For all its glory, the moon walk struck some people as an empty luxury. Popular interest in the space programme faded fast; the astounding had become ho-hum. Three scheduled lunar flights were cancelled. The last time a human walked on the moon was 1972, when The Godfather was the top-grossing movie and the Dow Jones industrial average closed above 1,000 for the first time.
"Apollo symbolised more than anything else in the 1960s what can be done with a very rational approach, putting faith in the experts, setting the goals, and having them achieve those goals," said Matthew D. Tribbe, a history professor and author of No Requiem for the Space Age: The Apollo Moon Landings and American Culture. "But a growing number of Americans, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, are seeking something more out of life than just material progress or technological progress like Apollo represents."
But Nasa grasped early on that if taxpayers were to accept pouring billions of their dollars into the project, a measure of slick salesmanship would be required.
Thus, Nasa press kits became almost as important as computer chips. The astronauts and their wives were thrust before the public with all the verve of a Hollywood agent. Beating the Russians was touted as a national imperative. It hardly hurt the effort to have a prominent cheerleader in Walter Cronkite, routinely described back then as the most trusted man in America. Taken together, these elements amounted to one giant leap for public relations.
"I believe the marketing aspect of Apollo was as important as the spacecraft, I absolutely do," David Meerman Scott, the author of several books on marketing, said. Communicating both the scientific significance and the glamour, he said, "was absolutely essential for us to have been able to do that program."
Nonetheless, it was a fragile fascination, as reflected in some of that era's movies. A year before Apollo 11, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey showed astronauts struggling with a computer that had gone homicidally haywire. Later, in 1977, space-probe skeptics could enjoy Capricorn One, a film about a faked mission to Mars. "If we look at the broader cultural context," Tribbe said, "we start to see an era when Americans are starting to grow a little bit suspicious of the kind of technology that Apollo represents."
After the first few moon landings, the programme became a harder sell. Lethal explosions aboard the space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 produced national mourning but not renewed chin-up determination to conquer space. The government space agency began to be nudged aside by startup companies created by the likes of Elon Musk and Jeffrey P. Bezos looking to exploit whatever commercial potential the cosmos may hold. Perhaps not wanting to be fully eclipsed by business enterprises, Nasa announced this month that it would let private citizens visit the International Space Station — for a hefty fee, to be sure.
And yet the spirit of sheer adventure, so widely felt in July of 1969, never disappeared. That, too, is shown in popular culture, be it in The Right Stuff book and movie, the novel and film Contact or the adventure movie The Martian. The Trump administration seems to have caught the mood. It has promised to send astronauts back to the moon as early as 2024, though many experts regard that target date as overly ambitious.
If the past is prologue, the public may need to be sold on the idea, just as it was half a century ago. "It's always about storytelling," Scott said. "The best marketers on the planet are able to tell stories. And that's what's important for space travel going forward."
"You need to rekindle our imagination," he said, adding, "We need to tell the story of why we should be investing in this. There's still potential for that kind of story."
Written by: Clyde Haberman
© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES
