By the morning of July 16, 1969, Cape Canaveral, Florida, and its surrounds had been engulfed by a million people. Their number included half of all the members of the U.S. Congress, the ambassadors of sixty-nine countries, celebrities major and minor, and countless reporters. All were there to witness the launch of a 111-metre rocket, much taller than the Statue of Liberty, atop which sat a small conical spacecraft containing three astronauts. If all went well, the crew of Apollo 11 was headed to the moon.
Among the crowd was the novelist and New Journalist Norman Mailer. He was covering Apollo 11 for Life magazine, at the time an unabashed booster of the American space program. Mailer’s plunge into NASA press briefings and mission control tours, however, had failed to spark in him feelings of enthusiasm and patriotism for what he regarded as a bland world of routine, checklists, and “technologese.” But the night before the launch, he was...
Robert Smith is former chair of the Space History Department at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum. He teaches at the University of Alberta.
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