CHAPTER 7 Stairway to Heaven?

“Never Closer Together Before”

For more than a decade after Sputnik NASA administrators and congressional politicians of every stripe had propagated a vision of space exploration as a project capable of uniting the entire world, and in at least one sense the first moon landing fulfilled their promise. When Armstrong and Aldrin took their first steps on the moon, more than six hundred million people from around the world—one-fifth of its population—watched them in unison on television. For nearly forty continuous hours all three major US television networks provided full coverage of the astronauts’ descent, landing, and departure. Together CBS, NBC, and ABC spent nearly $6 million to broadcast live images from Tranquility Base and to collect reactions from capitals across the globe. City officials turned London's Trafalgar Square, Manhattan's Central Park, and Tokyo's tallest skyscraper into makeshift auditoriums from which the public could view the historic event. After the flag planting, Armstrong and Aldrin received a scheduled phone call from Nixon, who remarked that “for one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this earth are truly one.” The pair of astronauts acknowledged the sentiment, replying that it was a great honor to represent “not only the United States, but men of peace of all nations.” Indeed, Aldrin would later recall that he and his fellow crew members had perceived an “almost mystical identification of all the people in the world at that instant.”¹⁷ Here, embodied, was what historian Alexander Geppert has called the “synchronicity” of the moon landing. It was an event that all, in at least the mythology of the moment, seemed to experience together.¹⁸

Achieving human oneness had been at the heart of the cultural and political narrative of space exploration since the middle of the nineteenth century, but by the time of the Apollo program—indeed in large measure because of the moon mission—the notion that spaceflight would spark the transcendence of human difference had become axiomatic.

The Apollo 8 mission in 1968 suggested that the prophecy of unification would soon be fulfilled. While orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and Bill Anders witnessed the Earth rise, as if the sun, in the small window of their capsule. Gazing on the lambent blue sphere floating in the void, all three men perceived, with the force of an epiphany, that the world was fundamentally different from the home they saw from the ground. Earthly differences and conflicts now seemed mere trivialities, personal experiences infinitesimal next to the grandiosity of their new, interplanetary viewpoint.¹⁹ “Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilences don’t show from that distance,” reported Borman. “From out there it really is ‘one world.’”²⁰ That view would force people to wonder: “Why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people?”²¹

Though commentators the world over could not fully understand the crew's emotions from the ground, they propounded similar ideas once they had seen the photographs Apollo 8 had beamed back to NASA, particularly Anders's famous Earthrise picture (see figure 20). The Boston Globe rhapsodized on “how infinitely tawdry are the differences that separate its races, its nations, its men one from another—these infinitesimal grains of sand on an earth which is but a grain of sand itself, exaggerating their nonexistent differences, forgetting their oneness in the brotherhood they do not want to recognize.”²² The New York Times thought the mission “a sobering perspective on man's puny earthly works and rivalries, reminding all humanity that nature is the basic antagonist, not other men.”²³ Arthur C. Clarke, the subject of even greater fame after Stanly Kubrick's film adaptation of his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, predicted that Christmas 1968 would mark a dividing line in history, one separating humanity's slumber from its awakening. “The second Copernican revolution is upon us,” he wrote in Look magazine shortly after the flight, “and with it, the second Renaissance.” Children born after this inflection point would become something more than Americans or Russians, perhaps “citizens of the United Planets.”²⁴

FIGURE 20. Earthrise. Courtesy of NASA.

The first moon landing reignited these ideas. “The greatest thrill I can imagine for myself,” wrote astronomer Walter Orr Roberts shortly after the mission, “is to stand on the moon's surface and to look back from the harshness of the lunar landscape to the luminous hospitable earth. From that vantage point, I believe, I could view the earth in its oneness.” As interplanetary writers had predicted from the 1890s through the interwar period, the world now perceived that the view of Earth from space possessed a mind-altering quality that might strip human beings of their chauvinism, insularity, and aggression. Space writer Frank White would later call it the “Overview Effect,” astronaut Ron Garan the “Orbital Perspective.” Whatever the name, and whether through photographs or the experience of space travel itself, few denied that a certain “magic” existed in viewing one's home planet from the lonely isolation of the cosmos.²⁵

Michael Collins, who had been left behind in the Apollo 11 command module, provided powerful testament to the transformative power of seeing the whole Earth and its potential consequences for international relations. He hoped to escort political leaders to a distance of 100,000 miles to “see how there are no borders and how small the differences between nations really are.”²⁶ From such a distance, Collins wrote, the “tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a united façade that could cry out for unified treatment.” The cumulative effect of erased borders, diminished racial differences, and the fragility of Earth could be none other than transcendental. “By causing [people] to realize that the planet we share unites us in a way far more basic and far more important than differences in skin color or religion or economic system,” Collins would write in his widely sold memoir, Carrying the Fire, the orbital vantage point would be “invaluable in getting people together to work out joint solutions.”²⁷

It was a message that public officials, pundits, and social commentators reinforced upon the crew's return to Earth. Nixon, greeting the astronauts aboard the USS Hornet shortly after their splashdown on July 24, thought the mission to have been “the greatest week in the history of the world since Creation,” for the world had become not only “bigger, infinitely,” but also “never closer together before.”²⁸ UN Secretary General U Thant echoed the sentiment in a celebration of the mission he hosted in front of the General Assembly building in New York three weeks later. Thant considered the moon landing to have been experienced “vicariously” by all who had witnessed the event through television and radio. He remarked that the plaque the astronauts had left behind on the moon, a copy of which the astronauts presented to Thant, highlighted “the common identity of all the inhabitants of this planet and our never-ending search for peace.”²⁹ Coming from the leader of the world's greatest international body, the idea that the entire world was “privileged to share in [Apollo's] achievement,” became all the more cogent.

