Operation Moonglow

by Teasel Muir-Harmony

  After the ceremony with the president, the astronauts and their wives spent the rest of the day at the White House. Buzz Aldrin took the opportunity to have the president’s dentist replace a filling that had come loose on the tour.87 Later that evening, over cocktails, Nixon wanted to hear all about the tour. They handed him a large book of photos and used it to illustrate their stories.88 “He was very interested in everything we had to report about the tour, about the various leaders we had met, what their reaction was and what did they say,” Armstrong recalled. Nixon thanked them for acting as his ambassadors and, according to Armstrong, told them that “he had been trying for years to get a meeting with Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu and after leaving the USS Hornet he was able to get an appointment. President Nixon said something to the effect, ‘That meeting alone paid for everything we spent on the space program.’”89

  Although Nixon’s comment to Armstrong is clearly an overstatement—a remark meant to entertain as much as communicate—it reveals important elements in Nixon’s evaluation of Project Apollo and spaceflight more generally. He fully recognized the public relations value of the moon landing, and he leveraged its popularity to serve a host of foreign relations needs. As historian Steve Wolfe argues, the tour was “a highly political and carefully choreographed event designed to reward friends, snub foes, and promised a flood of positive foreign headlines that would for a while help offset the dreary news from Vietnam and elsewhere.” Days later, Kissinger would echo Nixon’s sentiment, claiming that “the visit of our astronauts abroad constitutes one of the effective policy vehicles available to us.”90 What both savvy leaders understood was the variety of the space program’s political spin-offs. The astronaut tour, both hoped, would amplify the message that the moon landing was “for all humankind,” a message designed to herald the liberality of US global leadership.

  That evening the president and Armstrong sat at the head of the dinner table in the upstairs family dining room. White House staff had put out Woodrow Wilson’s china, rimmed with a dark cobalt border and gilded trim. It was a small, intimate meal, just the six exhausted travelers and the Nixons. The Apollo 11 crew’s first dinner back in the United States was a French feast of a timbale of lobster Americaine, breast of chukar partridge Veronique alongside a bottle of Chateau Mouton Rothschild (1966), and for dessert soufflé au Grand Marnier.91 After dinner, Pat Nixon gave them a tour of the White House’s private quarters, including her porcelain collection. Then Neil, Buzz, and Mike retired to their sleeping quarters, where they found a bucket of ice and a bottle of Scotch waiting for them. Two more hours passed quickly, as they talked and drank and tried to make sense of everything they had experienced together over the past four months.92

  AFTERGLOW

  A little over five hours after launch on December 7, 1972, the Apollo 17 crew looked back and spotted the whole Earth through a window of their command module. Stunning and bright, the Earth seemed to hang with “no strings hold[ing] it up… out there all by itself,” observed Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan. They captured this world on film, but the political divisions, and the turmoil taking place over 18,000 miles away, were not recorded on the emulsion.1

  When NASA technicians processed the film from Apollo 17 in Houston, one photograph in particular caught their attention: the whole Earth, without the night side obscuring any part of its surface, against an inky backdrop of outer space. Much like the Earthrise photograph, the image that became known as Blue Marble quickly circulated around the globe, appearing on the covers of newspapers and magazines. It coalesced conversations about the need for world peace and environmental action. Reminiscent of the plaques that the Apollo crews left on the moon, Blue Marble revealed a planet devoid of political boundaries. For years, public diplomats had been cultivating the consciousness of global unity and, by 1972, thanks to the Apollo 17 crew, they had a photograph that embodied this message. Blue Marble translated a concept that had once been abstract and ethereal into one that was visually concrete.2

  Cernan contended that Blue Marble should be seen “from the philosophical point of view.” Holding up a copy of the photograph in his hand, he explained: “This is us. We’re looking at ourselves.”3

  Blue Marble, taken by the Apollo 17 crew, December 1972. (NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION)

  The viewing of the Earth from space, whether it was the astronauts’ firsthand perspective or later by looking at their photographs, has been said to recast our understanding of humanity and the planet. In 1966 counterculture writer Stewart Brand started campaigning for NASA to take a photograph of the whole Earth, arguing that “no one would ever perceive things in the same way” if they saw the Earth in its entirety.4 Brand’s contemporaries also expressed the notion that viewing the Earth from space would prompt a revolution, causing people to understand Earth and civilization anew. Once Apollo astronauts returned to Earth, many recounted a transformative experience in space, perhaps expressed most succinctly by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders: “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” Reactions to the lunar flights around the world echoed Anders’s experience.5

  Since the Apollo 17 crew left the moon in 1972 and brought Blue Marble back to Earth, countless efforts have attempted to understand and articulate the meaning of Project Apollo. They often assert that the lunar missions created the experience and consciousness of global unity. Sheila Jasanoff suggests that the Blue Marble image “perhaps more than any other has come to symbolize the Western world’s heightened perceptions of connectedness.” Others have likened the space-based optic to the Copernican revolution for its transformative impact on human self-perception.6

