Apollo in the Age of Aquarius by Neil Maher

Abstract

Reviewed by: Apollo in the Age of Aquarius by Neil Maher Martin J. Collins (bio) Apollo in the Age of Aquarius. By Neil Maher. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 368. Hardcover $29.95. Reflecting on the 1960s, author Joan Didion wondered whether a new historical condition had emerged in which connections among events were proliferating, binding the large-scale to the small, the central to peripheral, the meaningful to the nonsensical. In short, the very notion of agency, of what related to what, with what consequence, loomed as ever more challenging to trace or assess. Neil Maher enters onto this terrain with his critically thoughtful, exhaustively researched Apollo in the Age of Aquarius. Apollo here references the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) signature spaceflight program of the 1960s and early 1970s to land a "man" on the Moon and return him safely. Age of Aquarius points to the period's key and overlapping activist grassroots social and political movements: civil [End Page 640] rights, women's rights, the environment, and the opposing politics of the New Left and the New Right. Maher's main objective is to analyze and detail the consequential interplay between these two domains, between the "squares" and those who saw the square outlook, embodied by NASA, as blinkered to everyday realities of racial and gender discrimination, capitalism, and human impact on the environment. The key flashpoint in this interplay was the Moon mission: its vast expense, its masculine and rationalist bravado, its embodiment of traditional social hierarchies, its integration into the priorities of the Cold War state made it an outsize foil for the new activism. National priorities, allocation of resources, dominant structures of value, and the entire social fabric were at stake. By the early 1970s such confrontation, Maher argues, reshaped NASA's sense of mission and, in turn, recast the discourse and actions of these various movements. Indeed, the relationship to NASA, in different ways and degrees for each movement, became symbiotic. The historiographic rationale for this framing is that NASA-centric scholarship has tended to give inadequate attention to that institution's broader impact on American cultural life (a claim less true in recent years) and, inversely, that the histories of 1960s social movements have missed the importance of NASA and spaceflight to those movements' development and agendas. This is, then, a story about historical agency in the 1960s, seeking to complicate our understanding of the circuits of power and change—and to query scholarly interpretations on the broader meaning and impact of the period. It is toward this end that Maher characterizes his effort not as cultural or social history but political history (p. 9). With this positioning, Maher provides chapter treatments of the movements for civil rights, the environment, women, and the New Right (juxtaposed with the New Left), exploring for each their interactions with NASA, spaceflight, and the larger frame of Cold War science and technology. In the main, these chapters are tours de force. The narrative is lively and often elegant, richly detailed, and draws on research from a wide range of archives and media (cartoons, ephemera, songs. alternative newspapers, and more). Familiar events and actors abound (The Poor People's Campaign, Woodstock, Stewart Brand), enriched with new insight and interpretation; as do a host of less well-known events and actors. For example, in the chapter "Spaceship Earth: Civil Rights and NASA's War on Poverty", Maher deftly unpacks the relationship between Southern Christian Leadership Conference's president Reverend Ralph Abernathy and NASA. It arced from a dramatic confrontation with NASA Administrator Thomas Paine at the Apollo 11 launch over the moral fecklessness of funding trips to the Moon as the basic needs of African Americans became more urgent (a pre-echo of Gil Scott Heron's 1970 song "Whitey on the Moon") to NASA applying "high-tech" to urban problems such as the need for energy efficient buildings. Such telling vignettes are multiplied throughout [End Page 641] the book. Perhaps the strongest material is that on the NASA/environmental movement relationship (not surprising given Maher's prior well-regarded work on the history of environmentalism), in which NASA's post-Apollo commitment to...