Aside from the moon landing, nothing did more to promote the image of US space exploration as a world-uniting experience than the global tour undertaken by the Apollo 11 crew two months after the mission. At the behest of Nixon, who lent the astronauts one of his jets, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins departed from Houston with their wives on September 29 to spread the “spirit of Apollo” around the globe. Over thirty-eight days, the three couples, accompanied by an entourage of NASA and State Department officials, visited twenty-nine cities in twenty-four countries, crossing the equator six times in the process. In motorcades, press conferences, and other venues, more than 100 million people came out to see the astronauts, who would greet and shake hands with no less than 25,000 of them.³⁰

“Giantstep,” as the Apollo world tour was known, was among the greatest public diplomacy opportunities of the Cold War. The tour's itinerary reflected the interests of the State Department in healing tense relationships abroad and strengthening old alliances. In addition to a robust list of stops in Europe (which included London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, and Brussels), the astronauts visited a number of cities in the Global South (Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Bogota, Rio de Janeiro, Kinshasa, Tehran, Bombay, and Dacca), not only to promote a vision of American technological supremacy but create the impression that the United States “shared” the experience of Apollo with the entire world, regardless of whether one nation or another could then launch rockets, orbit satellites, or land a spacecraft on the moon.³¹

At each stop, the astronauts were to present gifts to foreign dignitaries: a replica of the plaque left on the moon mounted on a walnut backing (presented to the leading official in each city); a replica of the Goodwill Message disc left on the moon, an eight-power magnifying glass, and a framed photograph (for the signers of each of the individual messages that were contained in the original disc); as well as autographed color photos of the Apollo 11 mission (for other high-level officials).³² As ambassadors for democratic capitalism, US-led science and technology, and the “American Way,” no public representative could match the appeal or aura of the men who had gone to the moon. In both the symbolic acts they performed on the moon and in their tour appearances, the astronauts, Norman Mailer observed, “exhibited as much sensitivity to an audience as any bride on her way down the aisle.”³³

Space exploration had been a fixture of US public diplomacy since the late 1950s. In the wake of the United States’ first space feats, NASA cooperated with the State Department and the USIA to create countless films, pamphlets, books, exhibits, and radio broadcasts on the space program to be disseminated to countries all over the world. When Alan Shepherd became the first American to inhabit outer space in May 1961, NASA, USIA, and DoD sent packets about the flight to the governments of more than eighty nations and lent Shepherd's historic space capsule to the International Air Show in Paris and the International Science Fair in Rome. A year later, after astronaut John Glenn became the first American to make a full orbit of the Earth, NASA sent Glenn's capsule, Friendship 7, on an even more peripatetic tour, “a Fourth Orbit” for the capsule. This public space diplomacy was aimed at increasing the perception of the US space program as not only superior to that of the Soviet Union (a hard case to make given Soviet accomplishments) but more open as well.³⁴

But something was qualitatively different about the Apollo world tour. Whereas NASA's global outreach had, under Kennedy, emphasized mastery of technology, masculine competence in spaceflight, and the benefits of democratic capitalist management over Soviet technocracy, Giantstep seemed to subordinate notions of superiority to Apollo's “human” element. The tour's philosophical and political objective was to convey to every person, in every country, that to share in the transcendent experience of the moon landing, one needed only to be a human being. Everywhere onlookers reached out to touch the astronauts’ bodies, as if through physical contact each person could somehow acquire some moon magic. “Half the kids in town chased us through the police lines and in and out of the cars, with everyone wanting to touch, touch and to embrace,” reported one tour official as the Apollo 11 motorcade made its way through Mexico City.³⁵

The Giantstep tour, the crew's visit to the United Nations, and television coverage of the moon landing did much to legitimate Apollo's status as an omen for the unification of the world's people. But as both contemporary observers and historians since 1969 have pointed out, perceptions of the landing's political and moral consequences often derived from where one stood. From Huntsville, Houston, or Cape Canaveral, it was easy to be sanguine. From Watts, Baltimore, or the Cambodian villages then being bombed under Operation Menu, things appeared quite different.

That Apollo had united the world was a particularly difficult notion to accept given divisions over the moon mission itself. A yawning gap opened between enthusiasts who considered the moon landing the “single greatest technological achievement of all time” and critics who thought it a wasteful “Moondoggle.”³⁶ In the countdown to Saturn V's launch, during the mission, and well after the astronauts returned, it was impossible to disentangle the miraculous events in space with sober realities and political infighting back on the ground. It was a sign of the times when Archibald MacLeish, who had written the most famous commemoration of the Apollo 8 mission (see chapter 1), refused Nixon's offer to memorialize the Apollo 11 ceremonies, having “thought twice about doing anything with Nixon connected with it.”³⁷ The world at once “celebrated and recoiled” from Apollo, as historian Roger Launius has put it.³⁸

Most divisive was the program's cost. As widespread as enthusiasm for the moon landing was in July 1969, NASA found itself on the defensive from a formidable subset of the country who felt that the bottomless sums spent on the Apollo program (roughly $25 billion) had been wasted and would have been better spent elsewhere. On a basic level, this charge emanated from profound racial and class inequalities at home and abroad. Emerging nations and civil rights leaders in the United States had decried the moon project throughout the 1960s as wasteful and ignorant of more pressing matters affecting the world's poor. The sentiment came through most powerfully when Southern Christian Leadership Conference president Ralph Abernathy led a Poor People's Campaign protest on the lawn just outside the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral on the day of the Apollo 11 launch. With donkeys and wagons juxtaposed to the towering Saturn V, Abernathy called on NASA administrator Thomas O. Paine to divert the enormous resources then dedicated to the Apollo project to improving the lives of African American citizens in the nation's crumbling cities and rural backwaters.³⁹

The argument extended beyond the impoverished. “For that kind of money,” remarked Kurt Vonnegut on the Evening News, “the least [NASA] can do is discover God.”⁴⁰ Invited by CBS to provide the devil's advocate perspective on the moon mission, Vonnegut spoke for millions when he argued that humanity “should be humbled by his own waste and stupidity.” Noted historian Arnold J. Toynbee agreed, suggesting that expenditures were a matter of basic morality. “In a sense,” he offered, “going to the moon is like building the pyramids or Louis XIV's palace at Versailles. It's rather scandalous, when human beings are going short of necessities, to do this.”⁴¹

Whether poor or elite, fiscally grounded criticisms of Apollo did not stray far from public opinion. A 1967 Gallup poll found that more than half of Americans—fully 60 percent—did not think it was important to send a man to the moon before the Soviets. Similarly, when asked in the lead-up to Apollo whether the United States should set aside money for a manned Mars expedition, a majority replied “No.”⁴²

