A Moon for the Miscellaneous

Neil M. Maher's Apollo in the Age of Aquarius raises the prospect of adjusting our understanding of the tumultuous 1960s by approaching the era from a novel perspective. Coincidentally, Americans who lived through that decade experienced the impact of two apparently disjunctive forces. The first was the climax (and eventual collapse) of widespread faith in technocracy and its component parts: science, technology, professional expertise, and top-down planning. The second was the rapid (and mostly unforeseen) rise of new social movements that were driven by an instinct to humanize institutions, laws, organizations, and individual states of consciousness. Historians have commonly noted the similarities and distinctions among the various bottom-up movements, the tensions, cross-pollinations, and casual associations that loosely united—and occasionally divided—the subversive constituencies. Yet, with the exception of the counterculture, scholars have generally avoided examining any relationships between 1960s reform movements and technocracy. Now Maher is attempting to fill this investigative gap by revisiting criticisms of NASA's moon landing program by selected movement representatives. He is also attempting to construct an alternative historical synthesis for the legendary 1960s, in which yesterday's Age of Aquarius resembles today's Age of Fracture.

Still, the nagging question is this: How can a study that is so resourceful and industrious in gathering enticing facts and anecdotes also be so thematically confusing in its disjointed narrative? The answer is that the book's mission is muddled from the start. Not only does Maher try to accomplish too many things, but his approach lacks precision and his claims are often not borne out by the evidence. His opening argument that the "space race and the social and political movements of the 1960s era … were mutually dependent on each other for popular and political support" is unconvincing (p. 2). Surely the civil rights and antiwar movements did not require NASA's presence to make their points, build their followings, or draw attention to their crusades; the same can be said about second-wave feminism and the counterculture. Conversely, NASA's funding—and its political charter—actually suffered when these movements challenged the space agency's values and its purpose. Any slight symbiosis between NASA and environmentalism hardly salvages Maher's umbrella theory of mutual dependency. Ironically, most of the space technology that Maher discusses in relation to concerns about the environment and natural resources belonged to unmanned satellite systems (for example, Landsat and Nimbus-7) that had nothing to do with the Apollo program. Ultimately, the myriad case studies, vignettes, and observations that Maher provides fall well short of proving his corollary claim that "shared opposition to space exploration nurtured" social movements in the 1960s (p. 3). On the contrary, anyone familiar with the structures, dynamics, issues, events, personalities, or passions (in other words, the detailed histories) of those movements, must conclude that any opposition to space exploration—which varied in its nature, both across and within movements—was never more than incidental to the social histories of the 1960s.

Maher's boldest assertion is less about mutual dependency or "shared histories" than about societal disintegration. He divides the "space race" and the "social and political movements" into representations of "two factions in a national debate regarding the present and the future course of the United States," which he uses to argue that: "Apollo not only encouraged the identity politics of the 1960s, but also the perception, widely accepted during the following decade, that American society was becoming disaggregated, fragmented, and fractured" (pp. 2–3). This sweeping charge not only exaggerates the space program's role in fomenting discord back in the day, but gives it unwarranted credit for fostering the culture wars and the fractious politics that infected the nation's psyche in future years. It would be more accurate, if more mundane, to note that the biggest objections to the Apollo program centered on its $24 billion price tag, which many citizens and groups believed might be better spent elsewhere. Indeed, this was...