It blows my mind that there was significant opposition. I’d never heard of any of theis. Great thread.
I also recall reading a commentary about the space program that said it was far more partisan than people admitted.
Kennedy (D) and Johson pushed the Apollo program.
Nixon (R) cancelled what he could from it without making it a total waste, and pushed the shuttle program.
Carter (D) wanted to cancel the shuttle, but too much money had been spent, so he just lt it starve a bit for funds; Reagan (R) pushed the program and he and Bush I reaped the results. Clinton did as little as possible, so it was Bush II (R) who came up with the next space program… Which Obama cancelled to come up with his idea…
Oh, yeah, Johnson was all over it- that why they control from Houston.
And, agreed this is an important nuance:
Excuse me? I traveled by 707 to Africa in 1961 and it was hardly new or exotic. By the late 1960s jet air travel was about accepted as it is today, except much easier and with far better food. I’m not sure when the Eastern shuttle was set up - I flew it in early 1969 - but it was about as exotic as using the Running Dog bus company.
I think that after Sputnik the feasibility of moon travel was hardly an issue, though I don’t know about the timing. 1975 was a commonly given date, Clarke used it at the beginning of “Childhood’s End.” Most science and sf in the 1950s assumed that a moon trip would be done after we established an orbital presence - this probably would have been better than the way we actually did it.
For thousands of years or more the moon was a symbol of the unattainable, so attaining it was a bit of a shock for older people. My father was well over 40 in 1969, and had none of the reactions you mention. My mother read Jules Verne as a child, so she was more advanced. 
IIRC, the NY Times for the day of the landing (or maybe the launch) had Ralph Abernathy, who took over for Dr. King, on the front page protesting the space program. So there was opposition. People didn’t do polls at the drop of a hat back then, but I certainly agree support of Apollo was overwhelming - or at least it was until we did it once or twice and it became routine.
Still, I suspect that in certain communities there was majority opposition - but these were small.
Steven Weinberg recently opened my eyes to the pointlessness of many manned space flights. I love the idea, so it’s quite disappointing to be persuaded it’s a waste. The money spent on sending a couple of people to Mars could be spent on larger numbers of robots that are far more efficient at collecting data. I suppose the idea of more data excites me more than the idea of someone being there.
Huh? The 707 was introduced in 1958. It’s was Boeing’s very first jet. How is three years old not new and exotic?
I’ve done fairly extensive research on this recently and I flatly disagree. The basic principles and needs of moon travel had been established for decades. The fuel needs were widely thought to be beyond the capabilities of known rocket fuels. The science fiction community waved their hands and talked about atomic engines, as Heinlein did in Destination Moon and in the book it was adapted from, Rocket Ship Galileo, because they knew it was otherwise impossible. All rockets up through Sputnik used liquid oxygen, whose production was understood, and a variety of other fuels. Explorer’s Redstone rockets used ethyl alcohol and hydrogen peroxide. What was needed was liquid hydrogen, but that was thought to be impossible to manufacture, transport, and store in the quantities needed. You’re right about the “orbital presence,” but that was sheer propaganda for the cause. If you go back and look at those Collier’s articles you see that what von Braun and Ley were proposing was the creation of a gigantic space station at 1085 miles, fed by a fleet of “space taxis” (their term). The moon voyage would start from there. They simply assumed that a rocket from the earth to the moon was technically impossible. As it turned out, their space station was just as impossible and probably still is today.
Of course the rocket guys made claims that they could get it all done. The reality was that nobody on earth in 1957/58 knew how to engineer a moon rocket of the type we used in 1969. It took a crash program of engineering advances along a huge number of lines to make it happen. You’ll notice that the Soviets couldn’t even with a different political environment.
Do we need spoiler tags after all this time?
Nazi Moon Base!!!1!
Agreed that the steps from Sputnik to manned orbital flight to Moon landings wasn’t obvious or preordained.
You’re excused. 
I’m with Expano Mapcase on this, I just wanted to add this.