Apollo's substantial cost contributed to a sober ambivalence that crept through the pages of editorials across the world in the weeks and months after Apollo, particularly the feeling that the mission ultimately did as much to bring human character into doubt as it did to elevate it. Indeed, as a philosophical exercise Apollo was a study in contrasts. It was impossible to escape the notion, as Dean Rusk put it, that from their vantage point on the moon the astronauts had “seen us as we really are.” When they returned home Aldrin, Armstrong, and Collins would find both “brotherhood and armed conflict, tolerance and blind prejudice, sacrificial service and narrow selfishness, generosity and greed, luxury alongside of demeaning poverty, soaring hope and abject despair.”⁴³ For columnist Flora Lewis, the central meaning of Apollo was the gap between “the capacity of man and our deficiencies.” As “It is heaven and earth,” she wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “inspiration and meanness. It is the challenge of hope and the degradation of fear. It is ingenious courage and niggling suspicion.”⁴⁴ The German-born sociologist Amitai Etzioni echoed many when he railed against the disconnect between the space program's “investment in things” and the need for “investment in people”; the “glory of rocket-powered jumps” and the shortage of “critical self-examination.”⁴⁵

Similar views could be heard in countries all over the globe. British journalist George Lichtheim reported that the rhetoric of Apollo “fell on deaf and uncompromising ears” in his native country. The ravages of the Second World War, the uncertainty of Cold War defenses, and an increasingly unstable economy had made the British “temporarily disposed to believe that glowing promises of a better future are never likely to materialize.”⁴⁶ The Times of India argued with resentment that humanity had strove to reach the moon simply because it was “there.”⁴⁷ Commentators from the Eastern bloc drew a contrast between what US leaders promised through space exploration and the actions of their government. Surely, one East German newspaper remarked, the half-million American troops then stationed in South Vietnam could not claim to have come “in peace for all mankind.” The indiscriminate violence exacted on the Vietnamese, civilians especially, marked the true nature of the United States in the world.⁴⁸

“In Peace for All Mankind”

Indeed it was the United States’ bloody, protracted war in Southeast Asia that most undermined the second major narrative NASA and US officials told about the first moon landing—that it represented the peaceful nature of the American people and the US space program. The coincidence of the war's major events with the unfolding of the Apollo 11 mission provided a stark reminder that the promises of space travel remained ill-equipped to solve earthly problems. In the weeks and months surrounding the moon landing, US troop deployment had reached its peak at fully 540,000, and more than 33,000 had been killed, surpassing the Korean War's deadly toll. In April 1969 five-hundred Harvard students seized University Hall, threw out the deans, then locked themselves inside to protest the escalation. In May, forty-six men of the 101st Airborne Division died (around four hundred others were wounded) fighting for “Hamburger Hill” in the A Shau Valley near Hue, a strategically useless scrap of land that the army quickly abandoned once the firefight was over. That same month the New York Times broke the news of Nixon's secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. And, perhaps most damaging for the image of Apollo 11, the US Army charged Lieutenant William Calley, just over a month after the completion of the mission, with murder for his role at My Lai.

It was for the Vietnamese people, in particular, that the irenicism of the first moon landing was a bald lie. In 1968 Lyndon Johnson had seen fit to include Ho Chi Minh in his list of recipients for a special print of NASA's Earthrise photograph, an act that the North Vietnamese leader had appreciated; now, only a year later, even that scrap of goodwill had evaporated. For many Vietnamese, the savage war being fought in their villages and towns—and the often-indiscriminate violence with which that war was being waged—directly contradicted the notion that Americans visited foreign lands either “in peace” or “for all mankind.” For one Hanoi-based journalist, Apollo and Nixon's global tour were merely a ploy to “cover up” the United States’ “aggressive … designs” and to sell the president's “fake peace.” His readership knew better. The moon landing was not some “magic wand” the United States could wave to achieve a reversal of its shattered image aboard. NASA had failed to divert “the attention of the world's people, who are constantly vigilant against US imperialists’ criminal actions and plots on earth.”⁴⁹

It was easy to dismiss such sentiments as the propaganda of an embattled enemy. But the peacefulness of Apollo and the US space program generally began to come under wider scrutiny when journalists revealed that NASA had been aiding the war effort since at least 1965. Late that year, USAF General James Ferguson visited NASA to brief its Office of Defense Affairs on the operational difficulties the US military was then experiencing in Southeast Asia. The enemy's use of guerilla tactics and the nature of a limited war fought in thick jungles had made it almost impossible to find combatants, to land aircraft, and to achieve the element of surprise. Fighting an unfamiliar battle, they needed new ideas. NASA administrator James Webb enthusiastically offered his agency's “full technical support.” His engineers would make every effort “to uncover those NASA solutions to problems, devices, or techniques, that might be of assistance to our forces in Southeast Asia.” Within a month the space agency had established a “Limited Warfare Committee” to pool resources, manage personnel, and lobby laboratories all over the country for assistance.⁵⁰

By the end of 1966 Webb had acquired the cooperation of every NASA center and assigned thirty-five of the agency's engineers to research for the war. The committee's budget (funneled through a NASA account labeled “Special Support Projects”) swelled to $4 million annually by 1967 and its personnel had grown to one hundred scientists working in labs from MIT to Berkeley. Together NASA and the Pentagon collaborated on more than eighty-nine different projects for the war: an acoustical net to pinpoint the source of mortar fire; improved aircraft target markers; a beacon for locating downed fighter pilots; mountain-top and airborne radio relays; miniaturized circuitry for backpack radio sets (reducing the weight of equipment); steerable parachutes to drop men and supplies into otherwise unreachable forest clearings; and noiseless aircraft engines for approaching enemy troops without prior warning.

The most pertinent technologies attempted to improve US reconnaissance capabilities, particularly the ability of US troops to find and destroy enemy forces in the jungle after sundown. These included the retooling of NASA's Applications Technology Satellites (ATS) to provide real-time weather reports to US pilots stationed in the region and a proposal for a giant aluminized Mylar mirror—2,000 feet in diameter—that would reflect the sun's light onto jet-black areas of National Liberation Front–controlled territory.⁵¹

Notable among these projects was NASA's adaptation of its lunar seismometers for use in Operation Igloo White, a covert mission involving the use of seismology to create “an electronic battlefield” along the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos and Cambodia between 1968 and 1973. NASA's engineers developed thousands of such Air-Delivered Seismic Intrusion Detectors, or ADSIDs, which, disguised as tropical vegetation, detected vibrations from passing military convoys and picked up voices from microphones. The sensors would immediately transmit these “hits” to USAF planes circling continuously overhead, which in turn relayed the data to the Infiltration Surveillance Center, then the largest building in Southeast Asia. There, two IBM 360–65 computers—identical to those being used in Houston for the Apollo program—quickly analyzed the data and, within five minutes, conveyed target coordinates to the closest available bomber.⁵²