  Decades after Project Apollo, astrophysicist and science promoter Carl Sagan proposed that the photographs taken by the Apollo crews “helped awaken our slumbering planetary consciousness.” Critical of the politics of spaceflight, Sagan reflected that “whatever the reason we first mustered the Apollo program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and the fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of Apollo.”7

  Sagan contrasts cold war nationalism and planetary consciousness, treating them as an unlikely pairing. But the planetary consciousness that Sagan observed was not simply a spontaneous, unanticipated consequence of Apollo. As the story of the Apollo 11 plaque—or the countless exhibits, press releases, film screenings, and diplomatic tours, among other programming—demonstrates, the idea of “planetary consciousness” was cultivated and marketed to advance US national interests. Although the linkages between nationalism and “planetary consciousness” may have become obscured by 1969, the story of Project Apollo shows us how they are historically intertwined.

  After Apollo 11, the USIA sent a report to the White House assessing the impact of the US space program on foreign public opinion. It noted that more than ten years earlier, the launch of Sputnik cemented the Soviet Union’s role as a superpower in the minds of many people around the world. In the 1950s, scientific and technological prowess became equated with all facets of national power. “The USSR was seen as not only holding a commanding lead in space; it was viewed as able to offer a credible challenge to the U.S. in any field where it chose to compete,” the report stated. Two factors amplified the impact of Sputnik: “its unexpectedness” and the “drama” and “innate appeal” of spaceflight, which ensured heavy news coverage. Sputnik II, Gagarin’s flight, and all the other USSR space firsts only reinforced the public’s perception of the Soviet Union’s superpower status: “The clamor of domestic debate in the US reverberated through the world press, and was assiduously cited by the USSR,” fueling the association of spaceflight and national power even further.8

  It was an uphill battle at first. The United States came from behind, but eventually a “see-saw pattern” emerged, with the “latest or most spectacular feat” determining th
e lead. The report stated that a single factor had a profound effect on the impact of the two programs: openness.

  Although at first CIA Director Allen Dulles and others initially questioned the advisability of the openness of the US civil space program, it paid off exceptionally well. According to the 1969 USIA evaluation, this open approach “fostered a sense of vicarious participation” throughout the world. It was in this arena that the US outmatched the Soviet Union. The essence of the difference was that the Soviet space program did not “escape the shadows of secrecy, concealment, and nationalistic possessiveness.” The US approach to space information dissemination—especially the policy of “openness”—bore fruit. It not only became a symbolic illustration of democratic values; it also enabled people to engage thoroughly with the US space program, from learning technical details of spacecraft to feeling the anticipation that comes with following a risky mission in real time.9

  By 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first steps on the moon, US public diplomats had come to recognize that beating the Soviets in space was no longer their top priority. Instead, the greatest geopolitical rewards of Project Apollo came from the international public’s sense of personal participation in this American-led endeavor. This is a lesson learned from years in the field, observing what did and did not resonate with international audiences. Public diplomats adapted their presentation of Project Apollo abroad, in part to ensure its political impact. Initially, framing the US space program as “for all mankind” helped suggest that the modified ICBMs lifting satellites into orbit were for peace and global prosperity instead of national security. At the beginning of the Space Age, diplomats touted US space hardware and scientific expertise. When public opinion polls and feedback from foreign posts revealed that international audiences did not respond well to the heralding of American greatness and technological strength, this message was dampened and subsequently replaced with one emphasizing global unity and international participation. Critique of US involvement in Vietnam and civil rights tensions prompted US officials to stress even more strongly themes of peace, inclusion, and a shared mission. The framing of Apollo was not wholly born within the United States but through a dialogue between US government officials and the audiences they hoped to influence.

  A report from the US Embassy in Chad distilled this lesson: “The psychological success of Apollo in Chad is largely due to Washington’s decision to stress the fact that Project Apollo is a venture of all mankind and not just of Americans… [the] soft-pedaling of nationalistic sentiments succeeded in establishing America’s technological supremacy and in adding to our overall national prestige much more effectively than a ‘hard sell’ ever could have.” For public diplomats the triumph of Apollo lay in the widespread identification with an American accomplishment.10

  Although the reach and intensity of foreign audiences’ responses to the moon landing were record-breaking on many metrics, what struck public diplomats the most was “the general tendency of foreigners to claim the feat as an achievement of all mankind.” Not just an achievement for all mankind, an achievement of all mankind: “The deed seemed too important to bear a national label.”11

  The openness of the program, combined with the broad access afforded by television, radio, and newspaper coverage, “permitted a world audience simultaneously to share the human drama… [heightening] the participatory involvement inherent in the nature of the moon landing.”12

