Opposing Apollo: Political Resistance to the Moon Landings

Abstract

With the retirement of the Space Shuttle in the summer of 2011, the United States no longer has the inherent capability to launch astronauts into Earth orbit for the first time in more than 30 years. Moreover, there is not a clear path forward in the United States for the development of a new approach to human space access. Debates over direction have been both persistent and persistently strident with various sides deploying responses to buttress their own positions and destroy competing ones. In at least one instance, an advocate defended a certain initiative by invoking the Apollo program as an example of how such debates have always existed. On October 21, 2008, Marshall Space Flight Center senior official Steve Cook passed off technical criticism of his efforts by indicating that such criticism was nothing new and that it had always swirled around NASA. Even the vaunted Apollo program, he insisted, experienced significant criticism both internal and external to the space agency. This response seemed unusual, essentially making the case that criticism of major projects undertaken by NASA, especially in human spaceflight, routinely endured significant criticism from all quarters. How true is this? Did Apollo engender significant criticism? Where did that criticism originate? How was it manifested and what did it entail? How does that experience compare to the current critical analyses of NASA's human spaceflight initiatives?