Though enthusiastic about the aid NASA might provide to the war effort, the agency's leaders were keen to keep it secret. To begin with, Webb and company relied on the territory, labor, and facilities of dozens of foreign nations, particularly in the Global South, to launch, track, and retrieve spacecraft, conduct experiments, relay communications, train new personnel, and of course, spread the gospel of US-led spaceflight around the world. If the rhetoric of the Space Act was contradicted by NASA's deeds, perhaps foreign governments would temper, or withdraw outright, their support. Moreover, agency authorization to engage in DoD projects was, as the Washington Post pointed out, “fuzzy at best.” The Space Act was contradictory on the matter. On the one hand, it barred the agency from engaging in activities “peculiar to, or primarily associated with, with development of weapons systems, military operations, or the defense of the United States.” That was the Pentagon's sole jurisdiction. On the other hand, just a few lines below this declaration, the legislation directed the agency to make available to the services any “discoveries that have military value or significance.” NASA officials came to argue that, as long as the agency refrained from designing or developing weapons, military research could continue. “We are not developing anything that shoots a bullet or a missile at somebody,” insisted one NASA representative. “I don’t think anybody is so naïve that he might feel an agency spending $4 billion a year on technology shouldn’t spend some of it trying to win a war we’re fighting.”⁵³

Despite its best efforts, NASA could not extricate the space program either from its contemporary association with militarism or its roots in previous conflicts, a problem that journalist Rudy Abramson termed the “Apollo Paradox.” All of the most significant engineering feats that had made it possible for Eagle to land on the moon, he pointed out, “were forced to happen before their time by the pressure of war.” The army had stolen the United States’ first space rockets after World War II from Germany, who had designed them to rain terror on European civilians. Apollo had trained its astronauts in flight tests of military aircraft. Thus, it was not a surprise when George Wald, a Harvard biochemist, reported that his students saw the moon mission as “an exercise in great wealth and power, heavy with political and military overtones.” Many of his students, rather than inspired or proud, felt “a little more trapped, a little more disillusioned, a little more desperate.”⁵⁴

The increasing association between Project Apollo and violence was evidenced by a renewed interest in the culpability of Wernher von Braun, the German émigré with whom Americans most associated the success of the US space program. For Norman Mailer, von Braun embodied the price that modern societies had paid to achieve technologies such as the space rocket. His Nazi past, including the use of slave labor at Peenemünde, constituted the historical “essence” of American space exploration. Nazism and “NASAism,” Mailer wrote, were quite similar: both were grand projects rooted in technological achievement, and both entailed the transcendence of vast new spaces for the revitalization of the nation.⁵⁵ When the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci visited Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to interview von Braun, she felt compelled to leave early upon smelling his lemon-scented detergent, the same used by German soldiers who had ransacked her home as a child during the war. Human spaceflight, Fallaci argued, could not be disentangled from von Braun and the Nazis. Theirs “was the story we would have to tell the Martians and Venusians when, filled with admiration, they watched us coming down in our spacecraft and asked us ‘But how did you do it? How did it happen?’”⁵⁶

Americans’ identification of space exploration with war extended even to literature. In Slaughterhouse Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut likened the desolate scenes of bombed-out Dresden to the moon no less than a dozen times.⁵⁷ The protagonist of Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), a Holocaust survivor who rails against grand, sixties-era plans, is most skeptical about escapist fantasies of deep-sea and space exploration. “New worlds? Fresh beginnings?” he asks with scorn at the novel's outset. Not likely. Experience had led him to believe that wherever human beings traveled, they would bring their violent and selfish nature with them.⁵⁸ Three years later, Thomas Pynchon, Jr. won a National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow (1973), a roving, complex novel centering loosely on the construction of the Germans’ “vengeance weapon” (the title refers to the parabolic trajectory of the missile). Pynchon, whose authorship of the book had been coterminous with the Apollo missions, pitched the rocket not as a vehicle with which to reach the moon but rather a celebrated implement of war and corporatism.⁵⁹ As in Bellow's story, the violence of which human beings are capable cannot be extinguished, only transformed as they move to new places. As one literary scholar pointed out, Gravity's Rainbow drove home the fact that the United States’ technological and economic supremacy derived from the “dark negotiations” that had brought Nazi scientists to America.⁶⁰

A Lunar Empire?

If the Vietnam War and its reverberations in the wider culture sewed doubt in NASA's claims about the peacefulness of US space exploration, neither were critics inclined to believe Nixon's third assertion: that the first moon landing had inaugurated a postimperial epoch. The optics of the Apollo 11 ceremonies presented one problem. The national flag raising on the moon closely resembled past images of conquering armies, including Theodore Roosevelt's rough riders on San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War and the Marine Corps’ victory against Japan at Iwo Jima toward the end of the Pacific War. Although the OST, signed just two years prior, forbade national sovereign claims to the moon, many commentators found it difficult to forget earlier calls to “Claim the Moon!” and the Air Force's warning that whoever controlled space would control the world.⁶¹ As the Apollo astronauts brought the first moon rocks back to Earth, many speculated about the opening of new resource vistas to be exploited.

NASA's greatest defense against charges of imperialism was the fact that although Armstrong and Aldrin had erected their national flag on the moon, the act did not represent, as it had throughout the age of colonial exploration, a sovereign claim to new territory. The astronauts’ erection of Old Glory merely represented national pride and “legally means nothing,” USAF jurist Martin Menter explained.⁶² Lunar rituals simply filled “an emotional need” and had “absolutely no practical, territorial—or lunatorial—significance,” one space lawyer agreed. They were no more important than the Soviet Union's deposit of pennants bearing the Hammer and Sickle on the moon in 1959, when Luna II had impacted the lunar surface. ⁶³ Dean Rusk, newly retired as secretary of state, considered the moon landing only the most recent iteration of American restraint exhibited despite awesome power. The United States, he wrote, though it had emerged from World War II as the world's most powerful country, “did not … exploit [its] unmatched power in imperialist adventure.” The nation had demobilized rapidly, funneled millions of dollars to Europe and Japan for reconstruction, and rehabilitated its former enemies rather than exacting vengeance. A quarter-century later, notwithstanding the economic and technological supremacy that Apollo represented, the United States remained completely uninterested in “reaching out for more territory in the name of a doctrine of ‘lebensraum.’”⁶⁴

Mindful of Apollo's symbolic significance, NASA had been cautious and deliberate in its planning for the first moon landing. Five months before the scheduled launch, the agency's acting administrator, Thomas O. Paine, appointed a special Committee on Symbolic Activities for the First Lunar Landing to be headed by Willis Shapley, then associate deputy administrator. Paine charged the committee with two principal goals: first, develop a set of symbolic acts that might “signalize” the moon landing as both a US accomplishment and one of the entire human race, and second, ensure that other nations did not perceive the United States to be “taking possession of the moon” in violation of the OST.⁶⁵ Shapley led deliberations on articles to be taken to the moon and returned to Earth, such as photographs, flags, and tokens; articles to be attached to the descent stage of the LM, such as plaques, documents, and microfilm; and, most sensitively, objects to be left on the moon.

