>As you go through the lesson, encourage students to think critically about these contradictions. Why does the Apollo 11 mission remain the subject of American nostalgia after fifty years? What role did the space race play in advancing social, economic, and geopolitical interests? How should we reflect on this time period as students of history?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp> \u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.backstoryradio.org\u002Fwp-content\u002Fuploads\u002Fsites\u002F13\u002F2019\u002F10\u002FNEH-Preferred-Seal820.jpg\">\u003Cimg src=\"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Fimages\u002Fmoon-man-myths\u002Finline\u002FNEH-Preferred-Seal820-300x136.jpg\" alt=\"\" \u002F>\u003C\u002Fa>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",[],[37,54,70,85,104,121],{"index":38,"title":39,"description":40,"audio":41,"tags":45,"transcript":48,"episode":49},0,"Star Trek in Real Life!","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Listener Bob Morehead was just 5 years old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. He remembers how his family made a moon-themed cake for his mother’s birthday, which happened to fall on the same day.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Music: \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.audioblocks.com\u002Fstock-audio\u002Fspace-ambience.html\">\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Space Ambience by Bobby Cole\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fa>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":42,"duration":43,"formatted_duration":44},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fmoon-man-myths\u002Fmoon-man-myths-01.mp3","240","00:04:00",[14,46,15,47],"Star Trek (television series)","space race","\u003Cp>Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: And I’m Nathan Connolly.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians and each week, along with our colleagues, Ed Ayers and Joanne Freeman, we explore a different aspect of American history.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: On September 12, 1962 President John F. Kennedy gave a speech declaring that America would be first to land on the moon and that it would happen by the end of the decade.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>John F. Kennedy: Why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, “Why climb the highest mountain? Why 35 years ago fly the Atlantic? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon. 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.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: Turns out America was up for the task. When Apollo 11 touched down on the lunar surface 50 years ago, July 20, 1969, the whole country watched as Neil Armstrong uttered those famous words.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Neil Armstrong: That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: A few weeks ago we asked you, our listeners, to cast your memories back to that momentous day and share your moon landing experiences. Here’s what one listener had to say.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Bob: Hi BackStory. This is Bob calling from Barberton, Ohio. My moon landing story, I was six years old, just turned six the previous month. The whole family was watching the preparation for the landing rather religiously that week. On the 20th when they actually touched down, that happened to be my mother’s birthday. My sister is 12 years older than I was, so she would have been 18 at the time, just graduated high school. Angel food cake was my mother’s favorite. So while we were all out in the living room watching them walk around on the moon, my sister was out in the kitchen and decorating this angel food cake.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Bob: She did it with white frosting and then she put these little gel candy rings on it, looking like craters. We celebrated my mom’s birthday with a moon cake while watching the first astronauts walk around on the moon. That was pretty special. I had taken to watching Star Trek with my brother. Geez, some of my earliest memories. My brother’s also quite a bit older than I am. He watched Star Trek, so I watched Star Trek. Lost In Space was on at the time too and I watched that. I was pretty into space by the time the moon landing happened. So it all just slid right into that as far as I was concerned.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Bob: I was excited by the whole thing. I’m watching Star Trek happen in real life right in front of me on the evening news. Looking back, the moon landing really represented tremendous progress to this date. I mean I carry around in my pocket a computer a million times more powerful than the one that put the thing on the moon, but even with that, we have still not yet, we are 50 years down the road. We have not yet equaled that achievement, let alone exceeded it. That is still the pinnacle of human advancement. It’s the farthest we’ve ever gone.\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":50,"tags":51,"thumb":52},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14,15,16],{"src":18,"caption":19,"derivatives":53},{"square_small":21,"square_medium":22},{"index":55,"title":56,"description":57,"audio":58,"tags":62,"transcript":64,"episode":65},1,"Mission Control: Behind the Scenes","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gene Kranz was flight director of the White Team for Apollo 11. He talks about what went on in Mission Control the day of the moon landing, and how the team dealt with the pressures of the job.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Special thanks to our friends at the \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fhistorycollection.jsc.nasa.gov\u002FJSCHistoryPortal\u002Fhistory\u002Foral_histories\u002Foral_histories.htm\">\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Johnson Space Oral History Project\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fa>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> for sharing this interview, which was conducted \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">on January 8, 1999, by Rebecca Wright, Carol Butler, and Sasha Tarrant.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Music: \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ca href=\"http:\u002F\u002Ffreemusicarchive.org\u002Fmusic\u002FPodington_Bear\u002FDaydream\u002FLittle_Dipper_1829\">\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Little Dipper by Podington Bea\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">r\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fa>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":59,"duration":60,"formatted_duration":61},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fmoon-man-myths\u002Fmoon-man-myths-02.mp3","688","00:11:28",[14,63,15,47],"Johnson Space Center","\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: So today on BackStory, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 by launching into the history of America’s race to the moon.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: You’ll hear from the Apollo 8 astronaut who took the iconic Earthrise photograph.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: We’ll learn about a kind of Apollo nostalgia that has crept into movies and other forms of pop culture.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: And stay tuned for more listener stories throughout the episode.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: What are the names you associate with the moon landing? Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin. Well, in 2010, a survey by the Space Foundation ranked as a number two most popular space hero a man who had never set foot on the moon. Gene Kranz was flight director of the white team for Apollo !!, and he recorded this oral history about what went on in mission control the day of the moon landing and how the team there dealt with the pressures of the job.