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A Moon for the Miscellaneous

Neil M. Maher’s Apollo in the Age of Aquarius raises the prospect of adjusting our understanding of the tumultuous 1960s by approaching the era from a novel perspective. Coincidentally, Americans who lived through that decade experienced the impact of two apparently disjunctive forces. The first was the climax (and eventual collapse) of widespread faith in technocracy and its component parts: science, technology, professional expertise, and top-down planning. The second was the rapid (and mostly unforeseen) rise of new social movements that were driven by an instinct to humanize institutions, laws, organizations, and individual states of consciousness. Historians have commonly noted the similarities and distinctions among the various bottom-up movements, the tensions, cross-pollinations, and casual associations that loosely united—and occasionally divided—the subversive constituencies. Yet, with the exception of the counterculture, scholars have generally avoided examining any relationships between 1960s reform movements and technocracy. Now Maher is attempting to fill this investigative gap by revisiting criticisms of NASA’s moon landing program by selected movement representatives. He is also attempting to construct an alternative historical synthesis for the legendary 1960s, in which yesterday’s Age of Aquarius resembles today’s Age of Fracture. Still, the nagging question is this: How can a study that is so resourceful and industrious in gathering enticing facts and anecdotes also be so thematically confusing in its disjointed narrative? The answer is that the book’s mission is muddled from the start. Not only does Maher try to accomplish too many things, but his approach lacks precision and his claims are often not borne out by the evidence. His opening argument that the “space race and the social and political movements of the 1960s era . . . were mutually dependent on each other for popular and political support” is unconvincing (p. 2). Surely the civil rights and antiwar movements did not require NASA’s presence to make their points, build their followings, or draw attention to their crusades; the same can be said about second-wave feminism and the counterculture.