As expected, the weightiest decision for the committee to make was which flag the astronauts would hoist once on the surface of the moon. Several options presented themselves. The most obvious choice was the US banner, which was already an accessory to the Apollo spacecraft, the Saturn V, and the spacesuits worn by the astronauts. NASA's leadership also discussed planting the American flag alongside the United Nations standard and placing decal flags of UN-member nations on the LM descent module. In its internal deliberations NASA attempted to toe a line between acknowledging the preeminent role the United States played in the mission while also preserving the cosmopolitanism with which it wrapped the Apollo program.⁶⁶ Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson wrote to Paine urging his agency to privilege options that would “enhance our posture abroad and to encourage other countries to further identify their interests in the exploration of space with our own.”⁶⁷ Because the moon flight “is being done in the name of all humanity,” NASA's head agreed little more than a month before takeoff, any ceremony should “reflect the philosophy that, while it is an American spaceship, it also is an undertaking of all mankind.”⁶⁸

But Congress made its voice heard, rejecting the UN flag out of hand. Speaking for millions of Americans, Representative Robert Michel (R-IL) argued that planting any standard other than the national one would be “a travesty and a double cross” to the men NASA would fly to the moon. It would give the Soviet Union, China, and other adversaries “a full share in what has been solely a United States project.” The United States had taken the risks, developed the necessary technology, and footed the bill; why shouldn’t it take the credit? The United States maintained the United Nations financially, charged Michel's colleague Joe Evins (D-TN). “It is American technological skill and it is the daring of Americans that made the moon trip possible. We earned the right to proudly plant our flag on the moon not as conquest but as a peaceful venture. By what right has the U.N. flag earned such an honor![?]” The United States should “make no apology” for its triumphs in space, agreed Wallace F. Bennett (R-UT). The American flag did not suggest a claim for ownership over the moon but rather that “this great accomplishment came from a free republic and was supported by a people who believed in liberty, freedom, and justice.”⁶⁹

These convictions turned into threats that a UN flag raising would put continued NASA funding in jeopardy. On June 10, Representative Richard Roudeboush (R-IN) proposed an amendment to the appropriations bill for fiscal year 1970 prohibiting NASA from deploying any other flag than the national one on missions paid for solely by the US government.⁷⁰ As a consolation, miniature flags of all the UN-member countries, the fifty US states, the District of Columbia, and US territories would be stowed in the LM and returned to the leaders of those governments upon the astronauts’ return. In lieu of national flags, Apollo 11 would leave behind on the moon a half-dollar-size silicon disc inscribed with the miniatured goodwill messages of more than seventy countries.

The decision by Congress to sidestep an international representation for the moon landing did not go unnoticed. On the contrary, it proved explosively controversial. Citizens across the country wrote to local and national news outlets demanding that Apollo 11 project a more cosmopolitan face. One likened Congress's verdict on the flag to Nikita Khrushchev's “childlike glee” at having impacted the moon with the Soviet flag a decade earlier. “Americans ought to be more sophisticated,” many agreed.⁷¹ The most popular alternatives recommended were to fly, as some NASA engineers had originally proposed, the United Nations flag, perhaps the flags of every nation in the world, or even the banner of some international scientific group such as the National Geographic Society. New York Times correspondent Max Frankel was particularly rueful about the political implications of striking the Stars and Stripes into the moon. It proved that “the moon will be no more exempt from mundane strife than the New World has been these last 500 years. The rivalries of nations will spill into the ocean of space just as surely as they spilled into the Atlantic in Columbus's wake.” Frankel concluded, “If there were an earth flag flying on the moon today, the men up there would obviously be tempted to label it the banner of a race of lunatics.”⁷²

Sure enough, Michel, Evins, and the other senators had defenders as well. Many Americans considered the lunar ceremonies an ideal opportunity to contrast the open, scientific US space program with the secret Soviet effort hidden away in a vast military bureaucracy. In his pledge to send men to the moon Kennedy had predicted that the world would witness outer space governed “not … by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace,” and it was widely understood in the lead-up to Apollo 11 that only the American flag could justifiably represent that freedom and peace. In any case, many agreed with the idea that because Apollo was “an extension of the exploring and enterprising spirit that built America,” none other than the US flag was a fair choice: “No apologies necessary.” Aldrin recalled in his memoirs the “sudden rush of pride for the country” after he and Armstrong completed the flag-raising ceremony. In October singer Judy Carne appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show to perform a new ballad called “American Moon,” in which she insisted “Apollo Eleven delivered our heavenly right to say, ‘The man in the moon is a citizen of the USA. Stand up and brag for your grand old flag waving on the moon tonight.’”⁷³

Because the United States had forsaken any claim to the moon through its ratification of the OST, this kind of jingoism did not translate to accusations of an American desire to conquer the Earth's natural satellite; after 1967, that prospect simply failed to hold much water. But political and legal conversations about US imperial designs on the moon refused to die out. For one, the language of exploration—“conquest” of gravity and space, expansion into vast new “frontiers”—alluded to an imperial age that, while coming to an end, still lingered in many corners of the globe. Space boosters continued to speak in colonial tones about the moon in particular, an “Africa-sized world” teeming with rich mineral resources.⁷⁴ Representatives at NASA and leaders in government emphasized that the material wealth of the lunar soil could be dug up without negative implications for the native population—there was none.