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Gene Kranz: You’re pacing. You got all this energy and you don’t have anything to do with it. You got no focus. You can’t sleep. Heck, we had six kids and Marta’s trying to figure out some way. “Gene, when are you going to settle down? When are you going to sleep? Are you going to go out the mission control center to sleep? What are you going to do?” You don’t know. You’d haunt mission control again and you’d fidget a bit to make sure your procedures are all ready. And then you have the most wonderful eight hours sleep that you have ever seen in your entire life. This is the last time because you’re going to walk into a mission control in a few hours and your team is going to write the book about landing on the moon.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Gene Kranz: In mission control when you walk into the room, you’re getting the feeling for what’s going on. You can feel the atmosphere immediately. This room is bathed in this blue light from the … a blue-gray light that you get from the screen. So it’s almost like you see in the movies kind of thing. And then the rest of the room atmosphere, it’s the smell of the room. You can tell people have been in there for a long period of time. There’s enough stale pizza hanging around and stale sandwiches and wastebaskets are full. You can smell the coffee that’s been burnt into the hot plate in there. That’s it. But you also get this feeling that this is a place something’s going to happen at.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Gene Kranz: I mean this is a place sort of like the docks where Columbus left and he sailed off to America or the beaches when he came on land. So it’s a place where you know something is going to happen. You feel the energy of the room because as you walk in, you pass little groups where there’s little buzzes of conversation. You don’t waste too many words in mission control. You speak in funny syllables and acronyms and short, brief sentences. Sometimes you use call signs. Other times you use first names, depends upon what the mood of the room is.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Gene Kranz: There’s certain things in mission control and there are two of them happened, one now and then one later on, that really now indicated that this was not a normal day. The first one, and this was one of the triggering events that got it. The spacecraft is now behind the moon and the control team, the adrenaline, no matter you how you tried to hide it, the fact is is that you were really starting to pump. It seems that every controller has in common a set of characteristics is they got to go to the bathroom. I mean it’s just to the point where you just need this break. That’s all there is to it. I mean you just get out there and it’s literally a rush to get to the bathroom.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Gene Kranz: You’re standing in line, and for a change there isn’t the normal banter, no jokes, et cetera. I mean the level of preoccupation in these … These are kids. These are the average age of my team was 26 years old. Basically I’m 36. I’m 10 years older. I’m the oldest guy on this entire team. This preoccupation is the first thing that hits you. I mean it just all of a sudden this is different. Then you walk back into the room and you hear the voice of the mission commentator. He talks and he’s commenting that the mission control team has returned from their break and they’re now going to be in the room through the lunar landing. Immediately that triggers my thought that this team this day is either going to land, abort, or crash. Those are the only three alternatives.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Gene Kranz: It’s really starting to sink in and I have this feeling I got to talk to my people. So I called the controllers, told my team. “Okay, all flight controllers. Listen up, and go over to FAD conference.” All of a sudden, the people in the viewing room are used to hearing all these people talking and all of a sudden, there’s nobody talking any more. But I had to tell these kids how proud I was of the work that they had done and that from this day, from the time that they were born they were destined to be here and they were destined to do this job. It’s the best team that has ever been assembled. Today, without a doubt, we are going to write in the history books and we are going to be the team that takes an American to the moon and that whatever happens on this day, whatever decisions they make, whatever decisions as a team we make, I will always be standing with them.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Gene Kranz: No one’s ever going to second-guess us. That’s it.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Apollo 11 Crew: Okay. 75 feet. There’s looking good. Down a half. Six forward. 60. 60 seconds. 60 seconds. Lights on. Down two and a half. Forward. Forward. 40 feet down. Two and a half. Picking up some dust. 30 feet. Two and a half down. Faint shadow. Standby for 30. Four forward. Four forward, drifting to the right a little. 30. 30 seconds. Four and a half. 30 seconds. Forward drift.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Gene Kranz: Then we hear the crew saying, “Contact.” Well, what happens? We have a three-foot long probe stick underneath each of the landing pads. When one of those touches the lunar surface, it turns on a blue light in the cockpit. When it turns on that blue light, that’s lunar contact. Their job is to shut the engine down, and they literally fall the last three feet to the surface of the moon. The crew is now continuing this process of shutting down the engine. Now the viewing room behind me, and this is again one of these other things in training, that just there’s nothing that training ever prepared you for that second, because the viewing room behind me starts cheering.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Gene Kranz: Our instructors, which are over in the sim room over to the right, they start cheering. But we got to be cool because we have to now go through all of the shutdown activity, but we have to go through a series of what they call, stay\u002Fno stay decisions because 40 seconds after we’ve touched on the moon, we have to be ready to lift back off again. Every controller, I think, went through his emotional climax that second. I was so hung up by this cheering that coming in the sound from the lunar room that I could not speak. Pure frustration because I had to get going on the stay\u002Fno stay. I just rapped my arm down on the console there. I was absolutely frustrated. I broke my pencil, pencil flies up in the air.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Gene Kranz: Charlie Duke’s next to me and he’s looking and wondering, “What the hell has happened here?” All of a sudden, it hurt so much that I got back on track and started to go, “Okay, all flight controllers. Stand by for T1 stay\u002Fno stay.” We went through this. I think every controller went through his climax at that second.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Apollo 11 Crew: Contact right. Okay. Engine stopped. ACA out of detent. Out of detent. Remote control both autos, descent engine command override off. Engine arm off. 413 is in. We’ve had shutdown. We copy you down, Eagle. Okay. [crosstalk 00:13:48]. Standby for T1. Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landing. Roger. Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Gene Kranz: You hear Armstrong talk, “The Eagle has landed,” right on down the line. “Houston. Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” These are seeping in. In the meantime, we’re just busier than hell. Throughout this whole period of time, except for the instant you hear the cheering, you never got a chance to really think we’ve landed on the moon. We get handed over to Charlesworth’s team. It was then I’m going over to the press conference. It was walking over to the press conference with Doug was the first time you actually really had the chance to unwind and think about today we really landed on the moon.