BackStory; Moon, Man, and Myths: The 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11

Major funding for Backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory. Welcome to Backstory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines. I'm Brian Bellow. And I'm Nathan Connolly. If you're new to the podcast, we're all historians. And each week, along with our colleagues, Ed Ayers and Joanne Freeman, we explore a different aspect of American history. On September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech declaring that America would be first to land on the moon, and that it would happen by the end of the decade. Why some say the moon, why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? We choose to go to the moon.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Turns out America was up for the task. And when Apollo 11 touched down on the lunar surface 50 years ago, July 20, 1969, the whole country watched as Neil Armstrong uttered those famous words. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. A few weeks ago, we asked you, our listeners, to cast your memories back to that momentous day and share your moon landing experiences. Here's what one listener had to say. Hi, Backstory, this is Bob calling from Barberton, Ohio. And my moon landing story, I was six years old, just turned six the previous month. And the whole family was watching the preparation for the landing rather religiously that week.

And on the 20th, when they actually touched down, that happened to be my mother's birthday. My sister is 12 years older than I was, so she would have been 18 at the time, just graduated high school. And angel food cake was my mother's favorite. So while we were all out in the living room watching them walk around on the moon, my sister was out in the kitchen and decorating this angel food cake. She did it with white frosting, and then she put these little gel candy rings on it, looking like craters. So we celebrated my mom's birthday with a moon cake while watching the first astronauts walk around on the moon. That was pretty special. And I'd taken to watching Star Trek with my brother, Chief, some of my earliest memories. My brother's also quite a bit older than I am, and he watched Star Trek, so I watched Star Trek, and Lost in Space was on at the time, too, and I watched that.

So I was pretty into space by the time the moon landing happened. So it all just slid right into that, as far as I was concerned. I was excited by the whole thing, watching Star Trek happen in real life right in front of me on the evening news. Looking back, the moon landing represented tremendous progress to this date. I carry around in my pocket a computer a million times more powerful than the one that put the thing on the moon, but even with that, we have still not yet—here we are 50 years down the road—we have not yet equaled that achievement, let alone exceeded it. That is still the pinnacle of human advancement. It's the farthest we've ever gone. So today on Backstory, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 by launching into

the history of America's race to the moon. You'll hear from the Apollo 8 astronaut who took the iconic Earthrise photograph. We'll learn about a kind of Apollo nostalgia that has crept into movies and other forms of pop culture. And stay tuned for more listener stories throughout the episode. What are the names you associate with the moon landing? Neil Armstrong? Buzz Aldrin? Well, in 2010, a survey by the Space Foundation ranked as the number two most popular space hero a man who had never set foot on the moon. Gene Kranz was flight director of the white team for Apollo 11, and he recorded this oral history about what went on in mission control the day of the moon landing and how the team

there dealt with the pressures of the job. You're pacing. You got all this energy and you don't have anything to do with it. You got no focus. You can't sleep. Heck, we had six kids and, you know, Marta's trying to figure out some way of, Gene, when are you going to settle down? When are you going to sleep? Are you going to go out the mission control center to sleep? What are you going to do? And you don't know. You'd haunt mission control again and you'd fidget a bit, you know, to make sure your procedures are all ready. And then you have the most wonderful eight hour sleep that you've ever seen in your entire life. And this is the last time because you're going to walk into a mission control in a few hours and your team is going to write the book about landing on the moon. And in mission control, when you walk into the room, you're getting the feeling for what's going on. You can feel the atmosphere immediately. This room is bathed in this blue light from this blue gray light that you get from the screen.

So it's sort of almost like you see in the movies kind of thing. But then the rest of the room atmosphere is, it's the smell of the room. And it's, people have been, you can tell people have been in there for a long period of time. There's enough stale pizza hanging around and stale sandwiches and the waste baskets are full. You can smell the coffee that's been burnt into the hot plate in there. But there's, you know, that's, but you also get this feeling that this is a place something's going to happen at. I mean, this is a place sort of like the docks where Columbus left, you know, when he sailed off or to America or the beaches when he came on landing. So it's a place where you know something is going to happen and you feel the energy of the room because as you walk in, you pass little groups where there's little buzzes of conversation and you don't waste too many words in mission control. You speak in funny syllables and acronyms and short brief sentences.

And sometimes you use call signs, other times you use first names, depends upon what the mood of the room is. There's certain things in mission control and there are two of them happened, one now and then one later on, that really now indicated that this was not a normal day. The first one, and this was one of the triggering events that got it, the spacecraft is now behind the moon and the control team, the adrenaline, no matter how you tried to hide it, the fact is, is that you were really starting to pump. And it seems that every controller has a common set of characteristics is they got to go to the bathroom. I mean, it's just to the point where you just need this break. That's all there is to it. I mean, it's just, just get out there and it's literally a rush to get to the bathroom and you're standing in line and for a change, there isn't the normal banter, no jokes, etc.