The moon's intrinsic value was undisputed. From the colonial period, US scientists had pointed to it as an ideal astrological observatory; operating outside the Earth's dense atmosphere, telescopes could penetrate deeper into the void.⁷⁵ As we’ve seen, in the wake of Sputnik the Air Force developed plans and theories about the military utility of a lunar base. Homer Boushey, Thomas Power, and other generals were convinced that such bases would prove “impregnable” from Earth-based military capabilities and thus serve as a powerful deterrent against Soviet aggression. Beginning in the mid-1960s, moreover, science writers wrote with increasing frequency about the moon's rich deposits of silicon, magnesium, titanium, aluminum, calcium, cobalt, nickel, and iron.⁷⁶ It also possessed stores of carbon, nitrogen, and helium-3. In April 1964 Hugh Dryden announced that “Geologically, we have no reason to doubt that the moon and the nearby planets, being solid bodies, may be rich in rare mineral resources, possibly offering economic returns far outweighing the costs of exploration.”⁷⁷ By the time of Apollo 11, New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger saw fit to dub the moon an “eighth continent,” one replete with the resources that would usher the world into a new generation of prosperity.⁷⁸

As one might expect, the development of US lunar mining interests was concomitant with the moon mission itself. As NASA shifted its manned spaceflight program from orbital to lunar operations, the United States and many of the nation's largest technology firms devoted increasing attention to how the mineral wealth of the moon might be extracted and processed. Beginning in 1962 NASA annually convened a Working Group on Extraterrestrial Resources (WGER) to “evaluate the feasibility and usefulness” of extraterrestrial minerals, a goal aimed at reducing the dependence of space exploration on Earth-based materials. The group consisted not only of NASA officials but representatives from the JPL, the Rand Corporation, the Air Force, the Office of Engineers of the US Army, and the US Bureau of Mines (USBM). WGER's special Committee on Lunar Mining and Processing was charged with establishing the quantity and quality of mineral deposits, syncing mining operations with available logistical capabilities and the lunar environment, and identifying areas of technology in which further research was necessary.⁷⁹

Toward those ends, through the 1960s and early 1970s WGER's members submitted proposals for lunar construction, remote detection, life support, food synthesis, vacuum detonations, lunar mapping, transportation, luminescence techniques, power generation, and countless other topics relevant to prying commodities from the lunar soil. As historian Megan Black has pointed out, the USBM was an especially important player in the WGER's constellation of mining interests. Beginning in 1965, the Bureau's scientists, working at seven locations from Reno to College Park, began developing methods to extract water and air from moon rocks, melt and weld lunar materials, build underground shelters for lunar miners, and operate conveyor belts and drills in extreme conditions.⁸⁰ Some USBM scientists believed that rocket fuel could be found on the moon in the form of acetylene, trapped in the rocks of ancient volcanoes. The possibilities, the Washington Post wrote of the Bureau's work, appeared “limitless.”⁸¹

Of particular importance for extracting and processing lunar resources was drilling, an expertise that USBM's corporate partners were happy to supply. Westinghouse's Defense and Space Division, under contract with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, developed a diamond rotary drill equipped with a retrievable wireline innertube assembly “patterned after the system in common use for Earth exploration.” Northrop Space Laboratories proposed a down-the-hole, gas-operated percussive drill. Martin-Marietta gave NASA plans for its Apollo Lunar Surface Drill (ALSD) scheduled for use during the Apollo 13 mission in 1970. When full-scale excavation became a reality, USBM scientist R. L. Schmidt reported to the WGER, the technology acquired from exploratory drills would become the foundation of “production drills … that will serve the same function on the Moon as they do on Earth.”⁸²

In painting their “cornucopian fantasies” about the moon's mineral riches, NASA and WGER maintained that lunar resource cultivation was intended exclusively for further operations in space, for the cost of lugging minerals back to Earth would more than counteract the value of products retrieved from the mining operation. “Even if we found pure platinum on the moon,” said one USBM research director, “it would cost too much to bring it back.” Another said that even the discovery of “pure diamonds” on the moon would fail to justify the prodigious costs of cis-lunar transportation. Implied in these observations, of course, was the assertion that the United States had little intention of mining resources on the moon for profit, trade, or use in earthly industries. US utilization of lunar resources would, according to NASA, resemble the economical means by which native Plains Indians had lived off the North American bison: future astronauts would recycle every mineral, gas, and water supply to further the quest of discovery on which Apollo had set humankind. Mining would be practical, prudent, and advanced in the interests of world scientific knowledge.⁸³

But broader ambitions revealed themselves when, early in 1971, the Soviet Union proposed a new international treaty to the United Nations COPUOS, one pertaining specifically to the moon (Argentina had submitted its own proposal the year before, but it went largely unnoticed). “Desiring to prevent the Moon from becoming a scene of international conflict,” the draft restated many of the OST's provisions and applied them with renewed legal force to the moon. It barred any state from claiming sovereignty over any part of the moon; banned the testing of “any type of weapon” as well as the construction of military bases, installations, and fortifications (with new language prohibiting the threat or use of “any … hostile action”); outlawed the orbiting of nuclear weapons around the moon and their installation on or below the moon's surface; declared the universal freedom to explore the moon; and aligned the conduct of states on the moon and in cis-lunar space with the UN Charter.

Other provisions were decidedly more ambitious and hence controversial: Article 8 of the draft (its text would become Article 11 of the final treaty) declared that neither states, international organizations, nongovernmental entities, nor individuals could claim “the surface or subsoil of the Moon as their property.” Any objects constructed on the moon, it added, “shall not create a right of ownership” over any part of the moon. Crucially, it also decreed that “portions of the surface or subsoil of the Moon may not be the object of concession, exchange, transfer, sale or purchase, lease, hire, gift, or any other arrangements or transactions with or without competition.”⁸⁴

US officials exhibited a measure of support, proposing additional provisions, amendments, and eventually its own draft.⁸⁵ The State Department was certainly interested in measures that would reinforce and build on the stipulations outlined in the OST. Yet as the draft treaty was debated and amended over the course of the 1970s, it became increasingly clear that the United States was unprepared to accept the more prohibitory provisions regarding the extraction and use of moon resources. By the time the United Nations formally adopted the Moon Treaty in December 1979, US officials and business interests had rallied in sufficient numbers to invalidate the agreement and keep lunar resource vistas open.⁸⁶

Foremost among the Moon Treaty's opponents was the L-5 Society, a coalition of spaceflight enthusiasts, science-fiction authors, and aerospace corporations that sought to make the colonization of space a reality. The organization drew its name from the Lagrangian or “L” points (see chapter 4) that allowed for large objects to remain stable between the gravitational pulls of two celestial bodies. The Society's founders, Carolyn Meinel and her husband Keith Henson, were inspired by Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, who published an influential article on space habitation in September 1974. After O’Neill invited them to a conference at Princeton the following year, the couple founded the Society to raise money for and spread awareness of the physicist's ideas.⁸⁷

