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7. Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Random House, 1994), 215.
8. “Impact of U.S. Space Program on Domestic and Foreign Opinion,” August 20, 1969, Box 4, Entry A1 42, RG 306, NARA.
9. “Impact of U.S. Space Program on Domestic and Foreign Opinion.”
10. US Embassy Fort Lamy to State Department.
11. “Impact of U.S. Space Program on Domestic and Foreign Opinion,” August 20, 1969, Box 4, Entry A1 42, RG 306, NARA.
12. “Impact of U.S. Space Program on Domestic and Foreign Opinion.”
13. This type of shared experience, historians have argued, can contribute to social cohesion and transnational consciousness. See David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Akira Iriye, “Making of a Transnational World,” in Global Interdependence: The World After 1945, ed. Akira Iriye (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); “Impact of U.S. Space Program on Domestic and Foreign Opinion.”
14. Eighteenth-century print capitalism, according to Anderson, provided a common language, experience, and imagined association between people who might never meet. In the second edition of his book, Anderson analyzed additional institutions that began to flourish in the age of mechanical reproduction: museums, maps, and the census. Modern states employed these institutions to influence the content and shape of “imagined communities,” Anderson explained. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), 6.
15. In some ways, Anderson’s description of the formation of nationalism resembles David Nye’s and Michael Smith’s discussions of technological display and national image making. In Nye’s study, Americans’ experience with awe-inspiring technologies has led to social cohesion. Communal events, according to Nye, contribute to American national identity. Smith focuses on the promotion, presentation, and iconography of Apollo, or what Anderson might call the “logoization” of spaceflight. Project Apollo, according to Smith, was “an agent of national self-definition.” Both Nye and Smith are concerned with American experience and national identity making. But Project Apollo was not a merely domestic story. The image making and social cohesion that each author discusses apply to the role of Project Apollo in America’s relationship to the world as well. Nye, American Technological Sublime; Smith, “Selling the Moon,” 180.
16. “Impact of U.S. Space Program on Domestic and Foreign Opinion.”
17. The decades following Apollo have been called the Age of Fracture because of the disintegration of shared values and collective purpose. For an analysis of the relationship between the US space program and the social and political movements of the 1960s, and the longer consequences, see Neil Maher, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). On the Age of Fracture, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). For an estimate of the cost of US involvement in the Vietnam War, see “US Spent $141 Billion in Vietnam in 14 Years,” New York Times, May 1, 1975, 20. For an overview of US foreign relations in the cold war, see Walter L. Hixson, American Foreign Relations: A New Diplomatic History (New York: Routledge, 2015).
18. Collins interview with author, July 18, 2019.