Last updated: February 21, 2024
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Podcast 148: Cultural Impacts of the Apollo Program
Getting involved with the History of the Apollo Program
Image courtesy of Bret Bennington
Bret Bennington: Bret Bennington. I'm a Professor of Geology at Hofstra University on Long Island in New York.
Rodney Hill: And I'm Rodney Hill. I'm an Associate Professor of Radio, Television, Film, also at Hofstra University in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication.
Catherine Cooper: You just published a book called After Apollo. Where did this project start?
Bret Bennington: It started because someone in the administration at Hofstra University thought it would be a good idea for Hofstra to do something to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing, and the reason for that is probably the location of Hofstra University in Nassau County on Long Island, Nassau County is where there were many milestones in the early history of flight, but it's also where the lunar module was built by the Grumman Corporation. And so there's this connection. Charles Lindbergh took off from a spot about a mile north of Hofstra University, basically from what is now the entrance to Macy's at the mall.
So the call went out for faculty who would be interested in organizing a conference, and I've always had an interest in space flight. I was always a wannabe astronaut growing up. I'm an amateur astronomer. My day job is paleontologist, but I'm an amateur astronomer. So I immediately saw that this would be a great opportunity to maybe do something interesting related to the history of space flight. And then they decided they also wanted a faculty member who represented not so much the sciences but the humanities. And ...
Rodney Hill: Yeah. I will just also add that Hofstra University has a wonderful cultural center, and they put on conferences throughout the year on many different topics. They're actually known for their series of presidential conferences, looking back on the presidencies of recent administrations. I think the last one they did was ...
Bret Bennington: They just did Obama?
Rodney Hill: They just did one on Obama.
So they do conferences on all sorts of things, and so it was kind of natural, given the Long Island connections to Apollo, that they would do something on the 50th anniversary. And as Bret said, they wanted to cover not only the science aspects, but also the humanities and the arts. And so the administration sort of came to me and asked if I would help and sort of oversee the humanities and arts side of things. I do film studies, and one of my big interests is Stanley Kubrick, and of course, Kubrick did 2001: A Space Odyssey, so we were actually able to work that into the conference.
It came out in 1968. So the film came out before Apollo, and I think it came out even before we had very good photographs of the Earth from space. So all those visual effects in 2001 are just completely imagined, it's from the imagination of the filmmakers. So that interest in Kubrick, and I've also always been interested in science fiction film, and so this was a great fit for me as well. So out of that conference, so Bret and I ended up sort of co-directing the conference. We had scholars from all over the country.
One of the high points of my life, and I'm probably speaking for you as well, one of the guests of the conference was Dr. Mae Jemison, one of the Space Shuttle astronauts, and Bret and I did a Q&A with her on stage. And I could have died then and there and been quite satisfied with my life. It was a real honor to meet her. She was just delightful.
Bret Bennington: A very impressive person.
Rodney Hill: Gave a wonderful keynote talk for us, so that was really nice.
Bret Bennington: And there were a lot of little kids in the audience who knew exactly who she was and were really ... There was a little girl, who was probably six or seven, sitting in the second row holding a Mae Jemison doll, and this kid was vibrating in her seat. She was so excited. So that was really cool.
Rodney Hill: Yeah, that whole experience really brought tears to my eyes just being there with her and seeing the audience reaction to her. We also did a screening at the Cradle of Aviation Museum of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and we brought over Jan Harlan, who was Stanley Kubrick's producer, and he introduced the film and did a Q&A afterwards. And that was a real honor for me to get to meet Jan Harlan in person.
Bret Bennington: And we had a film student.Rodney Hill:Oh, yeah. One of our film students, she was a senior at the time, Connie Anderson Castilla, I think professionally now she goes by Connie Tais, she was one of my students in film, but she was also taking an honors course with Bret, and that's how she found out about our conference at Hofstra. And she approached you about, she wanted to do a documentary on the Grumman engineers.Bret Bennington:So about half-a-mile from campus is the Cradle of Aviation Museum, which has the lunar module, the actual lunar module that would've flown on either Apollo 18 or Apollo 19. And they have volunteers, who are the former engineers, retired engineers, who worked on the lunar module, who kind of hang around the exhibit and will talk to you and tell you everything you want to know about it. And so I was able to connect Connie up with the people at the museum who worked with these volunteers, and she ended up interviewing a bunch of them and doing this wonderful oral history documentary. It was very moving, I thought.
Rodney Hill: When she first told me about the project, I was thinking, "Okay, this is going to be like a 10-minute student documentary. It'll be very nice." And she said, "Oh, no. This is going to be like forty-five minutes long." And I thought, "No, no, no, you can't do that. That's way too ambitious." But when I saw it, I was really blown away. She did a magnificent job. She traveled down to the National Archives and got a lot of footage and research and things.
