The Apollo Program Had a Surprising Close Relationship With 1960s Counterculture

History Unplugged Podcast · Jul 15, 2021 · 45m

The summer of 1969 saw astronauts land on the moon for the first time and hippie hordes descend on Woodstock for a legendary music festival. For today’s guest, Neil M. Maher, author of the book Apollo in the Age of Aquarius, the conjunction of these two era-defining events is not entirely coincidental. He argues that the celestial aspirations of NASA’s Apollo space program were tethered to terrestrial concerns, from the civil rights struggle and the antiwar movement to environmentalism, feminism, and the counterculture.

With its lavishly funded mandate to send a man to the moon, Apollo became…