I mean, the level of preoccupation in these people, these are kids, these are the average age of my team was 26 years old. And basically I'm 36, I'm 10 years older, I'm the oldest guy on this entire team. And this preoccupation is the first thing that hits you. I mean, it just all of a sudden, this is different. And then you walk back into the room and you hear the voice of the mission commentator. And he talks and he's commenting that the mission control team has returned from their break and they're now going to be in the room through the lunar landing. And immediately that triggers my thought that this team, this day, is either going to land, abort, or crash.

Those are the only three alternatives. So it's really starting to sink in and I have this feeling I got to talk to my people. So I called the controllers, told my team, okay, I'll fly controllers, listen up and go over to AFD conference. And all of a sudden the people in the viewing room are used to hearing all these people talking and all of a sudden there's nobody talking anymore. But I had to tell these kids how proud I was of the work that they had done and that from this day, from the time that they were born, they were destined to be here and they're destined to do this job. And it's the best team that has ever been assembled and today, without a doubt, we are going to write in the history books and we are going to be the team that takes an American to the moon. And that whatever happens on this day, whatever decisions they make, whatever decisions as a team we make, I will always be standing with them.

No one's ever going to second guess us. So that's it. Okay, 75 feet, looking good, down a half, 60, 60 seconds, 60 seconds, lights on, down 2 1⁄2, forward, forward, 40 feet, down 2 1⁄2, picking up some dust, 30 feet, 2 1⁄2, lights down, great shadow, 4 forward, 4 forward, drifting to the right a little, 30, 30 seconds, 30 seconds, then we hear the crew saying contact. Well what happens? We have a three foot long probe stick underneath each of the landing pads. When one of those touches the lunar surface, it turns on a blue light in the cockpit. And when it turns on that blue light, that's lunar contact, their job is to shut the engine

down and they literally fall the last three feet to the surface of the moon. Crew is now continuing this process of shutting down the engine. Now the viewing room behind me, and this is again one of these other things in training that just absolutely, there's nothing that training ever prepared you for that second, because the viewing room behind me starts cheering. Our instructors, which are over in the sim soup area, sim room over to the right, they start cheering. But we got to be cool, because we have to now go through all of the shutdown activity, but we have to go through a series of what we call stay-no-stay decisions. Because 40 seconds after we've touched down on the moon, we have to be ready to lift back off again. And every controller, I think, went through his emotional climax that second. I was so hung up by this cheering, the coming in, the sound from the lunar room that I could

not speak. And pure frustration, because I had to get going in the stay-no-stay, I just wrapped my arm down on the console there, just absolutely frustrated. I broke my pencil, pencil flies up in the air, Charlie Duke's next to me and he's looking and wondering, what the hell has happened here? And all of a sudden, it just, it hurt so much that I got back on track and started go, okay, I'll fly controller, stand by for T-1 stay-no-stay, you know, and we went through this. And I think every controller went through his climax at that second. Contact light, okay, engine stop, APA at a descent, control both auto, descent engine command override off, engine arm off, 413 is in. We've had shutdown.

We copy you down, Eagle. Okay, everybody, T-1, stand by for T-1. Tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed. Roger, Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we're breathing again, thanks a lot. And you hear Armstrong talk, Eagle has landed right on down the line, Houston Tranquility base here, the Eagle's landed. These are all seeping in, in the meantime, we're just busier than hell. And throughout this whole period of time, except for the instant you hear the cheering, you never got a chance to really think we've landed on the moon. And we get handed over to Charlesworth's team, and it was then I'm going over to the press conference, and it was walking over to the press conference with Doug, was the first time you actually really had the chance to unwind and think about, today, we really landed on the moon. That interview was conducted on January 8th, 1999, by Rebecca Wright, Carol Butler, and

Sasha Tarrant. Special thanks to the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project for sharing the audio. You can find a link to their archive on our website at backstoryradio.org. Hi, Backstory.

