Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: The Home Front During Apollo (with Emily Margolis)

Episode Date: August 2, 2019

Did the public support Project Apollo? Dr. Emily Margolis joins the show to explore the domestic politics and cultural impact of the space age throughout the 1960s. Despite the success of the lunar landings, there was more opposition to Apollo than we generally remember. Chief Advocate Casey Dreier also provides an update on some important developments in the U.S. Congress on the eve of their August recess—including some potentially good budget news for NASA. More resources about this month’s topics are at http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/space-policy-edition-40.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to the August 2019 Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. We are glad to have you back and have a lot to celebrate and a good deal of stuff happening in Washington, D.C. to talk with you about. And Casey Dreyer has another very special guest. Casey is with us as I speak. He is the chief advocate for the Planetary Society. Welcome back. Hey, Matt. Welcome back to our normal way of doing things here, Space Policy Edition. Definitely. Although I certainly hope that people will check out the work that you have done on that special Apollo series, which as we speak is not quite done. There'll be a little wrap-up episode that I'm looking forward to talking

with you about. But these conversations that you've had, in fact, we're going to hear another one as part of Space Policy Edition today, that you've done a great job of packaging. Yeah, thanks, Matt. That was a lot of fun to put together. It's called A Political History of Apollo. You can find it on any of the major podcast directories, Spotify, Apple, Google. It was basically taking these interviews, some of which we will hear today, Emily Margulis, who is a historian specializing on space tourism on Earth, Emily Margulis, who is a historian specializing on space tourism on Earth, and putting together this whole series of look at the beginning of Apollo, what it was like in the country while

it was happening, and then, of course, why Apollo ended, really from a policy and politics perspective to really augment all of the exciting stuff that actually happened with the context. And it really makes all of us, I think, particularly space advocates, appreciate what it took to achieve something like Apollo and how to compare modern efforts to go to the moon to the one and only data point that we have of a successful human lunar mission. So I may be a little biased on this, but I think it's a pretty good show. I was happy with it. I agree with you. It is a great show. Better than pretty good. And it's a great compliment to all of the other celebration that has been taking place and will continue to take place as we now look forward to celebrating Apollo 12 having completed the 50th on the Apollo 11's 50th anniversary. And I guarantee you, we probably

won't be broadcasting a full-size image of the Saturn V rocket on the National Monument in Washington, DC for Apollo 12, even though it was just as cool of a mission. We're going to repeat that same loss of interest. I hope I'm wrong too. I'm just being cynical. It's hot now. I'm afraid you're right, but I hope you're wrong. It's hot now. I'm afraid you're right, but I hope you're wrong. Speaking of celebrating, before we go on, even in the Space Policy Edition, I think we should say something about our pride in our colleagues and the entire LightSail 2 team because of the really glorious success that has been declared in that mission. So here's your opportunity. So of all the things that I do in

the Planetary Society, LightSail is not one of them. That has been this whole other team. I'm not a mechanical engineer. I'm not an aerospace engineer. I have some science training, but I'm not a PhD. It's been fantastic to watch the team work so hard over the last decade and succeed. So Matt, I was actually just thinking about this. LinkedIn reminded me last week that I have now been at the Planetary Society for seven years. And so I came in just a couple of years after LightSail started. And that project was not in good shape when I joined the Planetary Society. And to see this complete turnaround from this, basically this drag around the organization into a triumph for the organization through the hard work of all the people here, all the engineers and people at Cal Poly, but also the tens of thousands of donors and members and supporters who literally helped make this happen. It's just been spectacular to witness, even though I work here at the Planetary Society.

I couldn't be more proud of the team that I work with. And now, with the, I mean, it's not that LightSail 2 is finished. We're going to keep raising that orbit, and it may stay on orbit for as much as a year or so. But now it kind of belongs to the ages and to everybody else who's interested in this technology. Do you have any thoughts about how now a tiny organization could put something in space that does something incredibly innovative, wonderfully innovative, and proves a technology that might be useful elsewhere across space

efforts? Oh, absolutely. I think that's the essence of a successful, like what role the Planetary Society plays, but also just big picture and policy. You know, when you're talking about space missions, right, there's this three letter acronym, TRL, a technology readiness level. NASA has all these stringent requirements on you have to demonstrate, you know, you have to move something up to this point of where you have a high confidence that this technology is going to work in space. And the more expensive your mission, the higher confidence you have to have in order to incorporate that. So it ends up being lots of expensive missions, ironically, for something like NASA, are very conservatively designed.

They use things that have been used before in space because you have a high confidence that will work. So to do something different like this, doing it cheaply, just demonstrating that it works in space, demonstrating it works in something the form size of a CubeSat, that's huge. That suddenly opens up all of these other people's ideas to say, this is a proven technology. This is no longer a risk for me if I'm trying to raise money, trying to write a grant, trying to do anything to raise the resources to build my own light sail style spacecraft in a small form CubeSat to be able to do with whatever I want. We already saw, actually, the associate administrator of science, mission director at NASA, Thomas Zurbuchen, kind of fantasize about all the types of things we could do with solar sails

and science missions now that we're seeing a proven technology. Icarus, of course, went first, but this is the first controlled solar sailing around Earth. And again, in a small set form factor, this has never been done in something so small. By proving this technology, the Planetary Society and its members has done a huge favor to the rest of the space community saying, anything you want to do now, you know that this part of your mission will work. We have shown this as a productive and effective technology. I can't overstate how important that is when designing space missions. So this is a big deal. And I hope

to be seeing lots of these types of missions going forward, where small satellites have unlimited access to this propulsion of sunlight to be able to move around and not be restricted with chemical propellants. It's a really exciting thing to see. It absolutely is. And that praise from Thomas Zurbuchen, that meant a lot to all of us at the Planetary Society. Hey, if you're a member of the Society, I hope you are sharing in this pride in the success of LightSail 2. And if you're not a member,

you heard this one coming, right? It's not too late. You can still become part of this organization that has made this wonderful achievement and has so many other irons in the fire to help promote and advance space exploration and space policy, because of course it is our members who also stand behind the work that is being done by Casey and the rest of us in Washington, D.C., to make sure that opportunities like LightSail are taken full advantage of, and certainly things that the Planetary Society cannot hope to take on that can only be taken on by a much larger organization such as NASA. That's the kind of stuff that you will be up to, that you'll be standing behind if you become a member of the Planetary Society, which we encourage you to do at planetary.org slash membership. Casey, with that,

we should talk about what's going on there in Washington, D.C. There have been some pretty significant developments. Yeah, we're actually at the end of the kind of the first part of the year's legislative session. This is hitting into August recess. This is where Congress gives itself a break and all the members go back to their home districts to meet with their constituents, go around and, you know, do the ribbon cuttings, their kissing babies, all their local work to engage with the people they represent. So the House has left Washington, D.C. They're gone for six weeks. They left last week. The Senate will be leaving this week also through all of August and the first week or so of September. And so anything that they need to kind of get done before that long break, they're kind of scrambling to do right now. And the most pertinent issue to us here at the Planetary Society and to space policy in general is this new deal that literally just passed the

Senate. It had already passed the House as we're recording this. It lifts spending caps for domestic spending that includes both non-defense and defense increases. So basically, this doesn't assign money to agencies like NASA, but it basically creates the size of the pie that they have to divvy up to give to every federal agency. And the pie just got bigger this year. That's a big deal. They actually made the extension for the next two years. So we're going to have a permanently larger pie for two years to divvy up federal spending with. That basically takes us through the next presidential election. So we won't have as many potential shutdown opportunities

or debates on the debt limit or the budget or overall spending agreement. This agreement's happening now to deal with that. And then the other interesting aspect of this is that this carries us through 2021. That means it's been 10 years since the passage of the Budget Control Act in 2011, which some of you may remember was meant to limit federal spending by putting into these things called sequester, automatic cuts that are across the board to both defense and non-defense parts of the federal government. If people in Congress couldn't agree on other targeted cuts or revenue increases. Basically happened once in 2013 that the entire government suffered from a sequester. And then literally every single year after that, Congress waived its own law, the Budget Control Act, and increased spending a little bit,

little bit, little bit. And then after President Trump was elected, the gloves came off and spending went way up starting in 2017. This now continues that extension. And you can debate what type of politics you have about this. But overall, this is very good for things like research and development, science in the United States, because all of these federal agencies, not just NASA, but the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy's science office, and others, they all draw their money from this non-defense domestic spending pie.