Even today, a teenager (or an Adult, for that matter) taking an intercontinental plane trip would be viewed as exotic, even if it was on a 25 year-old 747. Sure, lots of people do it, but way, way many more people would see it as being something they would never have the opportunity to do.
You are correct in that by the end of the decade, jet travel was accepted and common, but it was still new. Peter, Paul, and Mary’s hit “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane” topped the charts in 1969; the point being that it was a “Jet Plane”, not an “Airplane”. Today, the terms mean the same, but there was a big distinction in the 1960s. It’s just another illustration of how much and how quickly things changed in that decade.
In the opening monologue of the classic (but old) scifi film *Forbidden Planet *circa 1956 it’s predicted that we wouldn’t land on the Moon until the latter half of the 21[sup]st[/sup] century (i.e. the 2080s or so!) Even though it thought we’d still have stereotypical drunken (space)ship cooks named Cookie… 
Because there were lots of them, and going on one was not all that different from going on a prop plane. In 1959 or so my friends and I would look up when a Sud Aviation Caravelle flew over, but by 1961 it was routine. I loved this stuff,but my 10 year old self was excited about my first flight, and going to Africa, but I didn’t even think it was a jet. What else would it be? Jets had been invented over 16 years before, remember.
Do you have a cite saying they thought it was impossible? Now, their lunar missions were far different from how Apollo turned out. Clarke’s “Venture to the Moon” is an example, with a lot of ships staying for long periods. A similar fleet set off at the end of Islands in the Sky, about 2000, IIRC. Those kind of payloads couldn’t be launched from earth, I agree.
As for the space station, clearly it wouldn’t look like their space station looked (nor would the one in 2001, which is different from the one in the book) but I think it is more impossible in business terms. I’d hate to have to do a business case for the one in 2001. The drinks in the HoJos would have to cost a lot!
Of course not. Their work was far more to get people excited about space than to lay out plausible engineering. Remember Eisenhower didn’t let them beat the Russians. If we had gone to the moon for another reason than to beat the Russians it would all look a lot different.
The Peter Paul and Mary song was thus called probably for the line to scan rather than that leaving on a jet plane was exotic. In 1970 I, at 19, flew from Boston to Texas and it was totally unexciting and unexotic. I suspect that by 1970 there weren’t that many prop planes except on very short regional routes - Princeton Aviation had a little guy that flew to Newark as late as 1983.
Maybe someone from the sticks would be excited. In the summer of 1970 I delivered mail right at the edge of Kennedy airport, where the 747s were so low I could count the rivets. Exciting and exotic? Hardly. Relatively more expensive, but there were student discounts back then, so the price was not too bad. For students. Relatively more expensive than today, but not out of the reach of the middle class. Hey, is Don Draper exited about flying?
Unless by exotic you mean - airline doesn’t treat you like shit. Then I agree.
None of that in the movie.
I think if you wrote a novel about how the way it really happened, it would have been rejected for being utterly dumb.
Korolev’s N-1 used kerosene, and would have put a single man (or woman) on the moon, if it hadn’t exploded every time it was launched. Those explosions were caused by poor workmanship rather than inadequate fuel; a kerosene rocket could have got to the Moon.
I like the look of the N-1; it is a long, thin, tapering cone, and resembles the sketchy rocketships from the illustrations of my 1950’s childhood. But it was a dangerous bird.
I had no idea they made a movie out of it, probably was a bit goofy. I’ll check it out, thanks.
If I was going to make one of Heinlein’s juveniles into a movie, it would be Star Beast.
First book I opened was Ley’s Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel, revised edition 1958 released shortly after Sputnik. In a chapter on “the Spaceship” he’s going through a history of proposals. It’s too long to retype the whole thing, but here he’s referring to articles by Baron von Pirquet written for Die Rakete, the magazine of the German rocket society, in 1928:
An intermediary space station was needed. More experience didn’t change that. Of his contemporary world he writes:
You cannot judge what engineers thought about space travel by what the fiction writers did. It’s as bad as trying to discern what they thought of the Internet from Neuromancer. The technical literature on rocketry was much smaller than that the number of science fiction stories about space flight, but what mattered was that everybody in the field had read all of it. The public could have too if they wanted; popularizations by very good nonfiction books had been appearing since 1929 in German and 1931 in English.