My name's Elizabeth. I live in Goshen, Indiana. And I was born in 1955 and graduated high school in 1973. So like lots of people my age, I mean, we kind of grew up with the space program. I was 14 years old the year of the moon landing. It happened in the summer, and I was just going into ninth grade. So I decided to have a slumber party because I was so excited that they were going to land people on the moon. And I remember not a lot about it, but I do remember several of us girls in the family room at home watching the TV, and I and maybe one other girl were the only ones who managed

to stay awake for the actual feet on the moon. And I was super annoyed about that because I thought this is so important and it's such a big part of our lives. I was so excited about it. I didn't know why everybody wouldn't be excited about it. And I remember very distinctly the girl next to me who had fallen asleep on the floor, and I jostled her when they were getting ready to put the foot on the moon surface and say, wake up, they're going to step on the moon. And she just growled at me, leave me alone, I'm sleeping. And I just couldn't imagine why everyone wasn't as excited about it as I was. But watching on the TV, the video was kind of grainy and wobbly, but I just remember being so fascinated. And it seemed, at least my memory is, it seemed to take a while for them to actually get out of the space caps. And that's probably why all my friends had fallen asleep because they were tired of waiting

for them to actually open the door, go down the ladder, put the foot on the moon. And I just, I remember looking out at the moon and, you know, there were probably millions of us who did that same exact thing, just had to go outdoors and look up at this thing and see if we could see it and try to imagine people walking around on it. It just, it still blows my mind. It still is amazing to me that we did that. Looking back, I think the moon landing just means, you know, looking back at a time when we were focused and ready to work together to get that done. You know, Kennedy put out that challenge, we're going to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth and we're going to do it in this decade. And everybody had to scramble to get it to happen. And I just wonder the way things are now, if we could do that.

There's so much divisiveness in our politics right now and so much going on in this country and so many crises that we need to deal with. I wish we could come together that same way. In 1959, NASA unveiled its inaugural class of astronauts, dubbed the Mercury 7, after a rigorous selection process. From all of the active duty pilots in the Navy, Marines and Air Force, the service records of 473 test pilots were selected for review. 110 met the basic qualifications. Each must be...

These early astronauts were cut from the same cloth. They were all white, middle class, family men, which many at the time considered to be the touchstones of American virtue. In addition to being these exceptional individuals, they are our knights in shining armor. They are our representatives. They are us, in other words, in this Cold War environment and rivalry with the Soviet Union. That's former NASA chief historian Roger Lanius. He says while these astronauts looked like snapshots of the, quote, ordinary American, major sections of the population were left out of that frame. They were often the first generation in their family to attend college. Many of them went to school after World War II on the GI Bill or to the service academies. They were all married. They had children. So in terms of sort of mainstream society in 1959, 1960, the early 1960s, they were a representation of all of us.

With obviously the notable exception of there weren't any women, there weren't any minorities, and that was a major hole in the effort. Was any thought given to going beyond that kind of white male, middle class seeming person? I understand that they were selected from the military and that obviously limited the number of people they might choose. But was there any discussion of thinking outside the box on this one? Oh, absolutely. I mean, there was lots of discussion. I mean, before the first astronauts were selected, there was some talk about who would be the best in terms of handling small, tight, cramped spaces. Maybe submarine officers would be better. There was acrobatic skills that might be necessary. Maybe somebody from a circus would be good who does high wire acts or something. So a lot of those sorts of things were considered and immediately rejected. The one area that was considered in a more serious way but didn't get anywhere at the

time was the issue of women. There were very fine pilots and some of them were taken to the Lovelace Clinic on a private endeavor to test and see how they would perform in the same environment that the astronauts had been tested on. Then they found that many of them were quite good at doing the same things the astronauts were called upon. Some of those women really did believe that they were going to become astronauts and the so-called Mercury 13, 13 women who did as well as the males did in those tests, sort of became a cadre and became a public force up to the point where there was actually hearings in Congress about whether or not NASA should have women astronauts. But in the end, they did not do that. To the discredit of NASA, they stood up and said, we do not want to do this.

They sent John Glenn up to Capitol Hill and he testified how this would be inappropriate. Later he recanted that and said, you know, I was wrong but it was a different time and place. And the result was there were no women that entered the American Astronaut Corps until 1978. Well, they did select all white men as far as I know. How were they portrayed by the press? You know, it is fascinating to watch. I mean, everybody sort of fawns over these individuals. And when they unveiled the first astronauts in 1959, the seven of them were setting up behind a table and they began to, you know, announce their names and all of the people in the room, and this is a press conference, so they're mostly sort of hard-boiled reporters and television news people and they stand up and cheer. And that in itself is pretty remarkable.

In fact, there's a famous exchange between Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard in which one of them leans over to the other and says, can you believe this? We haven't even done anything yet. And that's sort of true. But I think it does kind of get back to this sort of sense that these are our avatars for this rivalry with the Soviet Union in space and we're going to be supportive of them. So you talked about the reaction of the press corps to the astronauts. How quickly did the astronauts become American heroes? Almost immediately. James Reston, who was a newspaper reporter for the New York Times at the time, was at the unveiling of the first astronauts and he wrote in his story about that event, he said, you know, he says, most of us are pretty, you know, hard-headed when it comes to looking at these big events.

