Apollo in the Age of Aquarius by Neil M. Maher (review)

Did we really need another book about the Apollo program? Since John M. Logsdon's 1970 classic, The Decision to Go to the Moon, book after book has exhaustively examined the Apollo program from many different angles. Policy histories like Logsdon's have considered the rationale for the program and debated what it revealed and helped change about the role of the federal government in the United States. Many other books have analyzed key players in the drama of Apollo, from nasa officials to astronauts to previously-ignored mathematicians who blazed new trails for women and people of colour. Some books cover the program's technology in exhaustive detail, while others consider how nasa and its contractors marketed their efforts. Still more books analyze the science return of the missions, and others trace the history of popular attitudes toward them.

Yet remarkably, no book closely considered how the Apollo program fit into the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 70s, at least not until the recent publication of Matthew Tribbe's No Requiem for the Space Age (2014) and now Neil Maher's Apollo in the Age of Aquarius. Both books emphatically show that we certainly did need more books about Apollo. Both reveal that there are in fact entirely new ways of looking at the history of space exploration and observation.

Popular histories in particular often romanticize the "space race" that culminated in the United States with the Apollo moon landings. Everybody supported the effort, these histories suggest, and everyone watched in wonder as Neil Armstrong made his great leap for mankind. By contrast, Maher argues that the program increasingly represented a fast-fading segment of America's population, one that had to contend with social and political movements dedicated to civil rights, second-wave feminism, resistance to the Vietnam War, and environmentalism.

Many of the leading figures in these movements, Maher reveals, contended that money spent on space could more profitably be spent to ease the problems of racism, sexism, war, and pollution on Earth. The Apollo program became a galvanizing symbol of their frustration with the priorities of the federal government, one that captured the attention of popular media. Together, these movements successfully eroded public and in turn political support for space exploration, forcing nasa to respond.

Maher traces how nasa officials redirected Apollo technologies for use in inner cities; ended programs that supported American involvement in Vietnam; conserved environments at Cape Canaveral and launched revolutionary Earth-monitoring satellites; and belatedly consented to train female astronauts. Without the Apollo program, Maher argues, the social movements of the 1960s and 70s might have been less successful, and without those movements nasa might never have refocused its attention on Earth.

This is a compelling and strikingly original argument, placing space exploration at the centre of two of the most turbulent decades in American social and political history. To make his case, Maher draws on a broad range of diverse archival documents, and writes with clear and lively prose that will make his book a favorite for undergraduate students at every level.

The best books are perhaps most valuable for the questions they provoke and the criticisms they invite, and Apollo in the Age of Aquarius is no exception. Maher, an environmental historian, opens his book by criticizing environmental histories that focus on obviously environmental stories. To be "taken more seriously by all historians," he contends, environmental historians must incorporate the environment into bigger histories of trends or events that do not have obvious links to nature.

Apollo in the Age of Aquarius therefore shows that urban environments, polluted rivers, and human bodies all shaped the space race in often counterintuitive ways. While I agree that such approaches can be valuable, the discipline of environmental history is big enough to accommodate many different topics and methods. Surely it is mature enough for environmental historians to stop worrying about earning more respect from their colleagues.

Maher focuses on discourses in ways that occasionally make...