So the pie gets bigger. It's easier for everyone to get a bigger slice. It's easier for NASA to get more funding to pursue its moon-programmed science missions. And then, of course, there's the other aspect of this, which is the deal that the Defense Department gets a significant increase as well. And so while we're talking about here is this budget deal basically raises spending caps on domestic non-defense, basically everything else but the Defense Department, by about $27 billion in this upcoming fiscal year. So Congress has an extra $27 billion to distribute to all the other federal agencies. The Defense Department gets $20 billion increase compared to last year. So to put that another way, the single Defense Department increase this year is equivalent to one NASA, to put things into perspective. Defense spending has increased

significantly over the past few years. That's been a priority of President Trump and many Republicans in Congress. The deal has been, in order to get those increases to the defense spending area, they've had to accept a deal to increase other domestic spending opportunities to match it, basically. You know, again, you may have different opinions on what you'd like to see the government spending, but this is very good overall for agencies like NASA. Because again, what we expect to see is more funding now. We probably will see maybe a 3%, 4%, 5% boost to NASA funding this year. It might be a little trickier next year that kind of flattens out the spending, but they still have a decent amount to work with.

So overall, I feel this is very good news for our priorities. And I'm looking forward to see the Senate now start to act on NASA's budget. They have until the end of September to figure something out. Good deal of bipartisan support, of course, for this budget action. And by the time a lot of people hear this, probably President Trump will have signed off. And we should note there are still some members of Congress, mostly Republicans, who are grumbling because they are budget hawks and they really are disturbed by these rises in deficit spending that this no doubt portends. Yeah, I certainly hope that this money is used wisely to further the kinds of things that you just talked about, including the efforts of NASA.

to further the kinds of things that you just talked about, including the efforts of NASA. This deal was worked out between President Trump and Pelosi in the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives and Mitch McConnell, Senate leadership of the Republican Party in the Senate side. So this was a wholly bipartisan. We had a few people kind of detracting out of that. But again, it's easy to detract when you know it's going to pass. So they, you know, it's easy to take a kind of principled position when you know it won't make any difference. And when it has come down to it, this has always been the case. No matter who's in power, it's a lot easier to spend money when you're in power because it keeps the economy going. It's easy to spend the money. And again, it tends to go to very important things like improved research, transportation, roads, and then of course, you know, the creating this next generation

of capability for the Defense Department, all sorts of things. Basically, everybody gets a piece, everybody wins. This is how deals are made in a democratic system, where people have to all buy in in a coalition in order to get anything done. It's always kind of fascinating to see. It's also why it's so hard to actually cut spending. It's a lot easier to lower taxes and raise spending and just run a deficit than it is to do either one of those separately. So it's kind of fascinating to see this play out again in a pattern we've seen now for at least 35 years. for at least 35 years. And maybe much longer if you really look at the willingness of your representatives to spend money to look good. And we should also say accomplish good things in many cases. So is this possibly going to help NASA get footprints back on the moon by 2024? Or is that

even that target date now somewhat in question? I still think it's somewhat in question. So again, something to keep in mind. I mean, this is an increase of $27 billion for every other agency beyond the Defense Department in the federal government. That's a lot of those. So NASA will likely get an increase. We saw the House take action earlier this year on its NASA budget for the year 2020. They increased NASA's budget, I think, by about 4%. And they assumed actually a slightly larger increase in domestic spending than what the deal actually was. I think there's a pretty good chance NASA would get that funding.

But if you saw what the House did, the House restored missions like WFIRST, increased Earth science funding. They did not provide any additional funding for the Artemis program. Now, the Senate will probably take a different track. They will probably provide the requested funding, which was only about $1.6 billion additional that the White House requested this year. Jim Bridenstine and others are saying now that it's going to take $20 to $30 billion by 2024 to achieve that goal of landing on the moon, landing humans on the moon again. Next year, 2021, the next budget cycle, we have

effectively a flat spending rate. So the pie is staying the same size, which is helpful, but it doesn't give NASA a lot of room to grow by an extra $5 to $6 billion without taking it from somewhere else. So it's going to be much trickier for NASA to continue growing in 2021 without a significant turnabout of political support, not to mention the fact that the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives, Jose Serrano from the state of New York has expressed significant reticence to fund a 2024 moon landing program. He says he doesn't understand why NASA needs to work to that date. What's wrong with 2028? Why do you need the extra money now? And so there's political headwinds facing this 2024 date, not to mention the whole hardware issue of are you going to be able to launch your SLS, the Orion, you know, those all have to happen on time too. So we've kind of taken out some of the

obstacles by having this deal, right? We won't have any more shutdowns for the next couple of years. But at the same time, the pool of money to work with to give NASA the increase it needs to have a chance at succeeding in a 2024 landing deadline, that is not going to just magically appear. That's going to be a harder lift in 2021. That remains to be seen if they're going to get that funding. It doesn't really have policy ramifications, but I'm sure you heard that NASA, the administrator said that they're not going to skip a key test of the space launch system. They were proposing to skip that test because it would obviously speed development if everything went well.

But it was thought to be a dangerous step by a lot of people. And now NASA has backed off. Yeah, this is the green run test of basically testing the first stage of the SLS. All four engines, RS-25 engines in a big test stand at Stennis Space Flight Center down in Mississippi. Yeah, the idea was that maybe you don't need to do that test because you have to ship everything down there. You have to set up probably add six to eight months to the schedule to do this test. But you test so you can figure out if things are going to blow up or not. I was actually, it was quite reminiscent, if some of our listeners remember the interview we had with Asif Siddiqui about the N1 rocket that the Soviets were building

back in the late sixties, they skimped on the testing. They didn't test things in test stands. They just built the rockets. Like we'll just test it by launching it into space. And it ended up blowing up four times. And the fourth time it, it blew up on the pad and destroyed the entire pad. So it was ultimately killed a lot of people. It was and it was, yeah, it was counterproductive, let's say, to the success of that mission. And it's also a good reminder that, you know, you can come in with a fresh pair of eyes and look at the decisions of why are we doing this long test program and so forth and so on. But usually there are good reasons behind doing it, right? You want to make sure something doesn't explode.

You want to make sure it's performing as expected. And it wasn't like they just added a test to spend money in the first place, right? You need to test these things. The difference is they don't have the resources now to kind of be testing at a rate fast enough to be able to achieve this 2024 deadline, I believe. And so you're kind of stuck in this,

you know, quote unquote, only getting $2 billion a year. You can only do so much in the way that the SLS program is structured. Other components of Artemis. I see if you have any comments about these. I don't think we're very far along in getting a lander put together to get the humans down there, but there has been a little bit of progress, some contracts awarded, I think, or at least one related to the Lunar Gateway, which is a key part of this plan. Two contracts have been awarded. So we have the power and propulsion element of the Gateway, the PPE. The first part, basically a big solar electric engine and solar panels and communications, kind of the base part of this Lunar Gateway space station. That was awarded to Maxar.