But when you see these individuals and their boyish charm, their good looks, their contagious enthusiasm for what they're doing, you've got to feel good about it. And in that sense, you know, they won over everybody. And those stories that were put out in the newspapers, done on the evening news, wherever, really did bring to the attention of the public the best things about these astronauts. Mostly they ignored the bad things. And it wasn't until years later that those sort of came out. Yeah. And just to underscore what an incredibly popular phenomenon this was, I remember, you know, writing to NASA during the 1960s and making suggestions. And as everybody in my family can tell you, I don't know how to turn on my vacuum cleaner. But you know, this is just something that a lot of people in the country got behind and felt a part of.

Yeah. And it's hard not to sort of feel a part of this when it's sort of on the news on a regular basis. And it's, at the time of a launch, for instance, there would be sort of a pause in the day where everybody would sort of watch it on television. When I was in school, they rolled TVs into, usually it was the lunchroom, which was the one place they could get us all into, and we'd watch these launches on TV. But it became a part of our lives in ways maybe NASA has not been since that time. The other thing I'd like to say about this is that in the 1960s, there were all of these weekly news magazines. And my parents subscribed to, I think, three or four of them. And you know, Time and Newsweek and the Saturday Evening Post and Life and Look and so on were all magazines that were popular during the time. And Life Magazine especially made a big deal out of the astronauts.

In fact, they paid a million dollars that went to NASA for the privilege of writing the personal stories of each of the astronauts in their magazines. And that million dollars then was held in escrow to be paid out in case something happened to the astronauts. It was sort of a life insurance policy. And of course, this is all going on during the escalating war in Vietnam, during a very contentious period, to say it mildly, for racial equality in the United States. How did Americans square the two? Well, in many cases, they didn't square them that well. You know, at the same time that you've got this sort of positive, good news story of America's race to the moon, you've got these very historic events, Civil Rights Crusade, the escalation in Vietnam, and the anti-war protests that result from that and so on.

And they come together at some level at the time of the launch of Apollo 11 in July of 1969, where Ralph Abernathy brings some protesters during his Poor People's Campaign to the Kennedy Space Center to protest this launch. And to the credit of the NASA administrator, a fellow by the name of Tom Paine, reminiscent of the 18th century Tom Paine, not the same person at all, he went out and met with him. And he heard their concerns, and their concerns were, why are we spending money on this when there are so many needs here on Earth? That is a very valid question, one that NASA struggled to answer throughout its history without very good success. And Abernathy made clear that we don't object to the astronauts, and we don't really object to going to the moon, but we do think that we could spend our money better.

And Paine, to his credit, said, you know, I'm in agreement with you on a lot of this. If I could solve the problems that you have identified by not pushing the button tomorrow to send the astronauts to the moon, I would not push that button. But you and I both know that this is not going to solve the problem. You know, I would urge you to be supportive of this, and I will be supportive of you and your desires as well. We can solve a lot of problems in this nation through our use of science and technology, and that's what NASA is all about. And Abernathy bought that. Paine then asked him to pray for the safety of the astronauts, which he did beautifully. And then him and some of the members of his campaign went over to the launch and saw it the next day. And in response to that experience, and it's a moving experience to watch a rocket go up,

it's sort of an epiphany in a lot of ways as you see this thing rise majestically in the distance, Abernathy, when interviewed about it, said, you know, I'm as proud as any American about this, but I really think we need to reconsider our priorities. Well, you've actually written about a kind of Apollo nostalgia that developed for a bygone era. Tell us about that. What did you mean by that, Roger? Well, I mean, one of the things that tends to happen is that when we look back on the Apollo era after 50 years, we sort of long for a time and a place that was simpler, where everything seemed more black and white, you know, what was good and you knew what was bad. Now, never mind the fact that the reality was always different. But that's how we tend to, I think, look at history in a lot of ways. I like to point to the sense that sort of white males are in charge, and there's not

that much in the way of multiculturalism or any of those sorts of things that are so common in our society today, and that somehow, when we think back on that, yeah, things were better then. So does that mean because white males were in charge, things were better? And I can guarantee you that might be the lesson that some people take, but that certainly wasn't true. And so that's that nostalgia that for a time and a place that actually never really existed, but we sort of would like to think did. Well, and a part of the nostalgia may be for white males to be in charge again. Absolutely. You know, the counterculture responded to the Apollo program sort of with this love hate thing. They look at these guys in short sleeve white shirts and dark ties and pocket protectors sitting in mission control, and they are the epitome of the establishment, the organization man.

