Apollo Lunar Program Research Articles

The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War by Alexander MacDonald

Reviewed by: The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War by Alexander MacDonald Thomas C. Lassman (bio) The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War. By Alexander MacDonald. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 272. Hardcover $35. After the triumph of the Apollo lunar program in the late 1960s, public enthusiasm and political support for spaceflight ebbed. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) downsized and confined its human spaceflight activities to low earth orbit as budgets shrank and the Cold War drew to a close. Without a replacement for the post-Apollo space shuttle, a successful but costly and accident-prone technology retired in 2011, NASA has relied instead on the Russians to ferry American astronauts into space, and more recently it has seen its role and status diminished even further as a new paradigm takes hold. Billionaire entrepreneurs have seized the initiative and now stand on the cusp of revolutionizing the technology and economics of spaceflight. So the story goes, according to Alexander MacDonald, a historian and space policy expert who sets out to upend what he calls the conventional narrative history of American space exploration. The era of large, government-funded spaceflight programs embodied by NASA's Cold War mission, MacDonald argues, is the exception, not the rule. It did not define the Space Age. A longer historical perspective, dating back to the earliest days of the American republic, reveals that wealthy individuals—the antecedents of today's technology entrepreneurs—eagerly pursued and bankrolled the exploration of space. The recent exploits of Elon Musk and Jeffrey Bezos are not new but rather part and parcel of this broader historical trend. Three pivotal movements in American space exploration structure the book. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the emergence and evolution of privately funded astronomical observatories from the early nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century. Correlating expenditures across time, MacDonald demonstrates the extent to which these early investigative efforts compared in scale and scope to NASA's programmatic initiatives during the Cold War. Chapter 3 carries the same argument forward through the experience of visionary rocket pioneer Robert Goddard. Although he tapped wealthy individuals for funds to pay for his research, Goddard also looked to the military departments for resources, a precursor to the type of public-private partnership that flourished after Sputnik. Chapter 4 explicates the waning of private-sector initiative in the face of overwhelming political will and government expansion that drove the economics of the Cold War space race. The accumulation of national prestige and status through the execution of massive, public financed projects, however, still bore some similarities to the motivations of those wealthy benefactors who had funded the observatory movement years earlier. MacDonald demonstrates the pervasiveness and resilience of institutional [End Page 484] patterns of private-sector behavior in space exploration across two centuries of American history. It is a useful exercise that broadens our understanding of the subject, but it has one significant weakness. There is no discussion or analysis of the twenty-first-century privatization of spaceflight or the leading luminaries of the movement that prompted MacDonald to write the book in the first place. The history of the Cold War space race is "overdetermined" and subject to a "cacophony" of viewpoints that obscure long-term trends, he writes (pp. 160–61), but that recent history, complex and messy as it may be, still reveals much more about current spaceflight activities than MacDonald is willing to concede. Put another way, is it necessary to take a long view of the Space Age to explain how Elon Musk, Jeffrey Bezos, and other technology entrepreneurs are giving NASA and its contractors a run for their money? MacDonald surely could highlight Musk's motivations and their connections to earlier antecedents. He has, for example, publicly proclaimed an ambitious vision for humans to leave the planet and colonize other worlds. MacDonald could also argue that Musk resembles the nineteenth-century capitalist. Like Andrew Carnegie in steel, he founded commercial enterprises that rely on inputs of capital and labor to build rockets and automobiles...

Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Mission [Book Reviews

This beautifully mounted coffee table book – featuring over three hundred photos and images – is a celebratory work. It celebrates the branding of our lunar gaze in the selling of the NASA’s Apollo Lunar Program to land a man on the moon and bring him safely back before the end of the 1960s. This was the new frontier that President Kennedy brought us to conceive of and surmount as part of America’s exceptional role in the world. Getting Americans to buy into this dream and endeavor was the result, the authors argue, of a pioneering set of public relations techniques.

Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program by David Meerman Scott, Richard Jurek (review)

Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program by David Meerman Scott, Richard Jurek (review)

Marketing the moon: the selling of the Apollo lunar program

In July 1969, ninety-four percent of American televisions were tuned to coverage of Apollo 11's mission to the moon. How did space exploration, once the purview of rocket scientists, reach a larger audience than My Three Sons? Why did a government program whose standard operating procedure had been secrecy turn its greatest achievement into a communal experience? In Marketing the Moon, David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek tell the story of one of the most successful marketing and public relations campaigns in history: the selling of the Apollo program. Primed by science fiction, magazine articles, and appearances by Wernher von Braun on the Tomorrowland segments of the Disneyland prime time television show, Americans were a receptive audience for NASA's pioneering brand journalism. Scott and Jurek describe sophisticated efforts by NASA and its many contractors to market the facts about space travel -- through press releases, bylined articles, lavishly detailed background materials, and fully produced radio and television features -- rather than push an agenda. American astronauts, who signed exclusive agreements with Life magazine, became the heroic and patriotic faces of the program. And there was some judicious product placement: Hasselblad was the first camera on the moon; Sony cassette recorders and supplies of Tang were on board the capsule; and astronauts were equipped with the Exer-Genie personal exerciser. Everyone wanted a place on the bandwagon. Generously illustrated with vintage photographs, artwork, and advertisements, many never published before, Marketing the Moon shows that when Neil Armstrong took that giant leap for mankind, it was a triumph not just for American engineering and rocketry but for American marketing and public relations.

A History of the Kennedy Space Center

This first comprehensive history of the Kennedy Space Center, NASA's famous launch facility located at Cape Canaveral, Florida, reveals the vital but largely unknown work that takes place before the rocket is lit. Though the famous Vehicle Assembly Building and launch pads dominate the flat Florida landscape at Cape Canaveral and attract 1.5 million people each year to its visitor complex, few members of the public are privy to what goes on beyond the final outcome of the flaring rocket as it lifts into space. With unprecedented access to a wide variety of sources, including the KSC archives, other NASA centers, the National Archives, and individual and group interviews and collections, Lipartito and Butler explore how the methods and technology for preparing, testing, and launching spacecraft have evolved over the last 45 years. Their story includes the Mercury and Gemini missions, the Apollo lunar program, the Space Shuttle, scientific missions and robotic spacecraft, and the International Space Station, as well as the tragic accidents of Challenger and Columbia. Throughout, the authors reveal the unique culture of the people who work at KSC and make Kennedy distinct from other parts of NASA. The authors pay particular attention to "operational knowledge" developed by KSC - the insights that came from using and operating complex technology. This work makes it abundantly clear that the processes performed by ground operations are absolutely vital to success.

A history of the Kennedy Space Center

This first comprehensive history of the Kennedy Space Center, NASA's famous launch facility located at Cape Canaveral, Florida, reveals the vital but largely unknown work that takes place before the rocket is lit. Though the famous Vehicle Assembly Building and launch pads dominate the flat Florida landscape at Cape Canaveral and attract 1.5 million people each year to its visitor complex, few members of the public are privy to what goes on beyond the final outcome of the flaring rocket as it lifts into space. With unprecedented access to a wide variety of sources, including the KSC archives, other NASA centers, the National Archives, and individual and group interviews and collections, Lipartito and Butler explore how the methods and technology for preparing, testing, and launching spacecraft have evolved over the last 45 years. Their story includes the Mercury and Gemini missions, the Apollo lunar program, the Space Shuttle, scientific missions and robotic spacecraft, and the International Space Station, as well as the tragic accidents of Challenger and Columbia. Throughout, the authors reveal the unique culture of the people who work at KSC and make Kennedy distinct from other parts of NASA. The authors pay particular attention to operational knowledge developed by KSC - the insights that came from using and operating complex technology. This work makes it abundantly clear that the processes performed by ground operations are absolutely vital to success.