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: That interview was conducted on January 8, 1999 by Rebecca Wright, Carol Butler, and Sasha Tarrant. Special thanks to the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project for sharing the audio. You can find a link to their archive on our website at backstoryradio.org.\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":66,"tags":67,"thumb":68},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14,15,16],{"src":18,"caption":19,"derivatives":69},{"square_small":21,"square_medium":22},{"index":71,"title":72,"description":73,"audio":74,"tags":78,"transcript":79,"episode":80},2,"Moon Party ","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Listener Elizabeth Dragoo recalls a slumber party she hosted with her friends as they tried to stay up late to watch the moon landing live on TV.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Music: \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.audioblocks.com\u002Fstock-audio\u002Fspace-ambience.html\">\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Space Ambience by Bobby Cole\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fa>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":75,"duration":76,"formatted_duration":77},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fmoon-man-myths\u002Fmoon-man-myths-03.mp3","195","00:03:15",[14,15,47],"\u003Cp>Elizabeth: Hi BackStory. My name’s Elizabeth. I live in Goshen, Indiana. I was born in 1955 and graduated high school in 1973, so like lots of people my age, I mean we kind of grew up with the space program. I was 14 years old the year of the moon landing. It happened in the summer. I was just going into ninth grade. So I decided to have a slumber party because I was so excited that they were going to land people on the moon. I remember not a lot about it, but I do remember several of us girls in the family room at home watching the TV. I and maybe one other girl were the only ones who managed to stay awake for the actual feet on the moon, and I was super annoyed about that because I thought this is so important and it’s such a big part of our lives.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Elizabeth: I was so excited about it. I didn’t know why everybody wouldn’t be excited about it. I remember very distinctly the girl next to me who had fallen asleep on the floor. I jostled her when they were getting ready to put the foot on the moon’s surface and saying, “Wake up. They’re going to step on the moon.” She just growled at me, “Leave me alone. I’m sleeping.” I just couldn’t imagine why everyone wasn’t as excited about it as I was. But watching on the TV, the video is kind of grainy and wobbly, but I just remember being so fascinated. It seemed, at least my memory is, it seemed to take a while for them to actually get out of the space capsule. That’s probably why all my friends had fallen asleep because they were tired of waiting for them to actually open the door, go down the ladder, put the foot on the moon.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Elizabeth: I remember looking out at the moon and there were probably millions of us who did the same exact thing, just had to go outdoors and look up at this thing and see if we could see it and try to imagine people walking around on it. It still blows my mind. It still is amazing to me that we did that. Looking back, I think the moon landing just means looking back at a time when we were focused and ready to work together to get that done. Kennedy put out that challenge, “We’re going to put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth and we’re going to do it in this decade.” Everybody had to scramble to get it to happen.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Elizabeth: I just wonder the way things are now if we could do that. There’s so much divisiveness in our politics right now and so much going on in this country and so many crises that we need to deal with. I wish would could come together that same way.\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":81,"tags":82,"thumb":83},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14,15,16],{"src":18,"caption":19,"derivatives":84},{"square_small":21,"square_medium":22},{"index":86,"title":87,"description":88,"audio":89,"tags":93,"transcript":98,"episode":99},3,"Apollo Nostalgia","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Former NASA Chief Historian, \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.nasa.gov\u002Fmissions\u002Fhighlights\u002Fwebcasts\u002Fhistory\u002Frlaunius-bio.html\">\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Roger Launius\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fa>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> sits down with Brian to discuss the early astronauts of the space race era, their ‘meteoric’ rise to fame, and how popular culture  mythologizes their accomplishments. \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Music:\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.audioblocks.com\u002Fstock-audio\u002Fthe-edge-of-space-99041.html\">\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Edge of Space by Bobby Cole\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fa>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":90,"duration":91,"formatted_duration":92},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fmoon-man-myths\u002Fmoon-man-myths-04.mp3","1033","00:17:13",[94,95,96,97,47],"NASA","astronomy","hero worship","mythology","\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: In 1959 NASA unveiled its inaugural class of astronauts, dubbed the Mercury Seven, after a rigorous selection process.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Speaker 10: From all of the active-duty pilots in the Navy, Marines, and Air Force, the service records of 473 test pilots were selected for review. 110 met the basic qualifications. Each must be-\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: These early astronauts were cut from the same cloth. They were all white, middle-class, family men which many, at the time, considered to be the touchstones of American virtue.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: In addition to being these exceptional individuals, they are our knights in shining armor. They are our representatives. They are us, in other words, in this Cold War environment and rivalry with the Soviet Union.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: That’s former NASA chief historian, Roger Launius. He says while these astronauts looked like snapshots of the “ordinary American,” major sections of the population were left out of that frame.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: They were often the first generation in their family to attend college. Many of them went to school after World War II on the GI Bill or to the service academies. They were all married. They had children. So in terms of mainstream society in 1959, 1960, the early 1960s, they were a representation of all of us, with obviously the notable exception of there weren’t any women. There weren’t any minorities. That was a major hole in the effort.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Was any thought given to going beyond that white, male, middle-class-seeming person? I understand that they were selected from the military. That obviously limited the number of people they might choose. But was there any discussion of thinking outside the box on this one?