And they look at those thick black glasses. Absolutely. And they were able to do all this stuff, you know, and at some level, you have to say, oh, God, I hate that society. You know, I want a culture that is more open and so on and so forth. But then you look back and you say, but God, they really did pull it off. You know, they were able to land on the moon, not once, but multiple times. And so there's something to be said for that. What role did pop culture play in this whole nostalgia industry, if you will? Well, I mean, obviously, you see it in a variety of settings. You can see it in the music. Think about all the music that has been great music that has been made that sort of celebrates spaceflight. You can start with Rocket Man by Elton John, and you can certainly very quickly move to a variety of other artists doing really interesting songs. But and they're all celebratory at some level.

And that's one strain of this. There is film that celebrates that tendency. The movie I like to point to is Apollo 13 in 1995, starring Tom Hanks, that really does sort of lay out this sort of geeky mindset of how a bunch of squares can accomplish all this great stuff. And the only sort of counterculture pieces of this that show up in the film is when Tom Hanks's daughter, he plays Jim Lovell in the movie, is complaining about the breakup of the Beatles, which of course did happen. But that's the only thing in which it intrudes. All of the other things that are taking place in Vietnam, civil rights, the women's movement, on and on and on and on, this desperate time in late 60s, early 70s that this all plays out in is just sort of lost in that particular story. One last question, Roger.

Did you ever secretly want to go to the moon? Not so secretly. I want to go now. I got involved a few years ago in the effort to sort of preserve the lunar landing site. Especially Tranquility Base from 69. And we haven't had a problem yet, but one of the things that's always happened with historic sites, cultural sites, is that as soon as people go there, they tend to sort of degrade those sites in various ways. Sometimes they do it intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. So I have volunteered to NASA that I would be happy to be the first curator on the moon to put the ropes and stanchions up around Tranquility Base to make sure that the tourists who visit there, and someday they will, no question, will be able to preserve the site. Roger Lanius is a former NASA Chief Historian and Associate Director at the National Air and Space Museum.

Thank you. Hello, Backstory. This is Rebecca Rogers.

I live in Augusta, Georgia now, but when Apollo 11 landed, I was living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I was a 15-year-old, and I had been avidly following the space program since I was really just a little kid. I'm kind of a child of the space age. But I do remember, as many Americans did, my whole family splayed out on the living room floor and couches watching our big floor model black and white television. We were mesmerized. I was awestruck by the idea that these pictures were coming more or less live from the moon. I couldn't get over that. But I had followed the space program since, oh, way back when they were sending up animals. I think the Soviets sent up a dog, and I worried about him, and then America sent up a chimpanzee, and I worried about him, and then they began to send up the men, and that was very exciting. I remember, I think I memorized all the names of the Mercury 7, which is kind of how little kids like to memorize lists, so my schoolmates and I were pretty good at rattling off the

names of all the astronauts. But it was a fascinating time. The anniversaries brought back a lot of wonderful memories. Looking back at the moon landing, and, of course, this is from the perspective of a young teenager, those were very, it was a very confusing time in America, and a lot of the things that we saw on television were quite disturbing and confusing. The racial riots had taken place. There were a lot of political confusion, and so as a young woman, I enjoyed paying attention to our space race because it was such a positive story. It was something not just our country, but the whole world was focused on, and my family had just recently returned from South America, so I was really feeling proud as an American. I was happy to be back in my own country, and I was really proud of what our country

was able to accomplish for the whole world. In 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders became the first people to orbit the moon. As they came around the moon for the third time, they caught a glimpse of the Earth rising over the lunar surface. One of them snapped a photo. In that image, the Earth is a swirling ball of blue and white, a jewel against the darkness of space. The photo became known as Earthrise, and it was reproduced across the globe in magazines like Life and Time.

Several years ago, I talked to William Anders, the Apollo 8 astronaut who captured the iconic image. I asked him about his historic lunar flight. Well, we were doing our jobs. We were fighter pilots, test pilots, and so this was all sort of just our line of work. But to see, you know, the backside of the moon, the front side up close, was all very exciting. But really, in retrospect, the most exciting part was to see the Earth from a lunar perspective. And were you surprised when the Earth just popped up in your window? Yes, I was. Because we were going backwards, looking down at the moon from the direction we came, that's all we saw was the moon, and it wasn't until we reoriented the spacecraft, turned it around, and faced it forward, that we were able to see the Earth coming up over the lunar horizon. I called it out. I think everybody saw it about the same time. There was a scramble for cameras. I was sort of the official photographer of the flight, though I had essentially no training.