Bret Bennington: She got a bunch of NASA images and footage, and sort of interspersed them in with the footage of the gentleman that she was interviewing.
Rodney Hill: It was really an extraordinary piece of work, and they showed it at the Cradle of Aviation, and I think it's been in a couple of other festivals. And Connie is now working with Ken Burns' company. So yeah, so we're very proud of her.
Bret Bennington: Yeah, for sure.
Rodney Hill: And so we took the best of those presentations and asked those authors to flesh things out and give us really full-blown essays that ended up in this book.
Bret Bennington: It's a good example of how if you volunteer to do things that are outside of your comfort zone, it very often leads to interesting opportunities, and that's how you broaden yourself intellectually.
Rodney Hill: So these essays come from all sorts of different approaches, different fields of academia. So we have chemists represented in the book, but we also have political scientists and film studies people and cultural studies people. It's a really great collection. I'm pretty proud to be associated with it, to be honest.
Catherine Cooper: There's so much variety, and it really shows how interdisciplinary and how broad-reaching Apollo was, how important it was to all spectra of American society.
The Space Race wasn’t Inevitable
Bret Bennington: One of the things I think that comes out of this book is how it didn't necessarily have to happen. It wasn't inevitable. And there's a chapter that discusses how these German rockets ... So if you think about contingency, one of the things that happens after World War II is we invade Germany, and we capture a bunch of German rocket scientists, including Wernher von Braun, and we bring them back to the US, and we put them to work. Itjust so happens that Wernher von Braun was an evangelist for space travel. The thing that he cared about more than anything was getting humanity off this planet, regardless of what you think of him as a human being because of the fact that he used slave labor to build the rockets in Germany, and he was bombing London and everything. If you listen to him, he did what he had to do to realize his vision of getting humans off the planet.
And he ends up teaming up with Walt Disney to basically sell the idea, this idea that space travel is human destiny to the American public. And I don't think the space program would've been possible without that sort of propaganda groundwork that was done that planted the idea in the public, because it costs so much money to put astronauts on the Moon.
Rodney Hill: Actually, the chapter on Disney and Wernher von Braun is written by somebody who was not at our conference, a former grad school buddy of mine named Chris Robinson. And I knew that he was interested in Disney television and that he had sort of been researching this, so I said, I contacted him and said, "Hey, Chris. We're putting together this book. If you have something, we'd be happy to take a look at it."
And this is like mid-1950s, we're talking 1955 or so, when Disney had just started his Disneyland TV series with ABC, which really was all about promoting the idea of Disneyland as he's building the park and then getting people excited about that. But then there were these different segments, including Tomorrowland, and this is where the man in space segments with von Braun sort of came into play, this Disney imagination of the future of humanity, right? Kind of fun that way.
Bret Bennington: It's good old German propaganda and American fantasy, sort of ...
Catherine Cooper: Capitalism.
Bret Bennington: ...capitalism combining to lay the groundwork. And then the first chapter in the book is this one by Matthew Hirsch is this wonderful sort of take, a review of the whole Apollo enterprise and how he calls it, "We ran as if to meet the Moon." And he just points out what a crazy idea, and it's kind of a miracle that it worked. Again, there was nothing sort of predestined about it, and it could have gone wrong in a hundred ways and never come to pass, but it did, and it changed everything.
And he ends up teaming up with Walt Disney to basically sell the idea, this idea that space travel is human destiny to the American public. And I don't think the space program would've been possible without that sort of propaganda groundwork that was done that planted the idea in the public, because it costs so much money to put astronauts on the Moon.
Rodney Hill: Actually, the chapter on Disney and Wernher von Braun is written by somebody who was not at our conference, a former grad school buddy of mine named Chris Robinson. And I knew that he was interested in Disney television and that he had sort of been researching this, so I said, I contacted him and said, "Hey, Chris. We're putting together this book. If you have something, we'd be happy to take a look at it."
And this is like mid-1950s, we're talking 1955 or so, when Disney had just started his Disneyland TV series with ABC, which really was all about promoting the idea of Disneyland as he's building the park and then getting people excited about that. But then there were these different segments, including Tomorrowland, and this is where the man in space segments with von Braun sort of came into play, this Disney imagination of the future of humanity, right? Kind of fun that way.
Bret Bennington: It's good old German propaganda and American fantasy, sort of ...
Catherine Cooper: Capitalism.