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: Oh absolutely. I mean there was lots of discussion. I mean before the first astronauts were selected, there was some talk about who would be the best in terms of handling small, tight, cramped spaces. Maybe submarine officers would be better. There was acrobatic skills that might be necessary. Maybe somebody from a circus would be good, who does high-wire acts or something. A lot of those sorts of things were considered and immediately rejected. The one area that was considered in a more serious way, but didn’t get anywhere at the time, was the issue of women.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: There were very fine pilots, and some of them were taken to the Lovelace Clinic on a private endeavor to test and see how they would perform in the same environment that the astronauts had been tested on. They found that many of them were quite good at doing the same things the astronauts were called upon. Some of those women really did believe that they were going to become astronauts. The so-called Mercury 13, 13 women who did as well as the males did in those tests, became a cadre and became a public force up to the point where there was actually hearings on Congress about whether or not NASA should have women astronauts.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: But in the end, they did not do that. To the discredit of NASA, they stood up and said, “We do not want to do this.” They sent John Glenn up to Capitol Hill and he testified how this would be inappropriate. Later, he recanted that and said, “I was wrong, but it was a different time and place.” The result was there were no women that entered the American Astronaut Corps until 1978.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Well, they did select all white men as far as I know. How were they portrayed by the press?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: It is fascinating to watch. I mean everybody sort of fawns over these individuals. When they unveiled the first astronauts in 1959, the seven of them were sitting up behind a table. They began to announce their names, and all of the people in the room, this is a press conference, so they’re mostly hard-boiled reporters and television news people, and they stand up and cheered.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Wow.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: That, in itself, is pretty remarkable. In fact, there’s a famous exchange between Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard in which one of them leans over to the other and says, “Can you believe this? We haven’t even done anything yet.” That’s sort of true, but I think it does get back to the sense that these are our avatars for this rivalry with the Soviet Union in space, and we’re going to be supportive of them.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: You talked about the reaction of the press corps to the astronauts. How quickly did the astronauts become American heroes?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: Almost immediately. James Reston, who was a newspaper reporter for the New York Times at the time, was at the unveiling of the first astronauts. He wrote in his story about that event. He said, “You know.” He says, “Most of us are pretty hardheaded when it comes to looking at these big events. But when you see these individuals and their boyish charm, their good looks, their contagious enthusiasm for what they’re doing, you’ve got to feel good about it.” In that sense, they won over everybody. Those stories that were put out in the newspapers, done on the evening news, wherever, really did bring to the attention of the public the best things about these astronauts. Mostly they ignored the bad things. It wasn’t until years later that those came out.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Just to underscore what an incredibly popular phenomenon this was, I remember writing to NASA during the 1960s and making suggestions. As everybody in my family can tell you, I don’t know how to turn on my vacuum cleaner. But this is just something that a lot of people in the country got behind and felt a part of.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: It’s hard not to feel a part of this when it’s on the news on a regular basis. At the time of a launch, for instance, there would be a pause in the day where everybody would watch it on television. When I was in school, they rolled TVs into, usually it was the lunchroom which was the one place they could get us all into, and we’d watch these launches on TV. But it became a part of our lives in ways maybe NASA has not been since that time.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: The other thing I’d like to say about this is that in the 1960s there were all of these weekly news magazines. My parents subscribed to, I think, three or four of them. Time and Newsweek and The Saturday Evening Post and Life and Look and so on were all magazines that were popular during the time. Life Magazine especially made a big deal out of the astronauts. In fact, they paid a million dollars that went to NASA for the privilege of writing the personal stories of each of the astronauts in their magazines. That million dollars that was held in escrow to be paid out in case something happened to the astronauts. It was sort of a life insurance policy.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Of course, this is all going on during the escalating war in Vietnam during a very contentious period, to say it mildly, for racial equality in the United States. How did Americans square the two?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: Well, in many cases they didn’t square them that well. At the same time that you’ve got this positive, good news story of America’s race to the moon, you’ve got these very historic events, Civil Rights crusade, the escalation in Vietnam, and the antiwar protests that resulted from that, and so on. They come together at some level at the time of the launch of Apollo 11 in July of 1969 where Ralph Abernathy brings some protestors during his poor people’s campaign to the Kennedy Space Center to protest this launch.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: To the credit of the NASA administrator, fellow by the name of Tom Payne, reminiscent of the 18th century Tom Payne, not the same person at all. He went out and met with him. He heard their concerns. Their concerns were, “Why are we spending money on this when there are so many needs here on Earth?” That is a very valid question, one that NASA struggled to answer throughout its history, without very good success. Abernathy made clear that, “We don’t object to the astronauts. We don’t really object to going to the moon, but we do think that we could spend our money better.”\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: Payne, to his credit, said, “I’m in agreement with you on a lot of this. If I could solve the problems that you have identified by not pushing the button tomorrow to send the astronauts to the moon, I would not push that button. But you and I both know that this is not going to solve the problem. I would urge you to be supportive of this and I will be supportive of you and your desires as well. We can solve a lot of problems in this nation through our use of science and technology and that’s what NASA’s all about.” Abernathy bought that. Payne then asked him to pray for the safety of the astronauts, which he did beautifully. And then some of the members of his campaign went over to the launch and saw it the next day.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: In response to that experience, and it’s a moving experience to watch a rocket go up. It’s sort of an epiphany in a lot of ways as you see this thing rise majestically in the distance. Abernathy, when interviewed about it, said, “I’m as proud as any American about this, but I really think we need to reconsider our priorities.”\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Well, you’ve actually written about a kind of Apollo nostalgia that developed for a bygone era. Tell us about that. What did you mean by that, Roger?