An interesting way of awarding this contract, actually very fascinating, taking a page from the commercial cargo and commercial crew development system. They awarded this contract fixed price. So it's not your classic cost plus where they are paying somebody whatever it takes to build this. They're paying a fixed amount to this company, Maxar. Maxar is going to build this. They're paying a fixed amount to this company, Maxar. Maxar is going to build it. And actually, Maxar operates it itself for the first year in lunar orbit, this power and propulsion element. And then if NASA is happy with its performance,

NASA will buy it from Maxar. So they give some money up front to help build it. But then NASA has the ultimate decision of whether to fully exercise its contractual obligation to the company. So Maxar, the company is under a high amount of incentive to deliver this on time and on budget, because if they don't, NASA does not have to pay them the rest of the money to take operation of this element. So it's kind of an interesting contracting change. The details are really important here in terms of how a company is going to proceed moving this forward. And the idea being that a company wouldn't take that risk because developing this large-scale solar electric

propulsion and large-scale maneuverability in space actually has commercial applications in Earth orbit for communication satellites and other aspects. So they can become a leader in that field with potential commercializable outcomes. So they can make more money in the future. And then NASA can basically hand off some of that R&D cost to a private entity who's willing to take that risk for potential further payouts in the future. So it's an interesting outcome that they found. I'm really curious to see how this works out. It is a very much a new way of doing things. I think it's very exciting. And then at the same time, we saw the brand new contract award, a no compete award actually to Northrop Grumman to build the pseudo initial habitation module that sticks onto this power

and propulsion element. Basically, Orion will dock to that. It's not going to be much of anything. It's still a little unclear to me how much life support or what it's going to be able to do with people. But it provides a docking mechanism for the Orion crew, and then they can move around with the gateway to wherever they want and then land from there. That was awarded as a no-compete clause. I don't know what the contracting mechanism is on that one,

but I did think it was interesting in the fact that Northrop Grumman has not really performed too well with the James Webb Space Telescope. They've performed very poorly, and they just want a no-compete contract with NASA to build this element of the gateway. So, you know, for every new development we see in the contracting world about public-private partnerships, we see the old aerospace contracting system still move forward unabated. So, you know, we'll see how that goes as well. Yeah, it's an interesting hybrid stage that we seem to have reached. Of course, that development of that solar electric propulsion unit by Maxar, also thought of as a key element for getting us to Mars, far more powerful than any solar electric engine, rocket engine that has ever been developed in the past.

So, you know, we wish them all luck, of course. There has, in addition, been at least a bit of a shakeup atstine effectively fired Bill Gerstenmaier, who was the associate administrator of the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA. He'd been there, I think, 14 years at this point, had been kind of the steady hand between administrations running all basically human spaceflight initiatives at NASA. all basically human spaceflight initiatives at NASA. And he was reassigned to an advisory position. So he's a civil servant. You can't necessarily fire them outright, but you can reassign them into a position with no influence, which is effectively what happened. Bridenstine explained it and said he thanked Gerstenmaier for his service,

but that he was reassigned due to his concerns about meeting the 2024 deadline and previous performance issues basically related, I assume, to the cost and schedule overruns of the space launch system and Orion crew capsule. When I worked for a university, we used to refer to a certain office in the library of that university, which we called the memorial office, which is where you would put administrators that you couldn't fire, but you wanted to get them out of your hair. And so you'd stick them up there without a telephone. And it didn't sound like too bad duty, actually, because you still had an entire library around you. But that seems to be what's happened to Gerst. But we have to say a remarkably long tenure, and his influence will probably be felt within the agency for many years. That's absolutely true. And again, we don't have a lot of details for exactly why it happened now. So we should just be clear on that. What I think we can take away from this is that

Bridenstine continues to surprise as a NASA administrator. It takes a lot of confidence in a way to basically feel that you can remove the person who's been there a lot longer than you and does have a lot of support within the mission director of the human spaceflight because he's not performing the way you want him to. So it's easy to defer to long-term civil servants inside a bureaucracy like this. And to see Bridenstine kind of make that bold move really does show that he's committed to moving fast. And you have seen a lot of activity within NASA around this moon goal at a variety of different levels, both with commercial lunar payload services, with providing these first quick contracts to this gateway PPE section and

the non-compete to Northrop Grumman, they're moving fast and in a way that I have never seen NASA move. So it's fascinating to watch. And again, really changes the game in a certain way that we don't exactly know how this is going to turn out. That's exciting. Let's turn from Artemis to her close relative, Apollo. Good segue. Thank you. Get us into this discussion, terrific discussion that you had with Emily Margolis. Yeah. Dr. Margolis wrote her dissertation on something that I thought was really fascinating, which was this relationship of the U.S. population to NASA through tourism. She called it space tourism at 1G, basically people driving around to NASA centers starting in the 1960s out of pure curiosity for what was happening

there during this beginning of the space age. And how NASA reacted to and through help through key members of Congress created the visitor complex kind of services that we now enjoy today. So Matt, you and I were just at the Cape to watch the light sail launch. And we were at the just fantastic Kennedy Space Center visitors complex with the rocket gardens and the space shuttle and all of the Saturn V, of course, those just didn't happen by accident. Those took an act of Congress to provide money to NASA to start building outreach centers for the public. So she did her dissertation on this, and she also has a lot of insight as to the overall kind of public engagement with the space program throughout the 1960s, which is a lot more complicated than we tend to remember during Apollo. A lot of us look

back to Apollo and say, ah, that was the time when we were unified, had clear goal to send people to the moon. And by God, we just rolled up our sleeves and did it. But we forget that Apollo wasn't particularly popular in terms of public polling. A lot of people thought it wasn't worth the money. A lot of people thought we should not be spending money on the moon. We should be spending money on other social purposes and addressing issues like hunger and equity and social justice and civil rights. It succeeded kind of in spite of that, because of all the reasons we've talked about of Apollo, it wasn't necessarily responsive to public demand. But it's important to see that Apollo, we tend to forget after something succeeds so completely. Looking back, we see the success and we don't see the debate that happened before

anymore of whether to do it or not. We kind of really go into that aspect. The home front, basically, we called it on a political history of Apollo, the episode that featured this interview. But we talked with her about not just the public's engagement with it, but the public reticence with it, some of the problems that the politics faced, and then, of course, kind of how it applies to today and what we see in this day and age about issues with space. So I thought it was a fascinating interview. She was at Johns Hopkins when I was there, and she's moved on to museum curation in Philadelphia.

She's a great insight on this aspect of the history of Apollo. I think you'll really enjoy it. So here is Casey Dreyer's conversation with Emily Margulis, and we will be back to close out the program right after they finish talking. Dr. Margulis, thank you for joining us today on the Space Policy Edition and the special series of Apollo podcasts that we're doing here at the Planetary Society. Previously, our listeners learned about why Apollo happened, the political and international context that created this weird nexus of funding availability for a massive space undertaking. And what I really want to explore today is the domestic side of that and the cultural impact. How did Apollo move forward?