Bret Bennington: ...capitalism combining to lay the groundwork. And then the first chapter in the book is this one by Matthew Hirsch is this wonderful sort of take, a review of the whole Apollo enterprise and how he calls it, "We ran as if to meet the Moon." And he just points out what a crazy idea, and it's kind of a miracle that it worked. Again, there was nothing sort of predestined about it, and it could have gone wrong in a hundred ways and never come to pass, but it did, and it changed everything.
The Importance of Art and Imagination
Rodney Hill: And one of the things he talks about is the fact that there always has been this notion that we could do that, that going to the Moon is something that we could consider. So he sort of looks at the history of science fiction stories, envisioning man going to the Moon. This goes back at least into the 1800s with Jules Verne and other people. And then in the earliest motion pictures, you have these fantasy films of going to the Moon. And so that's one of the things that Hirsch finds so amazing is that we imagine that this is something we could think about doing.
Catherine Cooper: Yeah. Méliès, and all of those early silent films.
Rodney Hill: Yeah. That's one of the beautiful things about science fiction. You have to imagine something before it can become a real thing.
Catherine Cooper: And then it also almost becomes a template for, "I wonder if we can do that?" And then we invent things to make it happen.
Rodney Hill: Right. Then how would we do it? What would this look like, and how would we do it?
Bret Bennington: There's another chapter which I like called Picturing Women in the Space Age, the Impact of the Lunar Landing on Film, Television, and Fashion that looks at sort of how the space program impacted women. Initially, women weren't really allowed to participate, but the sort of cultural fascination with space travel definitely did not exclude women. So you have women who are characters in TV and film playing important roles as space travelers long before NASA allowed women any significant participation as space travelers.
Rodney Hill: And the author of that chapter, Julie Wosk, actually curated an exhibit at the Queens Museum of all these images of women. In terms of fashion, you have fashion designers coming up with these space age looks for women's fashion, and she also looks at a lot of film and television images. I think that's an exhibit that has been traveling around to other museums as well.
Catherine Cooper: Yeah. Méliès, and all of those early silent films.
Rodney Hill: Yeah. That's one of the beautiful things about science fiction. You have to imagine something before it can become a real thing.
Catherine Cooper: And then it also almost becomes a template for, "I wonder if we can do that?" And then we invent things to make it happen.
Rodney Hill: Right. Then how would we do it? What would this look like, and how would we do it?
Bret Bennington: There's another chapter which I like called Picturing Women in the Space Age, the Impact of the Lunar Landing on Film, Television, and Fashion that looks at sort of how the space program impacted women. Initially, women weren't really allowed to participate, but the sort of cultural fascination with space travel definitely did not exclude women. So you have women who are characters in TV and film playing important roles as space travelers long before NASA allowed women any significant participation as space travelers.
Rodney Hill: And the author of that chapter, Julie Wosk, actually curated an exhibit at the Queens Museum of all these images of women. In terms of fashion, you have fashion designers coming up with these space age looks for women's fashion, and she also looks at a lot of film and television images. I think that's an exhibit that has been traveling around to other museums as well.
Civil Rights, Immigration, and the Space Race
Catherine Cooper: You mentioned that there's this broad base of support, that this was basically sold to the public, but it wasn't for everybody in the public, and there's a chapter on that specifically, isn't there?
Rodney Hill: Yes. Yeah. Patricia Rossi, who's an attorney on Long Island, I believe she's a civil rights attorney among other things, she talks about the backlash among civil rights leaders at the time, representatives, leaders from the African-American community pointing out the irony of spending millions and millions of dollars on what they saw as a kind of superfluous gesture to go to the Moon, while obviously there's problems of poverty and injustice in the US that need attention and need funding. Whatever somebody may think about that particular argument, Rossi points out that this controversy acted as a kind of ...
Bret Bennington: Catalyst.
Rodney Hill: ...catalyst, that's the word I'm looking for, a catalyst for renewing energy in the civil rights movement to say, "Hey, come on. If we can do this, we can also take care of these other problems."
Catherine Cooper: Right. Fix some things at home.
Rodney Hill: Right, right.
Bret Bennington: Yeah. She points out that even before Apollo 11 launched, Ted Kennedy came out basically in favor of canceling the Apollo program because it was costing too much money. So John Kennedy's own brother just said that we can't afford to do this, that we're neglecting these other priorities, that people are starving in American cities, and we need to address that. And that argument eventually became so compelling that Nixon did cancel the Apollo program. He politically couldn't justify the expense anymore.
Rodney Hill: It's too bad we didn't actually do anything substantial about the poverty problem, though. Right? "Okay. We canceled this one thing. That doesn't mean that we solved the other problems."