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: Well, I mean one of the things that tends to happen is that when we look back on the Apollo era after 50 years, we long for a time and a place that was simpler, where everything seemed more black and white and you know what was good and you knew what was bad. Now, never mind the fact that the reality was always different. But that’s how we tend to, I think, look at history in a lot of ways. I like to point to the sense that white males are in charge and there’s not that much in the way of multiculturalism or any of those sorts of things that are so common in our society today, and that somehow when we think back on that, yeah, things were better then.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: So does that mean because white males were in charge, things were better? I can guarantee you that might be the lesson that some people take, but that certainly wasn’t true. That’s that nostalgia for a time and a place that actually never really existed, but we would like to think did.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Well, part of the nostalgia may be for white males to be in charge again.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: Absolutely. The counterculture responded to the Apollo program with this love\u002Fhate thing. They look at these guys in short-sleeved white shirts and dark ties and pocket protectors sitting in mission control. They are the epitome of the establishment, the organization men.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Don’t forget those thick black glasses.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: Absolutely. They were able to do all this stuff. At some level, you have to say, “God, I hate that society. I want a culture that is more open and so on and so forth.” But then you look back and you say, “But God, they really did pull it off.” They were able to land on the moon, not once but multiple times. And so there’s something to be said for that.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: What role did pop culture play in this whole nostalgia industry, if you will?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: Well, I mean obviously you see it in a variety of settings. You can see it in the music. Think about all the music that has been … and great music that has been made that celebrates space flight. You can start with Rocket Man by Elton John and you can certainly very quickly move to a variety of other artists doing really interesting songs. And they’re all celebratory at some level. That’s one strain of this. There is film that celebrates that tendency. The movie I like to point to is Apollo 13 in 1995 starring Tom Hanks that really does lay out this geeky mindset of how a bunch of squares can accomplish all this great stuff.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: The only counterculture pieces of this that show up in the film is when Tom Hanks’ daughter, he plays Jim Lovell in the movie, is complaining about the breakup of The Beatles, which of course did happen. But that’s the only thing in which it intrudes all of the other things that are taking place. Vietnam, civil rights, the women’s movement, on and on and on and on as this desperate time in late ’60s, early ’70s that this all plays out in is just sort of lost in that particular story.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: One last question, Roger, did you ever secretly want to go to the moon?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Roger Launius: Not so secretly. I want to go now. I got involved a few years ago in the effort to preserve the lunar landing sites, especially Tranquility Base from ’69. We haven’t had a problem yet, but one of the things that’s always happened with historic sites, cultural sites is that as soon as people go there they tend to degrade those sites in various ways. Sometimes they do it intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. I have volunteered to NASA that I would be happy to be the first curator on the moon to put the ropes and stanchions up around Tranquility Base to make sure that the tourists who visit there, and someday they will, no question, will be able to preserve the site.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Roger Launius is a former NASA chief historian and associate director at the National Air and Space Museum.\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":100,"tags":101,"thumb":102},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14,15,16],{"src":18,"caption":19,"derivatives":103},{"square_small":21,"square_medium":22},{"index":105,"title":106,"description":107,"audio":108,"tags":112,"transcript":115,"episode":116},4,"A Proud Teenager","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Listener Rebecca Rogers shares a memory of her family gathered around the TV and looks back on how Apollo 11 offered a positive story during a contentious time.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Music: \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.audioblocks.com\u002Fstock-audio\u002Fspace-ambience.html\">\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Space Ambience by Bobby Cole\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fa>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":109,"duration":110,"formatted_duration":111},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fmoon-man-myths\u002Fmoon-man-myths-05.mp3","159","00:02:39",[14,113,47,114],"Cold War","television","\u003Cp>Rebecca Rogers: Hello BackStory. This is Rebecca Rogers. I live in Augusta, Georgia now but when Apollo 11 landed I was living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I was a 15-year-old and I had been avidly following the space program since I was really just a little kid. I’m kind of a child of the space age. But I do remember, as many Americans did, my whole family splayed out on the living room floor and couches watching our big floor-model black-and-white television. We were mesmerized. I was awestruck by the idea that these pictures were coming more or less live from the moon. I couldn’t get over that.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Rebecca Rogers: But I had followed the space program since way back when. They were sending animals. I think the Soviets sent up a dog, and I worried about him. Then America sent up a chimpanzee, and I worried about him. And then they began to send up the men, and that was very exciting. I remember I think I memorized all the names of the Mercury Seven. You know how little kids like to memorize lists. So my schoolmates and I were pretty good at rattling off the names of all the astronauts. But it was a fascinating time. The anniversary’s brought back a lot of wonderful memories.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Rebecca Rogers: Looking back at the moon landing, and of course this is from the perspective of a young teenager, it was a very confusing time in America. A lot of the things that we saw on television were quite disturbing and confusing. The racial riots had taken place. There were political confusion, and so as a young woman, I enjoyed paying attention to our space race because it was such a positive story. It was something, not just our country, but the whole world was focused on. My family had just recently returned from South America, so I was really feeling proud as an American. I was happy to be back in my own country. I was really proud of what our country was able to accomplish for the whole world.