Good news this morning from my publisher, Prometheus Books: Everyone's Gone to the Moon is off to the printer and is on track for its October 2023 release.
I am really enjoying writing non-fiction history. It's something that I have always wanted to do but thought it would be impossible to attain what with it being so difficult to sign on with a publisher, but here I am with my fifth book in the genre and my favorite to date. Of course I say that. When my next one comes out, I'll say that about that one. LOL!
But seriously, this one really hit home for me. I was 11 years old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. It was an exciting time to be young with incredible music bombarding the airwaves, stellar movies on the big screen, and, as you see from the back cover write up (below), it covers the gambit - pop-culture, current events, the lead up to the launch of Apollo 11 through splashdown and beyond, and a lot of personal stories from everyday people and NASA employees and contractors all of which occurred during that historic month of July 1969.
Probing deeper into the pop-culture I loved and the current events of the day, many now long forgotten like the Soccer War between El Salvador and Honduras, was fascinating but one chapter stands out for me. The chapter is titled, "Not Everyone Has Gone to the Moon." Despite that brief moment in time when the world united as they watched the grainy images of Armstrong and Aldrin first walk on the moon, polls showed that support in the U.S. for the astronauts and NASA in general was high, but not for the Apollo missions with 60% of Americans saying that the program should be cut in size or cancelled.
Protests and dissent was everywhere. Of course, the number one issue was how much the Apollo program was costing compared to the amount of money being spent on Earthly issues such as adequate housing for low income families and giving a hand up to a good portion of the population living in poverty.
Well before the first lunar landing, Congress was cutting the program's budget. In 1965, they requested that President Johnson make a drastic cut to NASA's budget and push Apollo 11 back to the 1970s which would have been past the goal set by President Kennedy to land on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Johnson refused but when asked a second time, he relented but only under the condition that the cuts be made after the final flight of the program.
Of course the most famous story is that of the Reverend Ralph Abernathy leading a protest right up to the gates of the Kennedy Space Center the night before the launch of Apollo 11 protesting the exorbitant expenditure on the space program which, in reality, was only 4.4% of the U.S. budget, only a fraction of what was being spent on the Vietnam War. Protesters carried signs reading, "Billions for Space, Pennies for Hunger" and "Rockets or Rickets".
Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson wrote scathing editorials about the state of our environment, comparing the Earth to an Apollo spacecraft. Astronauts need clean air and water, so do we on "Spaceship Earth."
But the two most interesting protests came during television coverage of the Apollo 11 landing. The first was on CBS where Walter Cronkite and astronaut Wally Schirra watched in awe at the landing. To pose a counterpoint, at 2 A.M. and during the coverage, news director Gordon Manning had a producer rush out and pick up feminist activist Gloria Steinem and author Kurt Vonnegut and rush them to the studio to question why we were going to the moon.
The other was the BBC coverage in the U.K. On the panel was James Burke as well as Irish political activist Bernadette Devlin and science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. When Devlin began questioning why we were landing on the moon and not helping solve issues on Earth, Bradbury couldn't take anymore. "This [Apollo 11] is the result of six billion years of evolution," he snapped. "Tonight, we have given lie to gravity. We have reached for the stars, and you refuse to celebrate? To hell with you!"
End of conversation.
Irish Political Activist Bernadette Devlin
There are MANY more stories from July 1969 waiting for you in my new book, Everyone's Gone to the Moon: July 1969, Life on Earth, and the Epic Voyage of Apollo 11, hitting bookstores October 2023.
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