Bret Bennington: Well, I think Rossi argues that this controversy did lead to some of the important civil rights legislation that came along in the late '60s and early '70s.
Catherine Cooper: And then it's also tied to other important aspects of the United States' policies with regards to immigration, because we started with Wernher von Braun, who we got from Germany, and then a whole bunch of other international figures are important to this as well.
Bret Bennington: There's a chapter by another Hofstra faculty member named Rosanna Perotti, who talks about the critical role that immigrants have always played in the space program, the different sort of generations of immigrants, that the original immigrants were the German rocket scientists and some Italian immigrants who came to the US before and during the war to escape fascism. And then immigrants from other parts of the world became important to the space program after Apollo, and she gives some really some nice examples of different individual people who were important.
Rodney Hill: In various different capacities, including as engineers and some later astronauts, and so all throughout the space program.
Catherine Cooper: Right.
Bret Bennington: My favorite is Farouk El-Baz. He was a remote-sensing expert from Egypt, who ended up being a big part of training the astronauts to be extraterrestrial geologists, in particular, training the command module pilots to make observations of the lunar topography and lunar geology from orbit. But it was also part of their other scientific training.
Rodney Hill: Yes. Yeah. Patricia Rossi, who's an attorney on Long Island, I believe she's a civil rights attorney among other things, she talks about the backlash among civil rights leaders at the time, representatives, leaders from the African-American community pointing out the irony of spending millions and millions of dollars on what they saw as a kind of superfluous gesture to go to the Moon, while obviously there's problems of poverty and injustice in the US that need attention and need funding. Whatever somebody may think about that particular argument, Rossi points out that this controversy acted as a kind of ...
Bret Bennington: Catalyst.
Rodney Hill: ...catalyst, that's the word I'm looking for, a catalyst for renewing energy in the civil rights movement to say, "Hey, come on. If we can do this, we can also take care of these other problems."
Catherine Cooper: Right. Fix some things at home.
Rodney Hill: Right, right.
Bret Bennington: Yeah. She points out that even before Apollo 11 launched, Ted Kennedy came out basically in favor of canceling the Apollo program because it was costing too much money. So John Kennedy's own brother just said that we can't afford to do this, that we're neglecting these other priorities, that people are starving in American cities, and we need to address that. And that argument eventually became so compelling that Nixon did cancel the Apollo program. He politically couldn't justify the expense anymore.
Rodney Hill: It's too bad we didn't actually do anything substantial about the poverty problem, though. Right? "Okay. We canceled this one thing. That doesn't mean that we solved the other problems."
Bret Bennington: Well, I think Rossi argues that this controversy did lead to some of the important civil rights legislation that came along in the late '60s and early '70s.
Catherine Cooper: And then it's also tied to other important aspects of the United States' policies with regards to immigration, because we started with Wernher von Braun, who we got from Germany, and then a whole bunch of other international figures are important to this as well.
Bret Bennington: There's a chapter by another Hofstra faculty member named Rosanna Perotti, who talks about the critical role that immigrants have always played in the space program, the different sort of generations of immigrants, that the original immigrants were the German rocket scientists and some Italian immigrants who came to the US before and during the war to escape fascism. And then immigrants from other parts of the world became important to the space program after Apollo, and she gives some really some nice examples of different individual people who were important.
Rodney Hill: In various different capacities, including as engineers and some later astronauts, and so all throughout the space program.
Catherine Cooper: Right.
Bret Bennington: My favorite is Farouk El-Baz. He was a remote-sensing expert from Egypt, who ended up being a big part of training the astronauts to be extraterrestrial geologists, in particular, training the command module pilots to make observations of the lunar topography and lunar geology from orbit. But it was also part of their other scientific training.
Public Opinion on Space Exploration
Image Courtesy of Bret Bennington
Bret Bennington: Skylab ...
Catherine Cooper: ... and Skylab.
Bret Bennington: ... comes in. Skylab was made possible by the fact that we had all this Apollo hardware line around. One of von Braun's big ideas was to build a space station. So we were able to do that by taking, I think it was a Saturn V midsection and converting it into a space station, which became Skylab. So that was the major manned spaceflight endeavor until the Shuttle came along.
Catherine Cooper: Okay. And then we had the Shuttle and then another lull.
Bret Bennington: And that brings us into the modern, well, the International Space Station. And now we're into the era of commercial spaceflight.
Rodney Hill: It occurs to me that the public attitude towards these things today is pretty lackadaisical compared to the zeitgeist to the late '60s when everybody was interested in space. Certainly in American culture, it was such a part of everything. Everybody was drinking Tang, kids wanted to be astronauts, all these TV series have astronauts, things like I Dream of Jeannie and all sorts of strange things.