\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":117,"tags":118,"thumb":119},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14,15,16],{"src":18,"caption":19,"derivatives":120},{"square_small":21,"square_medium":22},{"index":122,"title":123,"description":124,"audio":125,"tags":129,"transcript":131,"episode":132},5,"Earthrise: Behind the Lens","\u003Cp>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Brian talks with \u003C\u002Fspan>\u003Ca href=\"http:\u002F\u002Fheritageflight.org\u002Fmission\u002Fbiographies\u002Fmaj-gen-william-a-anders\u002F\">\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Major General William Anders\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fa>\u003Cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, one of the astronauts on the Apollo 8 Mission who turned his camera on the “earthrise,” and learns first-hand what it’s like to see the earth as a whole.\u003C\u002Fspan>\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Music:\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>\u003Ca href=\"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.audioblocks.com\u002Fstock-audio\u002Fwalk-in-the-park-93709.html\">Walk in the Park by Neil Cross\u003C\u002Fa>\u003C\u002Fp>\n",{"url":126,"duration":127,"formatted_duration":128},"https:\u002F\u002Fs3.amazonaws.com\u002Fcdn.backstoryradio.org\u002Faudio\u002Fsegments\u002Fmoon-man-myths\u002Fmoon-man-myths-06.mp3","1387","00:23:07",[130,15],"Apollo 8","\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: In 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders became the first people to orbit the moon. As they came around the moon for the third time, they caught a glimpse of the Earth rising over the lunar surface. One of them snapped a photo.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: In that image, the Earth is a swirling ball of blue and white, a jewel against the darkness of space. The photo became known as Earthrise, and it was reproduced across the globe in magazines like Life and Time.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Several years ago, I talked to William Anders, the Apollo 8 astronaut who captured the iconic image. I asked him about his historic lunar flight.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: Well, we were doing our job. We were fighter pilots, test pilots, and so this was all just our line of work. But to see the back side of the moon, front side up close, was all very exciting, but really in retrospect, the most exciting part was to see the Earth from a lunar perspective.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Were you surprised when the Earth just popped up in your window?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: Yes, I was. Because we were going backwards, looking down at the moon from the direction we came, that’s all we saw was the moon. It wasn’t until we reoriented the spacecraft, turned it around and faced it forward that we were able to see the Earth coming up over the lunar horizon. I called it out. I think everybody saw it about the same time. There was a scramble for cameras. I was sort of the official photographer of the flight, though I’d had essentially no training.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Why were you the official photographer?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: I don’t know. Just somebody made me the official photographer.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: If you can, try to recall that first moment what you were thinking about when you looked back at the Earth.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: Well, the first moment I looked back at the Earth was going to the moon and see it shrinking as we moved away. As a matter of fact, from a lunar distance, the Earth is about the size of your fist at arm’s length, not big. So that impressed me almost immediately that our planet physically was really insignificant. But that even though it wasn’t physically significant, it was our home and therefore important to us, and we ought to learn to treat it better.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Bill, you know NASA records everything and fortunately we’re able to listen to the tape from the very moment that you and your two colleagues saw the Earth rising. We can ID you because you’re the guy asking for the colored film. I’m going to play it for you now.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: Go ahead.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: Oh my God. Look at that picture over there. There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Frank Borman: Don’t take that. It’s not scheduled.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: You got a colored film, Jim? Hand me a roll of colored quick, will you?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Jim Lovell: Oh man. That’s great.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: Quick. Quick.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Jim Lovell: Down here?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: Just grab me a color.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Listening to that tape I think I detected a little bit of edge creeping into your voice, especially when you were asking for that colored film. Am I right about that?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: Well, Borman was very focused on doing our mission, which was to test out these space vehicles. I’d been assigned the job of photographing the lunar surface. The Earth was not in the flight plan at all. You might wonder why. I have, but never come up with a good answer, except we just didn’t think about it or NASA didn’t think about it. But I knew basically where the film was, so once we started taking pictures of the Earth, I just wanted to get on with it. I think I blazed a shot off with the camera I had in my hand at the time, but then managed to get Lovell or somebody to pass me a magazine of color film and slapped on the long lens and started blazing away.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: You made a lot of effort to bring and then grab that color film. Why was color film so important to you?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: Well, the Earth is colorful. Black and white may be good for technical analysis. Certainly the moon you didn’t need color film. I was challenged by others, “Why take color film when the moon isn’t colorful?” But luckily we had it, and that’s what I wanted to take a picture of this beautiful and colorful planet we live on. Fortunately for me, the people down in the photo lab picked this one color one that I took that has become the iconic Earthrise picture. What I find is ironic that I just learned here recently that the Earthrise was printed upside down. In other words, they flipped it. I’ve always wondered why I couldn’t figure out the continents.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: I guess if you look at the negative through the back, you can figure it out. But I thought that was ironic because this thing’s been replicated a billion times probably, on stamps and other things.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: At the time that you took this series of photographs, did you have any idea about the kind of impact it would have upon your return?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: No. Frankly, I did not. I was just out there doing my job. Here was a new target and that’s why I told Lovell, “Don’t worry. This may be the first Earthrise, but they’ll be hopefully eight more in our orbit. So we can get a good one later.” I think we probably did take some later, but of course it was the first Earthrise that had all the historic significance.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Yes. In fact, you said quite famously that, “We came all this way to discover the moon and what we really did discover is Earth.”\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: Well, that didn’t take long to realize that the moon had been pulverized by meteoritic bombardment through the eons. It was just a big mess. I described it as dirty beach sand where a lot of people’d been walking in the sand and having barbecues there and getting charcoal spread around. I caught a lot of heck from poets on that one. Here was our home planet looking beautiful, serene, delicate, looking peaceful. There was no country divisions. It was sort of weird to think that, well, on one side of it people are trying to kill folks on the other side of it. Why don’t we try to get together?