Why were you the official photographer? I don't know. Somebody made me the official photographer. And if you can, try to recall that first moment, what you were thinking about when you looked back at the Earth. Well, the first moment I looked back at the Earth was going to the moon, and see it shrinking as we moved away. And as a matter of fact, from a lunar distance, the Earth is about the size of your fist at arm's length. Wow. Not big. It impressed me almost immediately that our planet physically was really insignificant, but that even though it wasn't physically significant, it was our home, and therefore important to us, and we ought to learn to treat it better. Bill, you know NASA records everything, and fortunately, we're able to listen to the tape from the very moment that you and your two colleagues saw the Earth rising.

And we can ID you, because you're the guy asking for the colored film. I'm going to play it for you now. Oh, go ahead. Oh my God, look at that picture over there. There's the Earth coming up. Wow, that's pretty. Okay, I'll take that. That's my schedule. Is that a color film, Jim? Hand me a roll of color, quick, will you? Oh, man, that's great. Where is it? Quick. Is it out here? Just grab me a color. Listening to that tape, I think I detected a little bit of edge creeping into your voice, especially when you were asking for that colored film. Am I right about that? Well, Borman was very focused on doing our mission, which was to test out these space vehicles. I'd been assigned the job of photographing the lunar surface. The Earth was not in the flight plan at all. You might wonder why I have, but I've never come up with a good answer, except we just didn't think about it, or NASA didn't think about it.

But I knew basically where the film was, so once we started taking pictures of the Earth, I just wanted to get on with it. I think I blazed a shot off with the camera I had in my hand at the time, but then managed to get Lovell or somebody to pass me a magazine of color film and slapped on the long lens and started blazing away. You made a lot of effort to bring and then grab that color film. Why was color film so important to you? Well, the Earth is colorful. Black and white may be good for technical analysis. Certainly in the moon, you didn't need color film, and I was challenged by others, why take color film when the moon isn't colorful? But luckily, we had it, and that's why I wanted to take a picture of this beautiful and colorful planet we live on. Fortunately for me, the people down in the photo lab picked this one color one that I took that has become the iconic Earthrise picture.

What I find is ironic that I just learned here recently that the Earthrise was printed upside down. In other words, they flipped it. So I've never been able to... I've always wondered why I couldn't figure out the continents. And I guess if you look at the negative through the back, you can figure it out. But I thought that was ironic because this thing's been replicated a billion times, probably on stamps and other things. At the time that you took this series of photographs, did you have any idea about the kind of impact it would have upon your return? No. Frankly, I did not. I was just out there doing my job. Here was a new target. And that's why I told Lowell, don't worry, this may be the first Earthrise, but there'll be hopefully eight more in our orbit so we can get a good one later. I think we probably did take some later, but of course it was the first Earthrise that had all the historic significance.

Yes. In fact, you said quite famously that we came all this way to discover the Moon, and what we really did discover is Earth. Well, it didn't take long to realize that the Moon had been pulverized by meteoritic bombardment through the eons. It was just a big mess. I described it as dirty beach sand, where a lot of people have been walking in the sand and having barbecues there and getting charcoal spread around. I caught a lot of heck from poets on that one. But yeah, here was our home planet, looking beautiful, serene, delicate, looking peaceful. There was no country divisions, and it was sort of weird to think that, well, on one side of it, people are trying to kill folks on the other side of it. You know, why don't we try to get together? Did seeing the Earth from the Moon change any of your political views? Well, yes, I must say it made me realize that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe, and that religions and things like that, who were based on Earth being particularly special,

had a certain flaw in them. And I have yet to fully square that, but there's a heck of a lot more Earth out there than even a supercomputer can keep track of. Yeah. You know, expectations were so high in the 1960s for what might come of the space program in general, the Apollo missions. How do you assess what we've accomplished, and where have we fallen short? Well, I think people have lost track, and NASA has not faced up to the fact that Apollo was a Cold War policy by Kennedy. It's been coded, given a patina of exploration, but that really wasn't what the American taxpayers were paying for.

They were paying to beat those dirty commies. And when the flag went into the moon, thanks to Neil and Buzz, that basically satisfied the objective of what Apollo was all about. Now, of course, it became a jobs program for NASA after that, and so that, plus everybody's excitement about the exploration phase of it that there was, propelled NASA to keep going. We would have had 30 lunar landings if Nixon and others hadn't pulled them up short. So I think the lesson I've learned from that is, admit what your real goal is and why, and don't try to kid yourself that just because you've made one objective that has been supported by the public that you, therefore, are destined to and will be funded for making some other destination. Bill, if you could visit one place on Earth or beyond that you haven't been to yet, where would it be?

