From rereading the link I see that only 47% of Americans did support the effort, and I think it’s possible to make the case that the overwhelmingly pro-NASA mainstream media forced any such oppositional opinions to the margins. But even so, any time you have, say, 30% or more of the public enthusiastically in favor of something, it can create the appearance that “everybody” feels the same way.
As far as I’m concerned, at least we got something for our $29B–we got a moon landing. For the hundreds of billions spent to bail out the S&Ls in the 1980s, we basically got zip.
Yeah I wonder if with just books and internet one can realize just how worn out that cliche got in that era, if you weren’t there to hear it constantly.
In general as suggested by the song writer’s work in general and type of artist/viewpoint, being skeptical of the space program tended to go with general counter culture view highly skeptical of the country and its institutions, in terms of the Vietnam War and race issues as much more major issues, but in general whatever the [white] ‘establishment’ was into must be suspect. And though again moon program wasn’t as big an issue as the War or Civil Rights, it was also something ostensibly supposed to make people ‘proud of their country’ in a tradition kind of way, which was a generally suspect attitude in the counter culture.
Now the counter culture view is embedded in a significant part of US culture, arguably it’s even the leading cultural view, dominating the entertainment and education worlds at least and lots of people grew up with it in the home or even their parents did. Although it’s still in a non-stop ‘war’ with traditional cultural views which is arguably even more bitter now. Anyway the space program isn’t much of a field for contention in the culture wars anymore not only because it’s smaller relatively, but also there isn’t as much of a national competition aspect and outlet for traditional patriotic attitudes. Stuff like taking close up pictures of Pluto etc. is more of a pure science thrill with less pro/anti-nationalist aspect, no less thrilling when non-US unmanned probes record cool things. I guess also that if there is a future really ambitious manned program (not just putting people back on the moon where the schedule seems to always to move off to the right anyway) it will be more international, like the ISS, than the Apollo program was.
The bailouts saved the U.S. economy, which was about 5,000 billion at the time, from hitting a deep depression, which would have cut a couple of thousand billion off that number. IMO, that’s a much better return on investment than what we got from the moon project.
I was not familiar with that song when it was new (being 8 years old), but seeing it in the movie was jarring. It really seemed crammed in there.
Hearing it now, 50 years later, it sounds more like “I hate Whitey” than “The moon landing money should be better spent on more important things.” But, it was a different time, you understand.
I’ll dispute this. Being a member of the British Interplanetary Society basically means you paid the dues. I’m a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. There was no vetting. I just paid the dues.
In fact, when Clarke wrote his famous article on satellites he only had a middle school education. He eventually got a degree in math/physics, but went on to a career as a writer. He never was employed as a scientist, nor did he have any kind of advanced degree.
Heinlein graduated from the Naval Academy 5th in his class in Engineering, and later did some graduate work in Math and Physics before dropping out due to poor health. During the war Heinlein worked in Naval research in high altitude and cold effects on materials.
When it comes to knowledge of rockets and space travel, they were roughly equals. Both were self-taught in those fields, and almost certainly from the same literature, as there was damned little of it. They started from a roughly equivalent background in science, but neither was a scientist. Heinlein had more engineering knowledge, and his books focused a little more on the nuts and bolts of spaceflight.
I have to disagree. Clarke’s first book was actually Interplanetary Flight: An Introduction to Astronautics (1950). While as the title indicates, it was not an advanced book, it wasn’t a dumbed-down popsci primer either. I can’t say for certain that Heinlein didn’t know as much about the subject, but I’m quite sure that Clarke was spending a far greater proportion of his time on rocketry and space travel than Heinlein. Also, his first books were almost nonfiction novels that did nothing but focus on the nuts and bolts of spaceflight. Heinlein never wrote a paragraph that came close to Clarke’s meticulous detail.
Going back to the earlier discussion, I will note that in Interplanetary Flight Clarke writes:
This is part of a discussion of atomic rockets and a needed space station.
Voyager’s statement that just got quoted, “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” is also incorrect. I traced mentions of Clarke in a newspaper database for 1952. The Exploration of Space was often reviewed in tandem with Sands of Mars. The combination boosted his sf career almost immediately, and he had several sf books and reprints of Prelude to Space, his first novel, issued in 1953 and 1954.
I will grant you that Clarke wrote about spaceflight when Heinlein hadn’t. But what I said was that their knowledge was likely about equal. There was so little in the way of publications on spaceflight at that time that anyone with an undergrad degree in a hard science or engineering and a serious interest could get up to speed fairly quickly, at least at a high level,
And by the time Clarke published his book, Heinlein had already written 8 novels, some of which had accurate calculations for Hohmann trajectories to other planets, etc. Heinlein was fully versed in the mathematics, implications, and engineering of rockets and fully understood orbital mechanics. He was a little shaky on relativity, though…
Five of those eight novels are YA books, two are ancient pulp stuff not about space, and neither is Puppet Masters, the one new adult novel. There’s no indication in his writing that Heinlein had any advanced technical knowledge, not even if you include Destination Moon. His college training, not in physics, was more than 20 years old. Heinlein’s studies were more out-of-date than Campbell’s, for Pete’s sake, and Campbell was lost in the 1950s. Clarke had just graduated with degrees in mathematics and physics, and had all the WWII rocketry advances to study, and was chair of the BIS, meaning he was spending essentially full time on rocketry. There simply is not a chance that Heinlein was as well-versed in the subject as Clarke.
And yes, they totally work with the Police song; in fact this is one of the strangest councidences I’ve seen for a ling time. I won’t be getting this earworm out of my head for a long time.