What was the impact to the public? And was it a smooth ride for that program? So just really to set the context for all of us, including you and I, who were not alive in the 1960s, we're coming out of the 1950s, you had Eisenhower, who himself was kind of coming out of this post World War Two era, the economy starting to grow, you have this new thing called the interstate highway system, this huge, massive public works project, you have a new type of maybe leisure class happening in the United States. What are some of the major themes and what are some of the major changes happening culturally and politically in the United States in the early 1960s when JFK announced Project Apollo? Thanks so much for having me, Casey. In the post-war period, the United States was enjoying a time of economic prosperity that it hadn't known in a long while. And this had a material

impact on the way Americans lived their lives. After having ration coupons and growing victory gardens, people had money in their pocket and they wanted to buy things that they had been denied during the war. And one of the most coveted items that people were interested in in the early days of the Cold War was the private automobile ownership. People really wanted their own cars. Automobile factories had been converted to wartime production. And when they reconverted back to producing cars, people wanted to get in them and they wanted to enjoy their America's roadside, starting in 1956 with the Interstate Highway Act, there was a proposal for over 40,000 new roadways to be built in the United States. So all of a sudden, people

had spending money, they had a means of transportation, they had more places to go, and they also had an interest in exploring our nation. So there was a renaissance at mid-century of this phenomenon called heritage travel, which first really emerged in the early, excuse me, the late 19th century in the United States after the Civil War, when there was a concerted national effort to bring Americans to national parks and historic sites as a way of reaffirming a unified national identity after the Civil War. In the Cold War period, this newly mobile middle class was interested in visiting the very same sites,

but as a way of recommitting to American values, which were contrasted with the Soviet Union in this battle of ideologies. And so people wanted to go to the cradle of democracy. They flocked to Independence Hall. They visited the Liberty Bell. They visited the monuments in Washington, D.C. and the Gettysburg Battlefield as a way of proclaiming their citizenship in the Cold War. I think that's really fascinating. Do you think it was a concerted effort, like a top-down effort to make this happen? Was there a kind of government or captains of industry, for lack of a better term, trying to make this happen? Or was this just a ground up attitude, natural response to this kind of oppressive regime contrasted against who they are? It's mixed, right?

So there are people who are wanting to experience these sites. And you have communities where these sites are located who are working incredibly hard to make them seem appealing and working on national publicity campaigns. So you've got PR and marketing coming oftentimes from chambers of commerce. And then later on in the Johnson administration, there was national tourism promotion campaigns and they provided resources to help Americans plan their journey throughout the United States. Do you think this is really the first time that Americans had leisure as a priority in their lives? I mean, it seems like, particularly after, in contrast to World War II, as you pointed out, kind of deprivation, sacrifice for this massive mobilization, right, and then mobilize the entire country functionally, that now it was almost like, enjoy the fruits of that sacrifice,

right? Not only are you going to consume, right? You had this whole consumer culture really created around then, but you're going to take your kids in that giant Buick and drive around. And the whole thing just seems so quintessentially American, but also really modern, really, when you think about it, right? I'd say so. I think that when the road trip sort of emerged in the 1950s and 60s, what made it so different from any kind of form of travel that Americans had enjoyed before is that it was widely accessible. So beginning, I think, in 1960, 75 million Americans took to the road in pursuit of pleasure, which is higher than any number of leisure travelers at any earlier time in history, right? So you're definitely tapping into the

newness of this phenomenon that has to do with the convergence of a new highway system, new access to automobiles, a more affluent middle class, and also an interest in this heritage travel in the Cold War. I should also mention that beginning in the 1940s, employers began to recognize a correlation between worker productivity and time off. And so employers were starting to give more vacation time. And so all of these coalesced to create mass tourism on a scale that had never been experienced in the United States. Would you say that was really the early 1960s? Was that really the birth of kind of our modern conception of middle class and capitalism, that kind of infusion of the two where you would have mass access, you had mass, you said mobility, which is nice, we're not

just class mobility, in a sense, but physical mobility, being able to choose where to go, that almost seemed to fundamentally change the relationship of broad public to not only their self-conception as a nation, but also to government that represents them. Because anyone had access to go and look at something if they wanted to, right? Absolutely. So in the 1960s, tourism emerged on a mass scale as never before seen. Over 75 million Americans took to the roads in pursuit of pleasure in 1960. But the way that they pursued these experiences depended on race. So there were communities in which African-Americans were unwelcome. And for them, traveling could be inconvenient to downright dangerous.

So they were denied services at a lot of places, motels, hotels, gas stations, restaurants, etc. And so Victor Green published a book called, which we know is the Green Book, which provided a travel guide for African American travelers at this time. We have to remember that the birth of the road trip, the golden age of the road trip, also happened during the civil rights era. I think that's a really important point. That's something I want to touch on, particularly in a little bit as we get more into the NASA aspect of this. But you're right. I mean, when I conceive of this experience, or when I conjure up this image, it's a white family going on a road trip, right, in a big car. And that's not a representative view of the country at the

time. And that's a really important, I think, and will be an echoing important part of this, because it's also, as you point out, the early 1960s, the civil rights movement is kind of at the beginning aspect of it, right? This starts to become a bigger and bigger issue as we go through the 1960s, which will impact domestic politics. Let's say politically at this point, let's jump up to a bigger picture. So we have this growth of a consumer culture. We have a growth of a tourism culture, leisure culture, growing middle class. There's obviously, we should mention the baby boom happening here, right? So everyone has kids, it feels like. Politically, this seems like a relatively stable time.

We have very large, somewhat enduring Democratic majorities in Congress. We have very large, somewhat enduring Democratic majorities in Congress. You have a Democratic president right now in JFK who's coming in in reaction to what's seen as kind of a lackadaisical attitude towards Cold War confrontation of Eisenhower. He announces Project Apollo. What's the initial kind of political reaction to Apollo? I remember reading that JFK himself was a little unsure after he made president most often associated with both Project Apollo and the space program in general. And his legacy is felt even today. If you listen to politicians, they echo his rhetoric all the time. And if you listen to his two most famous speeches about the space program, the May 25th, 1961

speech on the urgent national needs before Congress, where he announced Project Apollo, he's very clear that he has taken into consideration the fact that he's asking the nation's taxpayers to fund this effort, and he doesn't make this request lightly. And so I think his thoughtfulness helped to garner support at the time. It was very measured. And then his second speech, which was September 12, 1962, at Rice University, is much more a rallying cry. We've already committed to this, so we're going to see it through. to perhaps the fact that by 1962, people were already starting to question the price tag. And so he really needed to get people on board. We had already set on this track and now we're really rallying the troops.

And it's so interesting, the speech is given in the stadium at Rice University and it almost feels like a kind of pep rally. Yeah, this is a, we don't go because it's easy, but because it is hard, right? Exactly. He's the rah-rah aspect. And it's interesting, because people, I think, really do infuse those two speeches together in their heads in retrospect. But they are really distinct in terms of what he's pitching. I guess his audience is obviously quite different at the time. some consternation, but fundamentally, you look at the numbers, right? Like NASA's budget functionally doubled in the first year, then it doubled again in the next year, right? And so the

money began to flow. Something that you brought up, and I don't know if there's a clear answer to this or not, but do you think part of the reason why Kennedy was able to pull something like this off was because the United States had just gone through a massive public infrastructure project with the interstate highway system. And it worked, and people benefited from it, and they had a high trust in government to pull something off. Do you think that played into people's acceptance of this challenge? I think that the highway system was still in progress, right? So it wasn't finished for many years, although it was coming along. So that was a sign that government worked. But what historians say about Project Apollo is that it

really demonstrated to the American public on a level that hadn't been seen prior that the government works. It can set goals and achieve them by a specific date. Whether or not people agreed with whether that was the correct goal for the country at the time is a side point. But most people said this is, and so that's why you often hear, if we can go to the moon, why can't we do X, Y, or Z? Because that's our way of saying government works, right? But there was a lot of disagreement at the time, even starting in 62, 63, about whether Project Apollo was a good idea, because it was going to happen at such an accelerated rate that it would require a lot of resources. And I don't just mean

money, but I also mean brainpower. We needed the nation's best scientists, engineers, and managers. And so the American public was very concerned about what would happen when all of these resources were applied to getting to the moon. We have lots of problems going on on the ground. So even though Project Apollo's budget doubled essentially between 61 and 62, then basically all the Congress people, especially Olin Teague, who was the chair of the House Subcommittee on Manned Spaceflight, he was getting tons of letters from his constituents and people were making it clear that we think the money is better

spent elsewhere. And they gave him pages and pages of handwritten and typed notes, education, poverty, curing cancer, right? We should be putting our money towards these really important efforts to fix what's going on on the ground before we start to explore the barren expanse of the moon. I'm really glad you brought this up because I think there is a tendency, particularly obviously among space advocates and fans, but I think just really among the public at large to kind of forget that there was kind of a divisive choice to do this. There were people in opposition to going to the moon, right? I'd say like the very basic standard story that we hear a lot is this very romanticized ideal where Kennedy goes up, this youthful president challenges the nation. By God, we all roll our, you know, our shirt sleeves up and we do it.