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Did seeing the Earth from the moon change any of your political views?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: Well, yes. I must say, it made me realize that the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe and that religions and things like that who were based on Earth being particularly special had a certain flaw in them. I have yet to fully square that, but there’s a heck of a lot more Earths out there than even a supercomputer can keep track of.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Expectations were so high in the 1960s for what might come of the space program in general, the Apollo missions. How do you assess what we’ve accomplished and where have we fallen short?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: Well, I think people have lost track and NASA has not faced up to the fact that Apollo was a Cold War policy by Kennedy. It’s been coded, given it a patina of exploration, but that really wasn’t what the American taxpayers were paying for. They were paying to beat those dirty commies. When the flag went into the moon, thanks to Neil and Buzz, that basically satisfied the objective of what Apollo was all about. Now, of course, it became a jobs program for NASA after that. So that, plus everybody’s excitement about the exploration phase of it that there was, propelled NASA to keep going.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: We would have had 30 lunar landings if Nixon and others hadn’t pulled them up short. I think the lesson that I’ve learned from that is admit what your real goal is and why, and don’t try to kid yourself that just because you’ve made one objective that has been supported by the public, that you therefore are destined to and will be funded for making some other destination.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Bill, if you could visit one place on Earth or beyond that you haven’t been to yet where would it be?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: Well, if I wasn’t paying for it-\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: You’re not paying for it. BackStory has a huge travel budget. You name the place.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: I don’t think it would be worth it to everybody else. I’d have voted for Apollo 35 if I could have landed. But from a responsible, by that time working in Washington, policymaker I just didn’t think it was worth it. Eventually humankind will go to Mars. I think the talk that we hear lately from the enthusiasts is massively premature. We don’t have the equipment. We don’t know how to solve the radiation problem. Zero G for that amount of time is tough. I hope that the talk of going here in five years or something like that doesn’t eventually turn people off. But sooner or later, earthlings will go to Mars, and I hope they do it as earthlings, not jingoist Americans trying to beat the Chinese, trying to beat the Russians, to beat the Cubans.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Thanks so much for joining us.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>William Anders: Thanks, and keep up the good work.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Apollo 8 astronaut, William Anders, is a retired major general in the United States Air Force.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: So Nathan, where were you when the first men landed on the moon?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: I was about nine years before being born actually, Brian.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: I remember very vividly not only the moon landing, but the buildup to it, the first suborbital flights, the first orbital flights. We’d be sitting in class in school and the public address system would come on. They’d follow the very brief space flights initially or portions of them on the public address system in school. Now, you know that’s important. Did they still have a public address system when you went to school?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: They did actually. One of my earliest memories of that system was watching a liftoff, but it wasn’t of a walk on the moon at that time. It was actually the Challenger disaster, as a child, because we were so captivated as kids in schools. The magic of that moment where we had a teacher in this case going into space. It was an extraordinary moment and a sad chapter of American history. The tragedy of America’s space program was something that was piped right into the schools.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: In a lot of ways, my youth has a kind of connection in fits and starts with exactly this question about what is a priority around space and also really the Cold War spending stuff that the space race helps to initiate. I mean I remember in January of 1987 being part of a mass march that my mom dragged me along to as part of the waning nuclear freeze movement at that time. The group was marching on then Cape Canaveral. But I do remember in a lot of ways the concerns about uses of government resources being very much what was on the table for a lot of the folks in the crowd at that time.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: That’s so interesting because we know that I’m significantly older than you. There was a lot of discussion about the uses of that technology when I was 10 years old, but it was all about the wonderful things that were going to spring forth from NASA. And of course, we were focused on things like Tang that, am I allowed to say, horrible-tasting orange juice substitute. You know, Nathan, we’re both from Florida. Only the real thing matters. But that Tang was just it tasted terrible, but it swept the nation in part because supposedly it’s what the astronauts drank.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: The next thing I remember being associated with NASA was VELCRO. I mean how could you do anything today without VELCRO? Well, we owe that to NASA. It turns out that, in fact, NASA was just instrumental in the development of computers. It was the major purchaser for the components of computers. It was directly responsible for developing key parts of computering, from the mouse to miniature cameras that today we all carry around in our cell phones. So yeah, NASA was more than space, but let’s code this all good stuff, helping, solving problems. It was going to help with desalination. It was going to even solve urban problems with its technology.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: Yeah. I mean the magic of whatever humanity’s next chapter was was going to be found in space. That was certainly fed by popular culture. But it was also responded to and rebutted in popular culture. I mean you think of somebody like Gil Scott-Heron who in 1970 he releases an album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. On that album is a very important piece of poetry called Whitey on the Moon. Heron is very much attentive to the poverty in places like Harlem and the kinds of money that’s being spent, and there isn’t any magic to the space program.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: In fact, that’s seen as being the next frontier that those who have the resources and the wealth and the history to get away and escape to the next frontier are going to leave everybody else behind on this impoverished planet. Again, it never turned into obviously a mass movement against the space program, but I do think it was an important soundbite or sounding off of the period about what are, in fact, the costs of all the innovation or the arrival of VELCRO or other kinds of novelties that may come out of space age investment.