NASA: Marketing and the Public Opinion
In the late 1950s and through the 1960s other publications and media sources show a significant increase in features on space travel and colonization from a futurist perspective. However, these images weren’t just targeted at what the nation’s leading scientists could accomplish but what the average consumer could achieve. Magazines features, comics, shows and product advertisements carried the implication that every man and child would soon by traversing the stars.
The Apollo program ran from the early 1960s to the 1970s. The missions were a multi-step process involving advancing technology until manned missions to the moon could be done safely. The risk of astronaut’s lives meant that missions were to be carried out in stages to test the theories behind space travel. News outlets and magazines regularly featured the astronauts while in training to give an American face to the heroic endeavor to reach space. The first Apollo mission in 1967 resulted in a cabin fire and the deaths of the three astronauts set to launch. Manned missions were suspended for a significant time until October 1968, less than a year before the successful moon landing, when the Apollo 7 crew orbited the earth. In 1970, the Apollo 13 mission was aborted due to technical failure but the crew returned to Earth safely. The missions continued until December of 1972, with the Apollo 17 crew. Given the defunding of NASA immediately after the Apollo 11 mission in July of 1969, many Americans and space enthusiasts have asked over the years what happened to the mass interest in space exploration.[3]
The multi-entity marketing campaign that led up to the Apollo 11 mission not only bolstered the public’s interest in space travel but it also concealed many of the facts. The reality behind the artistically illustrated veil covering up the real work of scientists and astronauts was not the grand adventure promised but far too mundane to sustain mass interest. Further, the reality behind the projects which involved the fact that true space travel lays beyond many generations, and the capabilities of known science and technology was disappointing from an immediate gratification front. As the base interest waned, questions began to rise over the justification of the expense of the program. These realizations are proof that part of the reason mass interest in space exploration was so high during the Cold War was because it was manufactured.
Many scientists, scholars, and space enthusiasts who write about space exploration delve into the question of why the interest in space reached such a fervor in the Cold War only to fizzle quickly and silently.[4] Many works of scholarly research focus specifically on NASA’s motivations and that of other aerospace industries. Hindsight is significant in this not because it demonstrates what technologies were realized and incorporated into American daily life but it provides insight into the motivations of the aerospace industries push to creatively market their work and research. One significant surprise that occurred once mankind got into space was that collectively, American’s interests and the attentions of the media heavily turned back to the earth. The first earth day commemorations in 1970, came about as a result of photographs of the world taken by astronauts. Many questions emerged in this time which turned into political and social movements informed by environmental concerns. How could people justify the expenditure of something like space exploration, travel, and colonization, which may not see results in many lifetimes, when there are so many environmental and humanitarian needs on the earth?
[1] Von Hardesty and Gene Eisman. Epic Rivalry: The Inside Story of the Soviet and American Space Race (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2007) 76.
[2] Joseph M. Goldsen, “Public Opinion and Social Effects of Space Activity,” (RAND Corporation, 20 July 1959) 3-5.
[2] Joseph M. Goldsen, “Public Opinion and Social Effects of Space Activity,” (RAND Corporation, 20 July 1959) 3-5.
[3] Jesse Lee Kercheval, Space: A Memoir, (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Press, 1998); Marina Benjamin, Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World Beyond (New York: Free Press, 2003); Megan Prelinger, Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962, (New York: Blast Books, 2010).
[4] See Marina Benjamin’s Rocket Dreams, Corn’s Yesterday’s Tomorrows, Scott and Jurek’s Marketing the Moon, Chertok’s Rocket’s and People, Creating a Rocket Industry, Kauffman’s Selling Outer Space, as well as recent popular media example’s such as films Tomorrowland (2015), Interstellar (2014) and documentary series Cosmos and The New frontier.