And then it's done. And everyone kind of passed themselves on the back. But it wasn't straightforward. And people were upset that we were spending all that money on something as really esoteric as going to the moon, particularly in the 1960s. I mean, right when Kennedy made his first speech to Congress, that was right after Alan Shepard, basically. I mean, the U.S. had just sent an up and down astronaut. Now we're talking about landing on the moon. had just sent an up and down astronaut. Now we're talking about landing on the moon. You bring up someone, Al-Antigua, which I confess, I didn't know really that story until I read your dissertation about this. Did he write a report? He was looking at a report. Something triggered

him to be concerned about Project Apollo. He himself was a supporter, correct? Yes and no. So he was the chair of this committee that was responsible for holding NASA accountable to the American public and making sure that they were on track to achieve their goals. And from that basis, we would determine how much money they would get in the next appropriation cycle. So he himself was a supporter of the space program, but also had reservations about how the money was being used. He was concerned about the finances. So when he was serving in this position, he was getting letters from constituents, as I mentioned. He also received a survey that was conducted by the

Grumman Aircraft Corporation at the time. Grumman was one of the prime contractors for Project Apollo. They made the lunar lander, right? Yes. And they were very much interested in public opinion because their contracts depended on whether or not Project Apollo would continue. And so they went out and they did interviews with people on the street and also with public intellectuals to see what people thought and felt about Project Apollo. And those results came across Teague's desk, and they echoed what he was receiving in his letters from the people that he represented and realized that NASA was really in a moment of crisis, because the funding was dependent on public support. And there was a lot of criticism about the way these dollars were being spent. Something I was thinking in reaction to that was you look at Apollo,

at the time they spent about $25 billion, which in today, depending on how you adjust for inflation, works out to about $250 billion or so, right? There's a couple different ways to do it. A decent chunk of change, right? But compared to what they were spending on Vietnam or all these major programs, it wasn't the dominant thing. But space is really visible, right? I mean, they're rockets. They're big and imposing, lots of hardware. You had the whole kind of cultural kind of representation of space that I want to get to in a second. Do you think that this permanent conception of the public,

that the space is always fantastically expensive, do you think that formed with Apollo because of that rapidness of the change as opposed to just ramping up slowly to it? Absolutely, right. The expenditures were growing and growing, doubling, you know, between fiscal years. And that certainly gave the perception that space was fantastically expensive, but it also gave the impression that space is irrelevant sort of to people's daily lives. So Vietnam impacted people in their daily life. They may have had a son, a brother, family member who was serving, right? Or they would be seeing on the news what was happening. They may have themselves been

living in subpar conditions. There was a housing crisis going on. They could have been experiencing poor education, right? So going to the moon is an exciting thing, but it doesn't impact your daily life. So if you were to turn off the TV or not read a newspaper, you wouldn't have a sense that it was going on. And so if we're putting money towards something that doesn't have a material impact on your daily life, it's an easy target. And so something that NASA tried to do is prove its terrestrial value to the American taxpayers. And so there was this problem in a sense, right,

that you have, you're ramping up the spending. I think it's that combination of spending increasing really rapidly, more than maybe even just the total amount, the increase of it, the news of it, the visual aspect of it being almost like an excess, like it's almost like toys or in a sense, you can argue that Apollo was kind of like a peacock kind of plumage showing off for the country, which is supposed to be imposing and impressive and expensive looking, right? I think it's fascinating, again, to look at the responses that you collected that Teague had. Well, I have it written down right here. It's called Attitude Toward the Moon Race Among Opinion Leaders and the General Public,

right? It just rolls off the tongue. I can't believe we didn't remember it. I just want to hear a few more examples of public and political opposition to the Apollo program, particularly in the early 1960s, as funding was coming anyway. You mentioned that people were writing and complaining about the money. We have public polling saying that they think money would be better spent on education. There's at least one other aspect of opposition to NASA that I found really fascinating. Can you talk about some of those? There was actually opposition to Project Apollo from the scientific community. to Project Apollo from the scientific community. Many scientists felt that the money necessary to build human-grade spacecraft was wasted because there could be autonomous spacecraft and landers and satellites that could do the same scientific work. And much more work could be done if given

the budget of Project Apollo. So there was a serious angle of criticism that came from scientists. And there's always been a tension between the scientific community and NASA regarding human spaceflight that sort of persisted even until the shuttle era. Yeah, exactly. There's a scientific resistance to it, and not just in space science, but larger scientific broadly, right, in the United States, right? You highlighted some serious concerns that people said, like, why not focus this on X problem as opposed to going to the moon?

Right. Curing cancer or improving education, building new schools, endowing fellowships for graduate study in fields that were deemed relevant to the national agenda. But I think what all of this gets to is the fundamental misconception that NASA has been fighting from the beginning, which is that a space dollar could easily be reappropriated to some other cause. And that's just not how the government works. And so because NASA is so visible, it is an easy target. And because it is so abstract, people feel like it's not as deserving, perhaps as more tangible efforts on the ground. Yeah, exactly. Like it's

the first fallacy of all arguments against the space program is that you could just plop, you can just excise the NASA budget and move it into something else, right? The money would just never be there to begin with, right? There was one more piece of resistance that I thought was fascinating, which was on religious grounds to the Apollo program. Right. So religious critique of the space program was the smallest subset of critique, period. People would write in and say that, you know, the heavens are God's realm and we shouldn't mess with it. That's not for us to explore. If we were meant to explore it, we would be there already. There were all sorts of critiques of Project Apollo. And I think in some ways,

the critiques show a deep engagement by the American public. They were really grappling with what is the significance of spaceflight? How is it relevant to me on a financial level, on a religious level, right? The critiques, they're a really rich source for historians to think about. But this was 62, 63 that this was happening, right? So at the early part of this effort, right? And this is in the heat of the space race where the Soviets were still putting up stuff, the first Soviet spacewalk, you know, they were launching humans into space all the time, the first woman in space, it didn't matter. And so this conception of the space race driving this whole public opinion, and the whole public was behind this, really isn't the accurate story here, right?

Right. And that's the reason that NASA had such an expansive public affairs operation at the time. So when NASA was founded in 1958 with the National Aeronautics and Space Act, it was charged with three responsibilities by Congress to conduct aeronautical and space research, to involve the scientific community in that research, and to provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information relating to those activities. So public affairs was essentially one of the three fundamental pillars of NASA's formation, because it was understood that the public was going to need to know how these dollars were being spent, how it was relevant to them,

and why. The very forward-looking congressional staff or whomever who wrote that line in the NASA Authorization Act, and again, maybe anticipating this, right? So this brings up an issue I think we should touch on, which is the cultural kind of representation of space, particularly up to this point in the early 60s, before things are really starting to get rolling, where it was really fantasy and fiction, right? I've read Howard McCurdy's book on space in the American imagination, and this idea that Apollo was able to happen because in a sense, the public had been primed to understand space travel, and it wasn't just a laughable proposition. But at the same time, the way that it was represented in media was kind of laughable, right? What was space presented to the public like at this point?

