Download No Requiem for the Space Age: The Apollo Moon Landings and American Culture AudioBook Free
During the summer time of 1969 - the summertime Americans first walked on the moon - musician and poet Patti Smith recalled strolling down the Coney Island Boardwalk to a refreshment stand, where "pictures of Jesus, Chief executive Kennedy, and the astronauts were taped to the wall behind the register." Such was the zeitgeist in the year of the moon. Yet this holy trinity of 1960s America would quickly break apart. Although Jesus and John F. Kennedy continued to be iconic, by the time the Apollo Program came up to a premature end just 3 years later few Us citizens mourned its passing. Why does support for the space program lower so sharply by the early 1970s? Rooted in serious scientific and technical leaps, rational technocratic management, and an ambitious view of the universe as a realm susceptible to individuals mastery, the Apollo moon landings were the grandest manifestation of postwar North american progress and appeared to prove that america could complete anything to which it devoted its energies and resources. To the fantastic dismay of its many proponents, however, NASA found the ground moving beneath its legs as a fierce influx of anti-rationalism arose throughout American contemporary society, fostering a ethnical environment where growing amounts of Americans started out to contest alternatively than adopt the rationalist beliefs and perspective of improvement that Apollo embodied. No Requiem for the Space Era offers a narrative of the 1960s and 1970s unlike any told before, with the story of Apollo as the story of America itself in a period of dramatic ethnical change.
