(Just to clarify before I start, I’m not trying to gather evidence for a “hoax theory” or any other conspiracy theory nutjobbery, I am just curious about events which unfortunately I was born too late to witness.)
I’ve often heard it said that one of the reasons the Apollo program ended earlier than planned was that the public “lost interest” once the race to the moon had been won. In fact I’m sure I read that by the time of Apollo 17 (and perhaps earlier), the video footage from the lunar surface wasn’t even shown live on the TV, because nobody really cared any more!
Can this really be true? It boggles my mind somewhat that within a little over three years, men walking on the moon had gone from the greatest human achievement ever to an “And in other news…” segment on the evening bulletin. (OK, I exaggerate slightly, but you get the point).
I’d be interested to hear from people that were around in the early 1970s just how much of a big deal these later Apollo missions were at the time. Was everyone really bored of it already? Was there a view that it was a waste of money? Was everyone more interested in what was going on in Vietnam?
Maybe I’m just biased because I find space exploration fascinating – I’m amazed that the pictures from the Mars rovers etc don’t get more news airtime, for instance – but I just can’t quite get my head around the idea that people weren’t still utterly enthralled by the Apollo missions.
Yeah, I was around at the time. The Moon landing was huge, of course, and I think that was the problem. How do you follow that? NASA tried hard: golf on the Moon, driving round in the lunar buggy, etc, but the public quickly tired of it. It would have taken a Mars mission to maintain public interest at the heights it had been.
Maybe if NASA had kept up the moon landings, developed a base there, the interest could have been maintained. But the space shuttle was, in contrast, unspectacular, and eventually became routine.
Since when do any sequels capture the public imagination like the original? Who remembers the second person to climb Mt. Everest, or the second person to run a sub-four-minute mile?
There were eleven additional moon missions. Each was exactly the same as the previous moon mission. Public interest in the twelfth was equal to public interest in the twelfth person to climb Mt. Everest. Hardly surprising.
I think he means 11 people have walked on the moon after the first. There were only five (successful) manned missions to the lunar surface after Apollo 11, but 11 people walked on the surface after Armstrong.
I grew up in that era and it is pretty much true that people lost interest right after Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. Instead of talking about how we should go to Mars or establish a moon base, people began to ask “With the $24 billion we spent in the last decade to do this, why couldn’t we have spent the money on earth to fix problems here”? In my elementary school, they used to call an assembly, get everyone in the cafeteria to watch the Mercury takeoffs on television. I had changed school systems for junior high/high school and they didn’t do that there.
When the Ron Howard film “Apollo XIII” came out in 1995, there was an article in “New York Newsday” on how many people who were alive back when the flight happened were astonished to find out how close three astronauts came to dying in space. “I had no idea this was going on. It was a busy time with the Vietnam war, etc” many said.
I don’t know how much was televised after that because I lost interest. Read about the flights in the newspapers. But I always found the hours of TV coverage at the time pretty boring.
We’ve lost that knowledge now, though. It’s a shame. I’ve read that we’d have to do it all over again from scratch, and it would probably take longer because we can’t take the kind of risks now that we did then.
The article’s point being that while the exact knowledge is not lost, despited claims to the contrary, it would be a horrendous undertaking just to get companies to make the old parts that were used then. No one makes such outdated stuff any more. Of course you could use modern parts, but that’s called a whole redesign, so it’s not even really a Saturn V rocket anymore.
Unfortunately a more accurate version would be “They could put a man on the moon, but they can’t convince people they should do it again.”
I wonder if anyone in the early 1960s would have believed that in the first decade of the 21st century we’d be looking back on a brief and distant age of manned space exploration with nostalgia…
How is it that people could get tired of moon landings that happened, what, once every few years, but it took them over 6 years to tire of “Becker”, which was on once every week?
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
…
I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
…
Was all that money I made las’ year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain’t no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon)
Y’know I jus’ ‘bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I’ll sen’ these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)
“Whitey on The Moon”, The Last Poets, 1969 (Gil Scott-Heron’s more known cover of the song is 1970).
The other element being forgotten here is how precious television time was in those days. With three main channels aired throughout the country (larger cities had a few more, plus there was an educational TV channel in most places), it was very difficult to broadcast anything that was not exclusive to the network.
Also: we did have a major war on-going; it was shortly after the assassinations of RFK and MLK; a time of huge social upheaval (Woodstock, Kent State). Also, space science (as opposed to getting there) is not something of interest on television, as the true research is done in the labs after the moon rocks are returned.
The part that always enthralled me in the early landings was the quarantine trailer the astronauts were locked in when they returned to Earth to ensure they had not been exposed to extraterrestrial microbes.