So in the 20s through the 50s, that's when spaceflight really entered into American popular culture through figures like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. And people were following these serialized accounts of their adventures in space in comics and radio and television. These were essentially dramas that happened to occur in space. And there was some attention to potentially like scientific aspects of spaceflight, but that really wasn't at the heart of it. As you watch popular culture evolve after the start of NASA, you see that the public is starting to demand greater accuracy in their pop culture experiences related to spaceflight. And so you start to see the development of

television shows like Man in the Challenge and Man in Space, where it's focusing on characters that could easily be a real person. Without ray guns, they were Air Force colonels who were interested in traveling into space, right? And then you eventually get back into the fantasy, starting into the sort of the late 60s with things like I Dream of Jeannie, but the fantastical element is not the space flight. It's the Jeannie companion. Exactly. We should touch on, of course, which most of our listeners already are familiar with, the Collier's articles, of course, in the 50s. And then the Disney TV shows that may be even more important to the general public. Let me just briefly discuss those because those weren't just, those were presented

scientifically, but they were very much propaganda in a sense. Absolutely. The group of individuals responsible for the Collier series are known as the space boosters. They were really trying to boost public regard for spaceflight, showing them that it wasn't just fantasy, but it was actually feasible. And look at the work that's been done to get us to this point. It was a herald saying that spaceflight is imminent. It's no longer in the realm of fantasy. The Collier series was started in 52. And then in 54 through 57, I believe, von Braun took the message of the Collier's magazines, which had reached about 12 million people, to Walt Disney's Disneyland television series, and 42 million

people, almost a quarter of the American public, watched these episodes. And what's interesting both about Collier's and about the Disney productions is that they're not completely divorced from fantasy, because the Collier's magazines were illustrated by Chesley Bonestell, who himself had worked in Hollywood beforehand. And he was imagining all of these landscapes and spacecraft in space that no one could see. And so there was an element of fantasy in selling the written word that accompanied that in Collier's. And then, of course, when you have Disney involved in the series in which Von Braun consulted and also appeared on screen, you have the Disney Imagineers who are doing the graphics. You have really fun

and totally approachable cartoons that talk about the physics of rocket propulsion, right? Those two elements were very much representative of this transition and how the public consumed spaceflight and what they expected of that. Yeah. And so that was happening in the late 50s, kind of leading right up to when the actual space age began. There's just something so interesting looking back at this. I mean, something you just said really stuck with me that like a quarter of the American populace saw that Disney show because there was what, three channels, right? And if you just, you had one in three chance of watching it basically. And then I guess the other quarter just didn't watch TV that

night. It reminds you at this point that there was really much a stronger monoculture in a sense, and, or at least in terms of gatekeeping of what was represented in culture, right? And we'll get to some of this again, more in terms of who was represented and who was welcome and who wasn't. But the idea, and it makes me think about this idea for Apollo. We've touched on this, but I think we can just answer this right now. Was Project Apollo the result of a grassroots demand? No, not at all. Right. It was, it could not be more top down. It came from the president's desk. Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. And you really don't see that as much these days, right? Because of our whole media ecosystem is so much more diverse, right? And then, of course, I mean, there's a lot of other factors. But what we're seeing, I think, with Apollo is, in a sense, and also in terms of how we look back and see Apollo through the eyes of Walter Cronkite, or, you know, again, just like these kind of great men of broadcasting at the time, because there was three networks. men of broadcasting at the time because there was three networks. In a sense, a triumvirate relied on this idea that if you could capture the people who made the influencing content and media, then

you could really do a lot with that. And so like Von Braun's insight, I think, was that he was able to access and influence and inspire not just the public, but the gatekeepers to the public. Absolutely. As an insight into some of Von Braun's strategy, before he collaborated with Disney, he actually had a contract to work with CBS. But he felt when the Disney offer came through, that he would reach a wider audience through Disney, and it would be a better production quality. And so he was able to get out of the CBS contract as a result of the various production delays. Yeah, yeah, I remember reading that as it's like, that's a very savvy insight at the time, right? And again, the reason

I bring this up is because we've already touched on this, but this idea that the people who didn't like how Apollo money was being spent, I mean, they were functionally sidelined for the first five years of the program. I mean, NASA's budget grew. I remember the peak appropriation was in 1965. NASA's peak spending was in 1966. And, you know, so we had four years, really, of just up, up, up, up, up. It kind of coincided with the, obviously JFK's overlap and then Lyndon Johnson's takeover of the program. Very helpfully, those are the most important years in

any space development project is that the money shows up to start figuring out how to do it, right? That's when you need the money. Let's start moving into going back to Teague, Representative Teague in the House, was it Committee on Manned Spaceflight? The subcommittee. Subcommittee on Manned Spaceflight. So he's starting to get more and more feedback that in reaction to the incredible growth of spending in Apollo, people are starting to react negatively to it. Maybe you take over the story from here. What does he decide to do in reaction to this? Well, Teague makes an incredibly radical suggestion. He writes to James Webb, administrator of NASA, in early 1964. So in December of 63, he had gotten the survey from Grumman, you know, had a year's worth of correspondence

suggesting that the public is starting to feel really ambivalent about Project Apollo. And he writes to Webb and says, I think that we need to allow the American people to see how their money is being spent in a more participatory fashion. And we should open up the Kennedy Space Center to visitors. There are two things that I really find fascinating about that. One is that his confidence that just by seeing it, people would be transformed or convinced, right? It kind of touches on Roger Lanius's paper that I love about human spaceflight as a religion, right? Like if you just, if the scales just fall out of their eyes, they'll be converts to the cause. But also the idea that there wasn't a way to access this before. And that this didn't come from NASA, this came from someone in Congress. So was NASA just completely out of the game on this? Were they just focusing

on the project? They weren't thinking about these larger issues of public support? They were very much concerned with the larger issues of public support. They had a very active public affairs apparatus. There was a center at headquarters and every NASA center had their own PAO, public affairs office. And they did everything from exhibits to educational programs to even running an art program. So NASA was on top of it. But when it came to access to its space centers, they were often run like secure military installations. There was dangerous work being performed there. And some of the work that was going on was classified. So there wasn't a reason for the public to come on board. confidence was not. It came from the fact that in his own personal experience, he would often tour the Cape and other NASA facilities. And sometimes he would bring friends or constituents who had

asked to come along. And he saw that their reactions changed after they had seen the scope and the scale of what was going on at NASA. People really couldn't comprehend how big this operation was, how many people were involved until they saw it on the ground. Yeah, literally true. Until you see the vehicle assembly building, there's like that difference between experiential and informational knowledge, right? Like, I can tell you how big the VAB is, but you don't feel how big it is until you see it, right? And it's, I always think of like, that's one aspect of why that sort of pseudo religiosity reaction is kind of present in spaceflight is because you are really standing against something that's immense. And you're

presented in this weird contrast with something that's beyond almost interpretation of how big it is. I think there's also something really fascinating about this, and that is the essence of why you have public representation in politics, right? I mean, that this came from the People's House, you know, the House of Representatives, that it was his idea to start opening up these areas to people. So what did he do exactly to make this happen? I mean, he's a powerful member of Congress. So what did he do to push NASA to do this? So Teague made the money appear to make these visitor programs happen. And he knew it would be successful not only because of his experience of dealing with friends and colleagues who toured the Cape, but because the Cape since the early or late 1950s had been attracting tourists. Tourists were coming to watch launches and they weren't able to access the Space Center at the time NASA was launching out of the Cape

Canaveral Air Force Station. And so Teague knew there was already an audience for this. He had seen what could happen to this audience through access to the Space Center. And he conveyed this to James Webb. And Webb was in agreement. And essentially, Teague was able to earmark a little over $1 million in the appropriations budget to build a visitor information center, the VIC, which actually still exists today, but has been modified quite a bit. But the VIC was a long time in coming. So there were multiple stages of access. At first, in late 1964, the Kennedy Space Center opened up a trailer that was parked alongside of the space center. It was actually outside of the gates. And the reason for this is that the space Center was still under construction. People were working

seven days a week. It wasn't possible for visitor safety purposes to allow others to come onto the site. After that, in early 1965, the pace of construction slowed to six days a week. And on Sundays, visitors were welcome to take a self-guided driving tour of the Kennedy Space Center. They would roll up in the family automobile and they would get a brochure with a map. They were not permitted to stop, but they could take photos. So I like to imagine how many families have blurry photos of the Kennedy Space Center tucked into photo albums somewhere in the attic. So reach out to me if you got them. Right. Because I mean, you didn't see the pictures until you develop them like a week and a half later, right? Exactly. Right. That was throughout 1965. And then the Kennedy

