Lunar skeptics.(Flashback; U.S. space policy)

The Apollo voyages to the moon marked the triumph of the 35th President over the 34th.

Dwight Eisenhower had been a space skeptic who was "not about to hock my jewels" for vainglory. (The uncharitable might point out that Ike preferred his own massive public works project: the Interstate Highway System.) In his extraordinary Farewell Address, Eisenhower warned of the "danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." He viewed the rise of Big Science with republican alarm: "The prospect of domination of this nation's scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present--and is gravely to be regarded."

President Kennedy, by contrast, seemed to welcome such domination. State and science were natural partners; JFK assured Americans that "every scientist, every engineer, every technician, contractor, and civil servant gives his personal pledge that this nation will move forward" into space. And so it did.

Congressional foes of the space program consisted mostly of a few liberals who wished the money might be wasted on the Great Society, and a handful of parsimonious conservatives who objected to the astronomical expense. The incomparable penny pincher H. R. Gross (R-IA) grumbled, "I hope that if we do get to the moon we find a gold mine up there because we will certainly need it."

Among maverick Democrats, Senate gadfly William Proxmire of Wisconsin denounced Apollo as just another instance of "corporate socialism," while Arkansas senator William Fulbright called the moon landing a "nine-day wonder of history, a gaudy sideshow in the real work of the world."

More interesting were the Apollo critics who had neither "D" nor "R" affixed to their names. The social critic Lewis Mumford found the space program "anti-human." Space travel, he argued, requires "the total mobilization of the megamachine, commanding to the point of exhaustion all the resources of the state: It is both a symbol of total control and a means of ...