L-5 members argued that the treaty's provisions regarding the equitable sharing of moon resources, particularly along lines that would benefit “the developing world,” would squash any incentive to invest in space research among the industrialized nations. “No one from Rockwell International or Boeing is going to manufacture moon-mining equipment when they know that control and profit from such technology will be shared with countries such as Sri Lanka,” implored one space booster. Capitalism was the only force capable of enticing rich nations like the United States to invest the resources necessary to colonize the harsh space environment. If such nations perceived that returns on their investments would be redistributed by “an international socialist regime,” efforts to fulfill O’Neill's dreams would never get off the ground. To many technology firms especially, the Moon Treaty was a thinly veiled attempt to close off space from corporate development, to fundamentally reallocate the industrial world's wealth to developing nations and to ensure that the power to explore and develop space remained vested only in national governments.⁸⁸

The truth was more complicated. Whereas many in the West interpreted the principle of common heritage as establishing the moon as res nullius, a no-man's land capable of being expropriated if not claimed, representatives from developing nations considered the clause to mean that the moon was res communis humanitatis, the common property of all people. Such an interpretation had played out in the 1970 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), in which the convened nations agreed that the natural resources of the seabed were the “common heritage of mankind” and therefore ineligible for extraction. “The commonness of the ‘common heritage’” clause, insisted Ambassador M. C. W. Pinto of Sri Lanka, “is a commonness of ownership and benefit. The minerals are owned in common by your country, and by all the rest as well. In their original location, these resources belong in undivided and indivisible share to your country and to mine, and all to the rest to mankind, whether organized States or not. If you touch the nodules at the bottom of the sea, you touch my property. If you take them away, you take away my property.”⁸⁹

Leaders of the developing world applied the same principle to the moon. Until nations could agree on an arrangement whereby all countries would be able to “directly participate or benefit” from the utilization of space,” they argued, the United Nations should issue a strict moratorium “on any development whatsoever.”⁹⁰ As with the negotiation of the OST, proponents of the Moon Treaty felt a sense of urgency in attempting to codify “sound rules” for lunar exploitation; it would be “far easier now,” the New York Times noted, when the moon still seemed distant, than “when the journey is easier and when powerful nations will see feasible means of exploiting the moon economically and perhaps even militarily.”⁹¹

The L-5 Society leveraged the sentiments of poorer nations in their assault on the Moon Treaty as it was debated in the Senate over the summer of 1980. The Society retained Leigh Ratiner to make its case before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The United States, the attorney argued, should not “buy a pig in a poke” by rushing to ratify the agreement. First, the government should seek to make clear exactly what “common heritage” implied in space. For Ratiner the term seemed to connote the redistribution of resources culled by the industrial West for the benefit of the developing world. Exploiting space for the benefit of all implied that “certain parts of mankind should be severely restricted in their access to the resources—particularly the industrialized countries, and more particularly the United States of America.” What company, Ratiner asked, would invest the billions of dollars necessary to establish mining operations on the moon or on an asteroid before agreement was reached as to the rules and regulations governing the extraction of resources? At this early stage, the United States could still withdraw from the treaty without being the “bad boys” at the United Nations; the government should assemble an international vote for a protocol on the “common heritage” principle.⁹²

Of all the L-5 Society's allies—which included personalities ranging from Timothy Leary to Barry Goldwater—the most important in its campaign against the Moon Treaty were US tech firms, who reasonably concluded that the agreement threatened to sink their efforts at commercial development on the moon. Alexander Haig, who Reagan would soon nominate as secretary of state, lobbied the government as president of United Technologies Corporation. He wrote to the State Department's legal adviser that the common heritage concept was clearly designed to achieve a redistribution of global wealth. In forwarding res communis humanitatis, Haig argued, the developing countries had “indicated they intend to gain control of critical raw materials and to gain access as a matter of right to the technology needed to exploit them.”⁹³ Many of these technologies, other firms noted, were identical to important military hardware—transfer of such technologies to hostile or nonaligned nations in the Global South would be extremely dangerous.

With these considerations flowing freely through congressional hearings and the press, criticism of the treaty quickly became vociferous. Charles Sheffield, president of the American Astronautical Society predicted that ratification would be “the single worst mistake in United States diplomatic history.” Future generations would regard it as more important than the Louisiana Purchase or the acquisition of Alaska, yet in this case “the US will be the loser, not the gainer.”⁹⁴ Permitting the developing world to dictate the pace and quality of space exploration, one editorial emphasized, made “about as much sense as fish setting conditions under which amphibians could colonize the land.” The editorial continued, hyperbolically: “If space resources are developed under this Treaty, the inhabitants of space may have no place to work to save the ‘Regime,’ no place to spend their wages except the Company Store, and no place to live but the Barracks.”⁹⁵

This offensive generated significant results. Although State Department officials attempted to shirk the perceived threat to free enterprise—“You can still make a buck off the moon, if there's a buck to be made,” one aide said—ratification of the treaty was in serious jeopardy. Letters from agitated spaceflight enthusiasts poured into legislative offices. L-5 lobbyists were seen “prowling” the halls of Congress. In the House, several representatives began circulating a resolution against the treaty.⁹⁶ Pressure from aerospace firms compelled Senators Jacob Javits (R-NY) and Frank Church (D-ID) to write a letter to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance urging restraint. The treaty's provisions on resource extraction, they insisted, would benefit the Soviet Union by erecting barriers to economic development. Because the United States relied on industrial and business interests to engage in exploration, the USSR was free to exploit space under the guise of scientific investigation. Its space program had been state led from the very beginning. “Seen from a long-term geopolitical perspective,” wrote Javits and Church, “we believe this outcome could be damaging to fundamental American security requirements.”⁹⁷ By December a third of the Foreign Relations Committee had committed in writing to oppose the treaty.⁹⁸

The agreement was finally trounced for good when Reagan ascended to the presidency in January 1981. The new administration made clear its opposition to the treaty on the same grounds outlined by Ratiner, Haig, and scores of other treaty opponents.⁹⁹ Even though the Moon Treaty had been passed unanimously in the UNGA, without a vote, it was never sent to the Congress for ratification. Only eighteen countries have ever signed the agreement; only seven have ratified. The Soviet Union, China, and Europe (with the exception of Austria and France) have neglected to acknowledge it as well.