In addition, rocket societies appeared in the U.S., France, Britain, and the U.S.S.R. in addition to Germany and amateurs in many more countries tinkered with building their own rockets. The technical requirements were very well understood as daunting. Robert Goddard never gave a rocket up even two miles which is why the Allies were so gobsmacked by the V-2.
In many ways science fiction was the worst thing to happen to the space program. People confused the two from the 1930s just as they do today. If it weren’t for that Buck Rogers stuff there might not have been the astronomical distance between the fiction and the reality making the reality too boring for people to care about once the space race was over.
There is an article by Heinlein in Astounding, 1950 I think, about the making of the movie.
I used Clarke instead of Heinlein since Clarke hardly qualifies as just a science fiction writer. He was an early member of BIS, and he got general recognition for The Exploration of Space (a Book of the Month Club selection, a big deal back then) long before recognition for his sf.
Willy Ley who was writing for Astounding in the 1940s and Galaxy in the 1950s was not an sf writer either. (Except for one bad story, I think.)
I’d have to look up the mission profiles that were impossible. I read all these books during the '50s and early '60s, and I don’t remember any that came close to resembling what Apollo did. I don’t even remember any that involved staging on the lunar surface. But I accept that they might have called it impossible in order to push for the orbital presence they really wanted.
As for sf writers, I’ve read large amounts of 1950s sf, and I sure wouldn’t trust the average sf writer to say anything useful about space travel. Even most sf writers with scientific training, like Asimov, wouldn’t have anything interesting to say about it.
Given how quickly we figured out how to do the impossible, I’d say that von Braun and Ley didn’t try very hard to figure out a way of getting to the moon directly - but that was not their intention.
As for sf being bad for the space program in general, I don’t recall anyone being disappointed in 1969 that it didn’t look like a 1950s sf movie. The failure of the space program to be sustainable had everything to do with politics and little to do with sf, which, as I said, never predicted what really happened - at least not that I can recall.
Fine, so let’s look at what Clarke says in The Exploration of Space.
In the chapter titled “Escaping from Earth,” he recognizes that a multi-stage rocket is needed to achieve escape velocity. The fuel problems are daunting. “It would be possible to build rockets which could escape from the Earth carrying a small payload of automatic instruments.” [37] Current fuels were insufficient for more, but hydrogen was an answer: “a 50-ton rocket could escape from the Earth completely.” [38] He doesn’t foresee manned flight this way. “The step rocket, therefore, already gives us the power to leave the Earth by proxy, if not in person.” [38] Carrying enough fuel for a journey and landing on other planets and returning “becomes, in not impossible, certainly fantastic.” [39] Building a space-station, “many believe … may be the first task of aeronautics, antedating even the first flight to the Moon.” [150] He looks at chemical rockets as a first step only, to be succeeded by ion or atomic motors. [175]
I have the advantage in that I read all these books, and magazines articles, and newspaper articles, in the last year, not 50 years ago. They are not all propaganda from enthusiasts. The New York Times, Sept. 5, 1952, carried an account of a talk by the president of the Swiss Astronautic Association, Prof. Joseph Stemmer, under the title “Space Flights Put Many Years Away” because of the fuel needs. Much has been made of atomic rockets, he said, but they’re development is “unforseeable.”
There were many people writing about space and every one of them, to my knowledge, made it clear that current technology was not sufficient for a moon rocket, without an intermediary step. It wasn’t that they didn’t try very hard; just the opposite, they thought this because they had been trying very hard for decades. It did turn out that several billion dollars and the collective wisdom of an entire industry can solve impossible problems, but nobody could - or did - know this ahead of time.
Bumped.
Gil-Scott Heron’s poem is featured in the recent Neil Armstrong biopic First Man as a counterpoint to national enthusiasm for Project Apollo: "Whitey on the Moon (from First Man)" by Leon Bridges - YouTube