Well, I mean, if I wasn't paying for it... You're not paying for it. Yeah, yeah. That back story has a huge travel budget. Yeah, I... You name the place. Yeah, I don't think it would be worth it to everybody else. I wouldn't... I would have enjoyed... I would have voted for Apollo 35 if I could have landed, but from a responsible, by that time working in Washington, policymaker, I just didn't think it was worth it. Eventually, humankind will go to Mars. I think the talk that we hear lately from the enthusiasts is massively premature. We don't have the equipment. We don't know how to solve the radiation problem. Zero-G for that amount of time is tough, and I hope that the talk of going here in five years or something like that doesn't eventually turn people off, but sooner or later, Earthlings will go to Mars, and I hope they do it as Earthlings, not jingoistic Americans trying to beat the Chinese, trying to beat the Russians, to beat the Cubans.

Thanks so much for joining us. Well, thanks, and keep up the good work. Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders is a retired major general in the United States Air Force. So, Nathan, where were you when the first men landed on the moon? I was about nine years before being born, actually, Brian. I remember very vividly not only the moon landing, but the buildup to it, the first suborbital flights, the first orbital flights, and we'd be sitting in class in school, and

the public address system would come on, and they'd follow the very brief space flights initially or portions of them on the public address system in school. Now, you know that's important. Did they still have a public address system when you went to school? You know, they did, actually, and one of my earliest memories of that system was watching a liftoff, but it wasn't of a walk on the moon at that time. It was actually the Challenger disaster as a child because we were so captivated as kids in schools. And, you know, the magic of that moment where we had a teacher, in this case, you know, going into space, it was an extraordinary moment. So the sad kind of chapter of American history, the tragedy of America's space program was something that was piped right into the schools, and in a lot of ways, you know, my youth has a kind of connection and fits and starts with exactly, you know, this question about what

is a priority around space and also, you know, really the Cold War spending stuff that the space race helps to initiate. I mean, I remember in January of 1987, you know, being part of a mass march that my mom dragged me along to as part of the waning nuclear freeze movement at that time, and the group was marching on then Cape Canaveral. But I do remember, in a lot of ways, the concerns about, you know, uses of government resources, you know, being very much what was on the table for a lot of the folks in the crowd at that time. That's so interesting because we know that I'm significantly older than you, and there was a lot of discussion about the uses of that technology when I was 10 years old, but it was all about the wonderful things that were going to spring forth from NASA. And of course, we were focused on things like Tang, that, am I allowed to say, horrible

tasting orange juice substitute, and you know, Nathan, we're both from Florida, only the real thing matters. But that Tang was just, it tasted terrible, but it swept the nation in part because supposedly it's what the astronauts drank. The next thing I remember being associated with NASA was Velcro, right? I mean, how could you do anything today without Velcro? Well, we owe that to NASA. It turns out that in fact, NASA was just instrumental in the development of computers. It was the major purchaser for the components of computers. It was directly responsible for developing key parts of computing from the mouse to, you know, miniature cameras that today we all carry around in our cell phones. So yeah, NASA was more than space, but let's code this all good stuff, right?

Helping, solving problems. It was going to help with desalination. It was going to even solve urban problems with its technology. Yeah, I mean, the magic of whatever humanity's next chapter was, was going to be found in space. And that was certainly fed by popular culture, but it was also responded to and rebutted in popular culture. I mean, you think of somebody like, you know, Gil Scott-Heron, who in 1970, you know, he releases the album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. And on that, you know, album is a very important piece of poetry called Whitey on the Moon, right? And Heron is very much attentive to the poverty in places like Harlem and the kinds of money that's being spent. And there isn't any magic to the space program. In fact, that's seen as being the next frontier that, you know, those who have the resources and the wealth and the history to get away and escape to the next frontier are going to leave everybody else behind on this impoverished planet.

And again, it never turned into, obviously, a mass movement against the space program, but I do think it was an important soundbite or, you know, sounding off of the period about what are in fact the costs of all the innovation or the arrival of Velcro or other kinds of novelties that may come out of space age investment. You know, the other thing that is, you know, I think critical about rethinking the space race, and this has happened a lot recently, is, of course, imagining what exactly were the civic benefits that came out of the space race, or at least, you know, some of the challenges and the questions that were always embedded in America's race to, say, outdo the Russians in technology, for example. I mean, we're both familiar with Margot Lee Shetterly's really impressive Accounting in Hidden Figures, where she talks about Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson as three really extraordinary mathematicians who basically, you know, overcome racial discrimination and gender discrimination, but work within NASA to help them achieve this tremendous success. And so, it's a total reframing of how American greatness actually happened.