Space Center began working with TWA, Trans World Airlines, who provides many services besides transportation between LA and New York. And they started to operate a bus tour, was a seven days a week tour that started in 1966 in the summer. And then by the summer of 67, the VIC had finally opened. So it was a three, four year process in the making, and it quickly became one of the top tourist attractions in the state. This was before Walt Disney World opened. And after Disney World opened, there's sort of been a nice symbiotic relationship between the Cape and between Disney. The Disney cruises leave out of Port Canaveral. So now people will often see both sites when they go down to

visit Florida. So yeah, the origins of access to the Space Center, which we totally take for granted today, were really because of Olentig's efforts. Was this, again, more of a top-down or bottom-up? Because I recall in your dissertation talking about that people would start to just show up at NASA centers, right, just wondering what was going on. Yeah, completely unannounced. I find that so remarkable that without any formal invitation or indication that there would be anything to see or do, they just wanted to get close to the space program. They wanted to see what was going on, how their money was being spent. That's really difficult to do if you can't get on site. For the folks who traveled down to Florida, you might even have the benefit of watching a launch.

You don't need to be on site to see that. You can see it from miles away. So there was this audience that was already there. And what's really interesting is that at the same time that NASA was realizing we have this audience, let's make use of it, the local community is having the same realization. And so they start to develop space-themed tourism industries in Brevard County, in Huntsville, Alabama, in Houston, Texas, where all the major NASA human space light centers are located. And so this is why you have things like the Starlight Motel in Cocoa Beach, the Gemini Room and things like that. Yeah, I remember driving down some back road in Brevard County and seeing an old rundown gas station with a space shuttle mock-up on top,

down in the middle of nowhere, right? And it was just all of these things come together. And so this feels like the nexus of all these kind of themes we're kind of bringing together, right? The growth of leisure culture, middle class, mobile class, right? To be able to drive and see these things. And then with this attitude of, well, we're a democracy, we exist on the taxpayers, whether they're happy with us or not. So we owe it to them to open it up, right? And so you would even say like they even opened it up to Soviet citizens who wanted to come by and take a look at it, right? They did. There was a guest book at the Kennedy Space Center and anytime a visitor from the USSR came through, there was always an article in the KSC employee

newsletter sort of heralding the fact that, you know, we are open and transparent, so different from our adversaries. This whole idea, I think, is there's this weird contrast that I still can't figure out, conundrum that I'm trying to figure out here. And maybe it's impossible because you can't just apply one attitude towards a country of 200 million people at the time. But you're seeing this obvious interest in this space program, right? You're seeing a cultural consumption of it, right? In terms of media, TV shows, fiction, but at the same time, significant ambivalence about whether it's worth it. And I kept going back to this idea of, particularly in this 1960s United States, of what people

like versus what they're willing to pay for, right, what they're willing to prioritize, because I mean, just to go back to some of the polling data that Roger Lanius and others have put together, Apollo was never that popular. I mean, you have a couple of ways of like, basically, was Apollo worth it? And I think briefly, right after Apollo 11, it cracked 50%. Right. But never above that. Right. So less than half of the country thought it was ever worth it.

So how do you think we can talk about this? When you talk about support for Apollo, looking at particularly the growth of tourism and obvious demand, how do you reconcile these two aspects of the nation with this? There's certainly a difference between what people will consume and what they will support. And I think that that tension led to NASA becoming ever more creative in its ways to reach the American public. But specifically within the realm of tourism, there's a complicating factor. There's nothing more powerful than seeing the real thing. But the only people willing to go and see the real thing are the ones who are already sympathetic to the effort. And so that gets back to why NASA allowed photographs when people toured KSC and

why they had made sure that the visitor information center had a gift shop, because it was, they were hoping to turn the visitors into ambassadors for Project Apollo. They would go back into their home communities and show their friends photographs and say, look at this great work that we are supporting, that this is your space program. And so you should know what's going on. This may be impossible, but is there any way to quantify the consequences of those tourism or opening things up? Did it have any palpable change in public opinion or funding or political support? Any insight into that? You know what, that is such

a hard thing to quantify. And unfortunately, no one has been interested in doing a survey about that that could have been useful to me in my research. But I think what it's done is created a sense of entitlement, perhaps, because we feel today that we should be able to access NASA centers. Because of that, I think that that creates an interest, perhaps, in that this is our program. We can see it. We should weigh in on it. We have a voice. We should voice our opinion about what's going on. So whether or not the opinion that's voiced is one that is helpful or hurtful to NASA is something to be seen. But I think it allows people to feel connected and have agency. They're not just patrons, but they also are participants in this effort in some way.

Do you feel like there was a turning point in the 1960s in terms of political support for Apollo? Was there any particular moment or a series of incidents that happened that changed how the country approached it, or at least from a political level? I think the moon landing itself really was the end to the space race. We did it. After that, people stopped tuning in to watch coverage of the subsequent Apollo missions. The last three missions were canceled completely. And so I think that was the moment at which things changed because it ended. We had achieved this feat. And because NASA was so set on this singular goal for almost a decade of getting to the moon and returning astronauts

safely home, this meant that they hadn't put any effort or time or money into other endeavors. They were almost a one-trick pony. And they had performed that trick, and then it was over. I'll have an upcoming whole episode to talk about what they decided to do next. But when you achieve something so well, clearly, right, that was the goal. It almost seemed to undermine whatever latent political, I mean, because again, it felt like there's a tension running this whole time, I think that we've established to some degree, where there may have been some reticence to fund these incredible amounts, but ultimately the funding showed up when it was needed. Right. At peak, it was declining by the time the first landing happened.

It was still substantial compared to today. The landing itself maybe seemed to resolve that tension now that was just, all right, we've done it. Now we don't have to keep reluctantly funding this crazy program. We've shown that we can beat the Soviets or something. But maybe also by 69, culture had changed also substantially too, right? Do you want to just touch on what had changed in the country in the last nine years? Sure.

So at this point, we are under the presidency of Richard Nixon. He was very much interested in the political effects of Project Apollo. Very much in a similar vein to Kennedy, Nixon recognized the international implications of this effort. And so he rode the coattails of Project Apollo in an international tour called Moonglow. Right after Apollo 11, there was an international tour called Giant Step, where the astronauts traveled across the world. And this created a lot of political goodwill abroad, but the American public still felt like they had all of these issues that hadn't been resolved from the early 60s, right? And now we have the Vietnam War

going on. There was just a lack of interest in continuing to support something without these clear ground-based applications, which is why in 1970, NASA starts to publish Spinoff Magazine as a way of saying, look at all of these valuable technologies that we've produced in the quest of reaching the moon that can be useful elsewhere. It's also in the late 1960s where NASA actually starts to work more with other agencies. So in 68, they start to collaborate with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD. They're trying to work on these spinoff technologies because what is the Apollo command module and service module and LEM, if not a self-contained housing unit that's sustainable? And so people who had still unresolved housing issues in urban environments said, well, maybe the NASA engineers can help us solve these problems. And so they started to work together. So starting in the

late 1960s, NASA became more engaged with these larger problems. It strikes me too that by the end of the 60s, when the political support disappears, that by the end of the 60s, when the political support disappears, NASA didn't have the public level of support necessary to counter that. And we brought this up at the very beginning, or you brought this up at the very beginning. I want to touch on this too, which is the idea of representation in NASA, both for gender and race. Obviously, all the Apollo astronauts were white men. Most of the people at NASA were white men. You even talked about in terms of the leisure class and vacationing and tourism was predominantly, particularly in the South, you had a lot of issues with race. Briefly here, what do you think the consequences are from NASA, whether it was purposeful or not, the exclusionary practices that they had in terms of