Bret Bennington: I think that's James, the last chapter in the book is written by James Spiller, and he talks about that, that shift in sort of how the public perceived manned spaceflight and astronauts was deliberate in a way, because the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts were promoted as explorers. This was the next frontier, and then they were the trailblazers that were risking life and limb to make it possible for humans to explore outer space.
But Skylab and the Shuttle, they were promoted differently. The idea behind the Shuttle was that space travel would become routine, and so the Shuttle astronauts weren't explorers, they were the settlers, they were the pioneers. They were the blue-collar astronauts who were just going up into low-earth orbit to get the job done. Shuttle launches weren't supposed to be seen as these amazing, adventurous things. They were supposed to be seen as just business as usual. It didn't quite pan out that way, because we lost two shuttles, and it wasn't very routine, it wasn't as safe as we wanted to think it was.
Rodney Hill: Spiller also talks about this transition from government-funded space travel to now the privatization of it. And so not only have you lost this idea of these explorers, but now it has become a thing, it's a phenomenon for rich tourists to go for up, for thrill seekers.
Bret Bennington: Right, and he specifically raises the question of are we going to be able to get the public behind human spaceflight if human spaceflight is seen as just a bunch of rich tourists going up into Earth orbit? I don't necessarily think that that's really happening. Yes, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, those enterprises are sort of predicated on being able to generate a lot of revenue by sending wealthy tourists up into low-earth orbit. But the people that go to Mars are not going to be wealthy tourists. They're going to be trailblazers in the mold of the Apollo astronauts, I think.
I mentioned this in the introduction. My feeling is that as long as, I mean maybe part of the way we're going to fund space travel in the future is by getting rich people to pay lots of money to go on sightseeing tours, and then that money gets funneled into developing technology and the hardware that we need to extend exploration. But government's always going to be involved because of the sums of money needed, particularly to develop really new technologies. SpaceX is being supported and funded by the federal government.
Catherine Cooper: And we also have the Artemis program.
Bret Bennington: Which is an interesting hybrid where NASA and its contractors are developing the rocket, but then NASA has given the responsibility for developing, subcontracted the lunar lander to SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Rodney Hill: And given the fact that there has to be this ongoing government support of these initiatives, I think it's essential to somehow get the public back on board and get public enthusiasm renewed for this. We're speaking to you here at this wonderful conference at Cape Canaveral that you've organized, and we've been hearing from various different perspectives. But one through-line that I've noticed at this conference is, much like our book, I mean the interdisciplinary aspects of this conference, you have people approaching these questions from an artistic standpoint. And I think that the mythologizing of it, the making space this big, this larger-than-life endeavor, if we can remind ourselves of the enormity of what has already been achieved, but what could be achieved in the future, and how that is important to the entirety of humanity. So I think that the arts and humanities could play a tremendous role in renewing that kind of enthusiasm.
And some of the participants here at the conference have asked questions like, "What should we be teaching our young people about people who want to be scientists and engineers, and how can they have an awareness of the historical importance of what they're doing so that they want to preserve the records of what they're doing?" And I think that's where the humanities come in. You've got to somehow instill a love of history in the people who are running these projects. It's not just about the technical aspects, it's not just about the money. It's also about this amazing, the gesture of getting off the planet. It's an amazing, amazing thing, and somehow, how did we ever lose that?
Bret Bennington: Is China going to be the next country that we're in a space race with, and will that motivate the public as a nation to care about space travel again? Of course, the other great motivator is money, and I think it remains to be seen whether there's money to be made beyond low-earth orbit. We know SpaceX has been very successful. Putting satellites in orbit is a very lucrative business. There's a lot of commercial applications to satellites. But is there money to be made on the Moon? Is there money to be made in the asteroid belt, on Mars? If there is, then I think we're going to colonize the solar system pretty quickly. If there isn't, then it remains to be seen. Because if there's a financial imperative, then as long as there's money to be made, companies will be doing that. If there isn't, then the only reasons to expand beyond earth become to get humanity off the planet as an insurance policy. So if we blow up the planet, we're still on the Moon, we're on Mars.
And then of course, the other imperative is scientific, but one can argue you can do most of the science with robots, which we've been very successful with.
Rodney Hill: Sure. Which is also not a very inspiring prospect. It's hard to get people excited about. But if things can be accomplished without astronauts on board these flights, by all means.
Bret Bennington: Having people involved definitely makes people care. I mean, the human element is super compelling.
Catherine Cooper: Wonderful. Thank you both so much.
Bret Bennington: You're welcome.
Rodney Hill: Thank you, Catherine.
Bret Bennington: Thank you.
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