And, you know, again, I also think it's important to keep in mind there's no shortage of love for the beyond among a cross-section of American society. I mean, I take my kids to the National Air and Space Museum, and it's just as magical for them as kids of color as it would be for anybody else. And so, I have to, in a lot of ways, congratulate, you know, NASA in a cultural sense for unlocking a certain, you know, kind of magic for subsequent generations of young people to imagine what's the next great frontier for, you know, the country, for the world, for the species, frankly. That's absolutely right, and it is interesting that this work, like Margot Lee Shetterly, is just being done now, or in the last five or ten years, we're recovering these stories. It does lend a little more credence to the notion that this initiative to put a man on the moon was a unifying force in American culture.

Would you agree with that? I would in some ways. I mean, I think there's nationalism that gets wrapped up in this. I think there are ways in which politicians become really effective at talking about the collective benefits of the investment in NASA and the space race as part of, you know, military forms of industrialization and expansion across the country. You know, congressional districts are awash in these kinds of dollars, especially in the South, places like Alabama, certainly Florida, Atlanta. But I do also think that there are ways in which, you know, thinking about the next big theater of American innovation and of, you know, challenge and transgression in some ways, again, moves the eye off of existing fissures on the ground, so there's a way in which the papering over of certain conflicts is another feature of the obsession with the beyond. But, you know, I do think it's important to at least give a nod to the fact that we require innovation as a human species to survive, and, you know, in theory, many of the ideas

that we are now grappling with in terms of conservation and saving this planet are also connected to ideas about exploring other places in the universe. So I got to ask you, given your perspective as someone who witnessed the moment 50 years ago, this particular commemoration, does it feel any different from other 50th anniversaries? Is there something driving this that isn't like, say, you know, the good old days or, you know, kind of a pining for an America that was less complicated? I mean, is there something about the nostalgia around space exploration that isn't as laden as other kinds of attempts to look back and remember American greatness from a half century ago? Well, yes, because I was one of those people who challenged the greatness in real time. I mean, if we're talking about 1969, I wasn't quite as precocious as you, but I was out there protesting against a number of things when I was in high school, and I was literally

one of those who viewed NASA as a fake, phony sleight of hand to divert resources that might have been going to solve the city's problems, an issue that I was particularly interested in. I'm the first to say I think that was a little bit naive, but I have retained a certain degree of skepticism about technology being able to solve our problems, even being able to help us in the Cold War. I mean, we learned very early after Kennedy announced that we're going to put a man on the moon, we're going to beat the Russians to the moon. We learned pretty quickly that the Russians really were not interested in going to the moon at all. I guess the question of the commemoration is perhaps, you know, best framed around, you know, what the next 50 years might bring.

In other words, is it possible to create a sense of, just in the smallest sense, national morale and buy-in and consensus around a social issue or a civic aim for the country as a whole? And I think Kennedy certainly did something, even if it didn't, you know, remove the problems of disenfranchisement in the South or the problems of gender equity in the workplace by a long way. There was something about the utterance that came from his podium that seemed to at least make it feel like there was a shared mission in some respects. Well, look, Nathan, you're the youthful hope for the future. So I'll ask you. I hope not. Yeah, yeah. Sorry to say. At least on this program. Do we need another gigantic national initiative equivalent to, you know, the determination to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade in the 60s?

You know, this is from my own vantage point as a historian and thinking a lot about what we've just outlined in terms of all of the shadowy areas around the shining, you know, initiative of going to the moon. Maybe we should have, instead of a space program, at least as a consensus builder, an earth program. This feels pretty straightforward in terms of what, you know, science can do, how nations can work together, thinking a lot about different forms of engineering and innovation. And you know, frankly, so much can be gained in space exploration by figuring out really basic things like how atmosphere works or how to reduce carbon or thinking about sustainable food options. I mean... Or how to provide clean water. Right. No, exactly right. I mean, if we can, you know, solve, say, the water problem in Flint, Michigan, then we can probably take a step closer to solving the water absence on Mars, right? You know, these are the kind of links that I think a lot of people could afford to see done.

And, you know, rather than imagining us moving to other barren parts of the galaxy or the solar system, you know, making sure that this corner doesn't become barren itself is obviously a really important piece of that. And we have a lot of help by virtue of Mother Nature in keeping this thing rolling. So, you know, I think it's possible. I do think, however, that, you know, there should be some acknowledgment of what it would take to create a new bipartisan moment around an earth program that I think would at least be akin in its broad support during the 60s to what the space program enjoyed. That's going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You'll find us at BackstoryRadio.org or send an email to Backstory at Virginia dot edu. We're also on Facebook and Twitter at Backstory Radio. Whatever you do, don't be a stranger.

Special thanks this week to the Johns Hopkins studios in Baltimore and to all the listeners who submitted their stories. Sorry we couldn't include them all, but we always like hearing from you. Backstory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment. Brian Ballow is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University.

Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.