both representation as astronauts, but also in access to their sites themselves? I think the best representation of this sense of exclusion is explored by Gil Scott Heron in his spoken word poem, Whitey on the Moon, right, which is doesn't come out until 72, I believe, but reflects a whole decade's worth of feeling excluded. The African American community felt like the U.S. government wasn't hearing its concerns and put money towards this effort of putting a white man on the moon, essentially. There was also a sense of exclusion. There are reports in the New York Times right after the moon landing of bars in African American neighborhoods in New York where they chose to watch a local baseball game instead after the moon landing of bars in African-American neighborhoods in New York,

where they chose to watch a local baseball game instead of the moon landing as protests, not just because they felt like their concerns hadn't been prioritized by the government, but also that they had been excluded from this effort. There was an attempt in the early 1960s to include an African-American astronaut, a man, of course, Ed Dwight, and he ultimately didn't make the cut for various reasons. There was also protests at NASA centers by women who said, you know, well, why aren't we here? The Soviet Union had Valentina Tereshkova go up in 1963, and there totally could have been a woman on the moon. So there were communities who were eager to change the makeup of NASA. I should say that NASA did change the communities in which

it was located because they were federal institutions. They could not be segregated. And so the local communities in Huntsville, for example, desegregated more quickly than the rest of Alabama. So there was sort of that change going on. But in general, the big change would happen in the shuttle era. More already civil rights legislation that was passed. There was just a public expectation that the shuttle core would look like the American public. Yeah, they did most of the hiring of the Apollo era astronauts in the early 1960s, right before most of the civil rights legislation had passed. Absolutely. And there was a really important note essentially in the hiring

criteria, which was that you had to have experience piloting a jet. And so that essentially disqualified women from taking on these positions, even though there was no, you know, header at the top, you know, women not wanted, this was their way of executing that. Yeah. And I feel like, you know, we're in kind of a recent period of our culture where we're looking at some of those voices that weren't represented as much. But I mean, the point of those movies and books is that those were exceptions. I'm thinking of Hidden Figures and others where it's inspiring, but the point is that that's an exception to the norm. Absolutely. You go back to why, why did Apollo happen and why hasn't it not happened again and probably will never happen again? I wonder if, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this, like because NASA enjoyed such overwhelming political support separated from overwhelming public support, it didn't have to build that up to rely on it initially, right?

It could just go and do the moon program and it could kind of blindly accept the exclusionary practices or whatever. I don't know the details of those, but it didn't bring people in at a large level. And so when it desperately needed political support in the late 60s, women weren't fully engaged. People of color weren't fully engaged. And so you just already handicapped themselves from having access to the full public support you would even need to continue something like this. Right. Absolutely. Yeah, that's definitely part of the story. Going back to the cultural aspect, particularly maybe from your expertise in terms of the relationship of people to like physical relationships, these engagement relationships that people started to develop with NASA centers, what were their fundamental and permanent changes to people's expectations to a federal agency from the work that NASA did trying to bring people in overall,

despite the failings that we just talked about? Like how many people do this with the Department of Agriculture, like demand to see like headquarters of the Department of Agriculture and say, I want to have a full tour and see this myself. I think that goes back to the act in which NASA was founded, having this third pillar of, you know, needing to provide information to the public about what's going on. I think that is why NASA has particular visibility. And that also makes it vulnerable to particular scrutiny, right? So if you go to any shopping mall today, you'll find NASA t-shirts at H&M and Forever 21, all these different places. You can buy NASA gear everywhere, but you can't do the same, as you mentioned, for FDA or especially not for the IRS, right? And so I think that NASA's

visibility is both a blessing and a curse. And its visibility was necessarily increased in the 60s because of this public criticism of the use of money on Project Apollo. But I will say that in, I think, 65, President Johnson issued a mandate to all federal agencies, which said, you need to increase your services to the public. So think about how to do that. And at the time, NASA reorganized some of its public affairs structure and continued to amplify its services. But that was something that was happening government-wide by the mid-1960s in terms of services to the public, not necessarily

tours of centers. Do you think the public from the actions taken in the 60s has a certain expectation now of access to NASA in particular that we should and this is deserved and did that spread beyond Kennedy Space Center and Marshall or the kind of the two first parts of that? Absolutely. Every NASA center now, no matter how small, has a visitor center. Whether or not they have full-time visitor programs or at least a community open house a few times a year, that is something that is a permanent change at NASA that started in this era and I don't think will go back. As we're kind of wrapping up here, I hope that we've demonstrated that Apollo wasn't just this monolithic, approved, everyone liked it.

And by gosh, only if we could get back to that point in the history where the whole country was behind this, then we could go back to the moon again. Why do you think it's important for people to learn about this political resistance, the complications of this? What does that tell us? Why don't we just embrace this nice story that makes us feel good about the past? It's incredibly important for the future of space exploration because history repeats itself. And some of the arguments that were made against NASA at the time in the 60s are still leveraged against NASA today. So thinking about the ways in which the public engages with the space program and how that works within a democracy and how important that is, is incredibly vital to moving forward with a public space program.

Well, Dr. Emily Margolis, I want to thank you for joining us today. This was fascinating. I really hope to personally be a tourist at every single NASA center. That's my goal in life. I made it to a decent number of them and space camp. I want to acknowledge we are both adult space camp graduates, which I recommend that people do as well. And the space camp story, maybe we can have you on in the future to talk about why space camp is and where that came from, because that'd be a lot of fun. Absolutely. It'll be my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Casey. Chief Advocate for the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer, in conversation with Emily Margulis. Part of this great series of conversations you've had, Casey, regarding the Apollo program. You can catch those in the Space Policy Edition.

But remind everybody once again of that special series where you've pulled all these together with your special introductions. Yeah, that's a political history of Apollo. And again, you can find it on anything, basically Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play. It's all out there. You can find it on our website, of course, as well. And yes, it's the same interviews, but with new introductions and analysis by me in front of every episode. You can listen to them all together, including ones we haven't played yet here on the Space Policy Edition. And you can get that full story starting from the prehistory of the space age to the final decisions to walk away from the moon. And it

really puts everything into a really nice context for this Apollo 50th anniversary year that we're going to be going through. And not by coincidence, all the places you can hear that series are also where you can hear Planetary Radio. We hope that you will tune in next month, the first Friday in September, to the next Space Policy Edition. And another one of those conversations, I believe, unless something big comes up, Casey, probably your conversation with our old friend John Logsdon. Yes, we will be looking at why it all ended. So looking at the after Apollo era, the decision by Nixon to stop the moon program and move to the shuttle, and to just see, try to understand how we could have possibly decided to just walk away, which is something I still struggle with understanding as someone born

a decade after the last moon landing. And between now and then, several more episodes of Planetary Radio, the weekly series that is the basis for all of this, that is supported by our members, our beloved members of the Planetary Society. We thank you if you're one of them. And if you're not, we invite you to join this worldwide grassroots effort to boost and communicate the success, the wonder, and the

joy of space exploration. The passion, beauty, and joy is our boss, the CEO, Bill Nye puts it. You can do that by going to planetary.org slash membership. Casey, I look forward to talking to you yet again and go light sail, right? Oh, of course. Let's see it. It'll be pretty much the only space thing happening in August, I will declare. When everyone else has taken vacations

and Congress is back in their districts, you can look up and try to see light sail. Looking forward to it, literally. Thanks very much, Casey. As always, Matt,

see you next month. This is the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. As I said, we'll be back first Friday in September. Hope you'll join us then. Thanks for listening and Ad Astra.