  Public diplomats asked if the sense of unity brought about by Apollo 11 programming signaled “an emerging new dimension in the international political process, comparable to the experience of unity that might be expected to emerge from such global disasters as a world epidemic, a meteor collision, or a nuclear accident.” This sense of unity or “solidarity of the human community” was “heightened by awareness that the whole of mankind was sharing the emotions and exhilaration of a single experience.” US government and commercial TV coverage of the flight had promoted the sense of global participation in the moon landing by streaming images of audiences around the world viewing the flight in unison. A fundamental element of the experience of watching or listening to the lunar landing was the awareness that the rest of the world was simultaneously following each stage of the mission with you.13

  Political theorist Benedict Anderson described a very similar phenomenon, arguing that political and geographic boundaries have little to do with nations and nationalism. In Anderson’s view, the globe resembles the Blue Marble photograph or the Earth as it was depicted on the Apollo 11 plaque. A nation is “an imagined political community,” he explained. These communities are imagined because, like strangers reading the same morning newspaper, citizens may never meet one another even though they participate in an abstract communal event. Common language, common experiences, common history, and an awareness of interdependence make communities cohere.14

  The story of spaceflight’s role in US diplomacy reflects the process that Anderson described. NASA and US public diplomats inundated the world population with global iconography like the Apollo 11 plaque and mission emblem or the Blue Marble and Earthrise images. They explicitly and intentionally spent years building up a communications infrastructure that gave global access to flight coverage, thereby ensuring that the moon landing would be a common experience, creating a shared history for people around the world. All the while, US messaging and media compounded the sense of participation and the awareness of interdependence. Together, these efforts not only promoted spaceflight; they also fostered an imagined global community.15

  It is important to note that Apollo did not create a united world, peaceful and serene like the one caught on film by the Apollo 17 crew. USIA staff knew that Project Apollo could not erase the growing criticism of government spending, civil rights tensions, urban unrest, the war in Vietnam, or the other challenges facing the United States in 1969. And they recognized that enthusiasm for Apollo 11 would fade with time. For although the moon landing may have heightened a consciousness of global interdependence, it also raised awareness of the disparity between America’s mastery of space and the faltering attempts to address problems on Earth. Many questioned the cost of Apollo. The expense of human spaceflight highlighted “the chasm between the superpowers and all other nations,” the USIA evaluation acknowledged.16 As with earlier phases in the process of globalization, some divisions were exacerbated while new connections were formed.

  Just as Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, address to Congress included a series of “urgent national needs” in addition to Apollo, the United States pursued numerous major national commitments throughout the 1960s. And many foreign relations initiatives, unlike the moon landing, did not have broad appeal. Under Kennedy the United States expanded the military and the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal and increased involvement in Vietnam. The CIA backed regime change in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Laos, and Brazil. When Johnson became president, he escalated the Vietnam War. The number of American military personnel in Vietnam jumped from fewer than 20,000 to more than 500,000 during his administration. One year of fighting in Vietnam by 1969 cost the United States roughly the equivalent of the entire Apollo program. The Nixon administration signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and initiated a new era of relations with China, but it also intervened in Chile, Cambodia, and Bolivia and ordered major bombing campaigns in Southeast Asia. The space program had a tangible and immediate impact on US foreign relations, from creating “apolitical” opportunities for US diplomats to meet with local leaders, to displacing negative newspaper headlines about the US, to Nixon’s Operation Moonglow tour. But any expectation that the moon landing could have brought unequivocal peace and unity to planet Earth, or a full embrace of the United States and its policies, misunderstands the broader geopolitical context that begot Apollo and that Apollo existed within.17

  After Project Apollo ended, the geopolitical landscape did not reflect the image of the borderless Earth inscribed on the Apollo 11 plaque or depicted in
Blue Marble; the world was still very much parceled into nation-states, and the US and the USSR radiated their separate spheres of influence. Nonetheless, as embossing helps us see patterns on paper, images such as the Blue Marble made it easier to see what unites us even in a divided world. This was Apollo’s afterglow: our heightened awareness of global interdependence.

  During the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing, Michael Collins reiterated a point he made years earlier. When he traveled the world with Armstrong and Aldrin after their flight, in every country they visited “everywhere people said ‘we did it,’ we humans—humanity finally left this little dinky planet and set foot else elsewhere.”18

  As Collins elaborated, “That trip around the world kind of changed [me], opened my vista. I would not swap the US for any other place but I think when we are in the business of foreign policy, the technology that goes into foreign policy, the use of that technology, how it manifests itself, and how we treat other countries, I think it’s important that we try not to be—not the dominant leader. I think we ought to bend over backwards to have a unified, worldwide approach.”

  The message that resonated with people around the world was not of US greatness and strength; it was of sharing and community and openness. The global power that Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all pursued through the American space program required “bending over backwards to have a unified, worldwide approach,” as Collins put it. It required forgoing the message of nationalism in favor of global connectedness. For Apollo to “win hearts and minds,” to advance US national interests, it had to be an achievement of and not for all humankind.