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: The other thing that is, I think, critical about rethinking the space race, and this has happened a lot recently is, of course, imagining what exactly were the civic benefits that came out of the space race, or at least some of the challenges and the questions that were always embedded in America’s race to, say, outdo the Russians in technology, for example. I mean we’re both familiar with Margot Lee Shetterly’s really impressive accounting in Hidden Figures, where she talks about Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson as three really extraordinary mathematicians who basically overcome racial discrimination and gender discrimination but work within NASA to help them achieve this tremendous success.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: It’s a total reframing of how American greatness actually happened. Again, I also think it’s important to keep in mind that there’s no shortage of love for the beyond among a cross-section of American society. I mean I take my kids to the National Air and Space Museum and it’s just as magical for them as kids of color as it would be anybody else. So I have to, in a lot of ways, congratulate NASA in a cultural sense for unlocking a certain kind of magic for subsequent generations of young people to imagine what’s the next great frontier for the country, for the world, for the species frankly.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: That’s absolutely right. It is interesting that this work, like Margot Lee Shetterly, is just being done now or in the last five or 10 years. We’re recovering these stories. It does lend a little more credence to the notion that this initiative to put a man on the moon was a unifying force in American culture. Would you agree with that?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: I would in some ways. I mean I think there is nationalism that gets wrapped up in this. I think there are ways in which politicians become really effective at talking about the collective benefits of the investments in NASA, and the space race is part of military forms of industrialization and expansion across the country. Congressional districts are awash in these kinds of dollars, especially in the South, places like Alabama, certainly Florida, Atlanta. But I do also think that there are ways in which thinking about the next big theater of American innovation and of challenge and transgression in some ways, again, moves the eye off of existing fissures on the ground so there’s a way in which the papering over of certain conflicts is another feature of the obsession with the beyond.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: But I do think it’s important to at least give a nod to the fact that we require innovation as a human species to survive. In theory, many of the ideas that we are now grappling with in terms of conservation and saving this planet are also connected to ideas about exploring other places in the universe. I got to ask you, given your perspective as someone who witnessed the moment 50 years ago. This particular commemoration, does it feel any different from other 50th anniversaries? Is there something driving this that isn’t like, say, the good old days or a pining for an America that was less complicated? I mean is there something about the nostalgia around space exploration that isn’t as latent as other kinds of attempts to look back and remember American greatness from a half century ago?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Well, yes, because I was one of those people who challenged the greatness in real time. I mean if we’re talking about 1969, I wasn’t quite as precocious as you, but I was out there protesting against a number of things when I was in high school. I was literally one of those who viewed NASA as a fake, phony sleight of hand to divert resources that might have been going to solve the city’s problems, an issue that I was particularly interested in. Now, I’m the first to say, I think that was a little bit naïve, but I have retained a certain degree of skepticism about technology being able to solve our problems, even being able to help us in the Cold War.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: I mean we learned very early after Kennedy announced that we’re going to put a man on the moon, we’re going to beat the Russians to the moon. We learned pretty quickly that the Russians really were not interested in going to the moon at all.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: I guess the question of the commemoration is perhaps best framed around what the next 50 years might bring. In other words, is it possible to create a sense of, just in the smallest sense, national morale and buy-in and consensus around a social issue or a civic aim for the country as a whole? I mean Kennedy certainly did something, even if it didn’t remove the problems of disenfranchisement in the South or the problems of gender equity in the workplace by a long way. There was something about the utterings that came from his podium that seemed to at least make it feel like there was a shared mission in some respects.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Well, look Nathan, you’re the youthful hope for the future. So I’ll ask you-\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: I hope not.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Yeah, yeah. Sorry to say. At least on this program. Do we need another gigantic national initiative equivalent to the determination to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade in the ’60s?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: This is from my own vantage point as a historian and thinking a lot about what we’ve just outlined in terms of all of the shadowy areas around the shining initiative of going to the moon. Maybe we should just have instead of a space program, at least as a consensus builder, an Earth program. This feels pretty straightforward in terms of what science can do, how nations can work together, thinking a lot about different forms of engineering and innovation. Frankly, so much can be gained in space exploration by figuring out really basic things like how atmosphere works or how to reduce carbon or thinking about sustainable food options. I mean-\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Or how to provide clean water?\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: Right. No, exactly right. I mean if we can solve, say, the water problem in Flint, Michigan then we can probably take a step closer to solving the water absence on Mars. These are the kind of links that I think a lot of people could afford to see done. Rather than imagining us moving to other barren parts of the galaxy or the solar system, making sure that this corner doesn’t become barren itself is obviously a really important piece of that. We have a lot of help by virtue of Mother Nature in keeping this thing rolling.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: I think it’s possible. I do think, however, that there should be some acknowledgement of what it would take to create a new bipartisan moment around an Earth program that I think would at least be akin in its broad support during the ’60s to what the space program enjoyed.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Nathan Connolly: Special thanks this week to the Johns Hopkins studios in Baltimore, and to all the listeners who submitted their stories. Sorry we couldn’t include them all, but we always like hearing from you.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Brian Balogh: Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.\u003C\u002Fp>\u003Cp>Speaker 16: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.\u003C\u002Fp>",{"id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"pubdate":133,"tags":134,"thumb":135},{"utc":9,"short":10,"medium":11,"long":12},[14,15,16],{"src":18,"caption":19,"derivatives":136},{"square_small":21,"square_medium":22},1790963929081]