The defeat of the Moon Treaty convinced many observers that although US aspirations on the moon had little to do with territory, they nevertheless contained imperial dimensions. United Technologies, the Martin Company, Boeing, and other aerospace firms could applaud the political insignificance of the moon landing, for they perceived the window for lunar development to have remained open. After all, had the United States needed to annex Guatemala, Costa Rica, or El Salvador for the United Fruit Company to establish banana-growing operations? Did ARAMCO require a territorial empire to extract Saudi oil? In the late 1970s and early 1980s, US leaders surmised that the Moon Treaty would spell disaster for US corporatism in space. According to their critics, they had defeated the agreement to protect not a territorial empire but a corporate empire, a technological empire, and the rest of what historian William Appleman Williams called “informal” imperialism. Amid the wave of decolonization washing the Global South since the 1950s, territorial control had become politically dubious, retrograde, even unnecessary.¹⁰⁰ To those calling for Armstrong and Aldrin to claim the moon, there came the easy question: What for?

The Shape of Things to Come

As a symbolic act, the first moon landing represented the fulfillment of the interplanetary dream that science-fiction writers, philosophers, engineers, and political leaders had sustained since before the publication of The War of the Worlds in 1898. The Apollo 11 mission created a scene markedly different from Wells's dystopia. Outer space seemed to have become a source of human unification, cooperation, and peace rather than cataclysmic war based in difference and a scarcity of resources. Although the astronauts had erected an American flag in the lunar surface, the act did not represent a claim to it. To “conquer” space, as the language of the time expressed it, meant nothing more than scientific discovery and a test of humanity's limits. For decades figures like Arthur C. Clarke had promised that space travel would facilitate the coming together of nations on Earth. For a brief moment, many believed those prophecies to have come true.

The reality, as others pointed out before the mission had even begun, was more complicated. Political and racial divisions at home—over the war in Southeast Asia, poverty, and social injustice—belied the astronauts’ observations about the oneness of the Earth's inhabitants. Minority communities in the United States and non-white peoples across the Global South were particularly critical of and suspicious about the prevailing discourse. For all the high talk about leveraging NASA technologies to revive crumbling inner cities and poor countries around the world, to “spin off” the astronauts tools’ to the benefit of those most in need, Apollo produced only embarrassing contrasts between glittering rockets and asbestos-infested tenements, liquid-hydrogen fuel and animal-driven ploughs. Nor did Project Apollo convince observers that US space exploration was a peaceful enterprise. The rising death toll in Vietnam, particularly among civilians, negated Nixon's claim about Apollo having brought the world's people together in peace. NASA's development of defense technologies, which at times derived directly from the Apollo program, further undermined the notion that the moon mission would usher in an era of international goodwill.

Not even the moon proved immune from conflict. For those whom the Interplanetary School had won over since Sputnik, this was among the most disappointing developments. Apollo had failed to convince people that the United States had made the moon safe from political rivalries back on Earth. “The diplomats have thus far thought of the Moon as a harmless wasteland that can be domesticated as easily as Antarctica has been,” wrote one columnist five months after the first moon landing, “but that is a rash assumption.”¹⁰¹ It seemed fitting when during the lead-up to the launch, a Jordanian rebel asked the astronauts to paint the moon black so that it would not illuminate raids on Israel. By the mid-1960s US aerospace firms and mining interests had made the seemingly benign question of “what is the Moon made of?” a profoundly political one. As the astronauts returned to Earth with the first lunar samples, the prospect of bringing extraterrestrial resources home for profit or for building enterprises in space had become realistic and controversial possibilities. Commentators again began to speak of the moon as “a strategic way station” to yet more celestial riches, a steppingstone to a twenty-first-century China Market.¹⁰² Despite the precedents set by the Antarctic Treaty, the ongoing UNCLOS conventions, a procession of UN resolutions, and the absolutist language of the space treaty, the question of whether one nation or another could claim lunar rights refused to go away. As they had since the late 1950s, most space lawyers brooked no contrarians on the matter. Situated deeply in the moral and political arguments against national sovereignty, they continued, long after the ratification of the OST, to produce books, articles, and pamphlets about why the moon should be exempted from historic claims. Yet whether it could was a subject of interest as long as the legal minutia of space exploration were up for debate and for as long as lunar possessions seduced governments with new economic horizons.

As the negotiation of the OST had been, the moon landing was an awakening, from dreams and nightmares alike. On the one hand, Apollo 11 demonstrated that US officials responsible for national space policy had roused to the immediate dangers entailed in transplanting Cold War rivalries to the cosmos. The ceremonies at Tranquility Base constituted an important milestone in the political and cultural construction of outer space as a zone apart from earthborn conflicts. It is notable that Kennedy's goal of landing men on the moon before the end of the 1960s superseded every military space project of the decade, not only in the public eye but in terms of government expenditure and political capital. Whereas at the end of the 1950s the United States was studying the possibility of testing nuclear weapons on the moon and establishing a lunar military base, by the end of the following decade Apollo had reinforced the idea that the nation would exempt the moon, as well as subsequent cosmic bodies on which it might land, from interstate conflict, sovereign claims to new colonies, and the accompanying forces that had driven European powers to Asia and the New World in previous thrusts of “exploration.”

On the other hand, zealous promoters of a sanctuary in space awoke as well. They discovered that the realities of Cold War competition were more immune to the metamorphic influence of space exploration than they had initially imagined; that differences in wealth and power between spacefaring nations and those stuck on the ground had rendered the Interplanetary Project grossly incomplete; and that despite the triumph of Apollo, there remained formidable limitations for exploration to reform human hearts and minds.

This tension between symbol and politics, between myth and reality, and between dreams and nightmares was the shape of things to come. Certainly no one expected that the Apollo 11 crew would, overnight, inspire the world to halt the Cold War at the edge of space or inaugurate a new, warless era in international affairs. But looking into the 1970s and beyond, it seemed that the cosmos would continue to be subject to the whims of world history. Of the many ironies that characterized the first moon landing, perhaps the most consequential was that at this zenith of the space race, it remained unclear whether the Interplanetary Project had succeeded in achieving its basic aims. Indeed, it was an uncomfortable possibility that because Apollo 11 was a pinnacle, there was nowhere left to go but down.