446 



1028 Walter A. McDougall 



Contemporary critics on the Left and the Right considered such diversion of 

 research and development to political goals of uncertain importance a misuse of the 

 tool of state-induced technological change. By 1963-64 left-liberal critics de- 

 nounced Apollo as wasteful given problems of racism and poverty,"*^ while Barry 

 Gold water attacked the squandering of billions to impress Third World leaders. He 

 bade America to remain secure in the intangible appeal of liberty and redirect the 

 space program toward military and scientific applications.'*^ In fact, the moon 

 program was a synthesis of the same liberal mentality that conceived the Great 

 Society at home and the same conservative one that supported containment of 

 Soviet influence abroad. But in neither case did scientists play a significant role in 

 policy. 



Since 1957 governments have neither resolved the anomaly of democratic 

 incompetence in technology nor abandoned the rituals of democracy. Instead, they 

 continue to choose scientific advice just as voters choose the politicians, on the basis 

 of promises, persuasiveness, personality, and their own preconceptions. Among the 

 Edward Tellers, Wernher von Brauns, and Barry Commoners, whom do you trust? 

 The Space Age introduced science and technology to the political arena, but it did 

 not transform politics or usher the scientists to power. 



For the united states, the early Space Age was a critical period of adjustment to 

 the prospect of Soviet nuclear paritv, to the emergence of a surly and disobedient 

 Third World, and to the apparition of command technology as a genie in the 

 service of government. Even if the .\pollo program reflected the failure of science 

 to reshape politics, it nonetheless unleashed hothouse technological change on an 

 unprecedented scale. Apollo is the best symbol of a revolution in governmental 

 expectations that occurred in the decade after 1957, and the roar of the rockets was 

 its tocsin. The revolution in research and development dating from Sputnik can be 

 termed, with only slight exaggeration, "Daedalus Unbound," and here is the 

 institutional and behavioral change that defines the Space Age in history. 



The only analyst who has treated the early space program as an integral 

 phenomenon rather than "just an expression" of this or that tendency in American 

 life or the Cold War is Bruce Ma/lish in his introduction to The Railroad and the 

 Space Program: An Expbration in Historical Analogy (1965). Mazlish characterized the 

 space prograrn as a "complex social invention" that, like the railroads of the 

 nineteenth century, was at once te( hnological, economic, political, sociological, and 



** See especially Amitai Etzioni, The Moon Dogglf (Garden City, N.Y., 1964); and Edwin Diamond, The Rise 

 and Fall of the Space Age (Garden City, N.Y., 1964). Also see Harold W. Babbit. "Priorities, Frugality, and the 

 Space Race: A Preliminary Assessment of Congiessional Criticism of Project Apollo," NASA hhn-41 

 (September 1964); William L. Crum, Lunar Lunacy and Other Commentaries (Philadelphia. 1965); Lester M. 

 Hirsch. ed.. Man and Space (New York, 1966); Eriend A. Kennan and Edmund H. Harvey. Jr., Mission to the 

 Moan: A Critical Examination of NASA and the Spcue Program (New York, 1969); and John V. Moeser, The Space 

 Program and the Urban Problem (Washington. 1969). 



Apollo did have indirect military benefits. Fear of technological surprise was a major impetus for 

 McNamara's and Rusk's support of the wi>on program. It forged the "building bliKks" of space mastery 

 without the provocation of a large Air For( e program. 



