Media, NASA, and America’s Quest for the Moon. Harlen Makemson. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2009. 272 pp.
Harlen Makemson has written a thorough and well-researched history of America’s lunar program through three perspectives. The charge given the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at its birth in 1958 was to provide “the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities.” But the agency had no guidelines for how to accomplish that goal. Makemson, an associate professor in the School of Communications at Elon University, details some of the internal battles within the agency and between its early public relations apparatus and the press as NASA struggled to find a balance between information control and transparency. During some early crises, critics charged that NASA actually stood for “Never A Straight Answer.”
The book also examines the relationship between devoted space advocates and the news media. Makemson points to the influence of Wernher von Braun’s early articles in Collier’s magazine during the 1950s, which showed that print media could turn the country’s attention to the stars. As the space program took off in the 1960s, the young U.S. TV journalism field took off with it. Makemson details how broadcast network news executives fought fierce battles internally to fund coverage of the space program, whose activities sprawled over multiple locations all around the country. NASA’s early reluctance to provide easy access to the launch sites and Mission Control in Houston meant that television had to work especially hard to create the visuals so necessary to the medium. Once the networks committed to covering the space program, however, they spent enormous sums of money to out-do one another in a ratings race that eventually devolved into “competitive inanities,” as one network executive put it.
Makemson also provides a history of how millions of Americans experienced the accomplishments and tragedies of the early space program through TV and print media. He refers to hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, aerospace industry reports, editorials, trade journal discussions, and internal documents produced by the networks to outline how and why the coverage unfolded as it did.
The book begins with a description of von Braun’s 1952 article in Collier’s, “Man on the Moon: The Journey.” Von Braun soon got a call from Disney, which was planning a TV program to tout its new California theme park. The “Man in Space” and “Man and the Moon” episodes of the Disneyland television series in 1955 whet the public appetite for the infant space program. Once the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the space race became a media focus for its military implications as well as for the drama of men on the moon.
Because the early space program was an offshoot of the military’s missile programs, NASA’s early media policy reflected security and secrecy. The general rule was “Do First, Talk Second,” and all press requests had to go through the Office of Public Information. But once the inaugural members of the astronaut corps were ready to be introduced to the nation, NASA had to revise its public information policy to accommodate the celebrity of the seven men chosen to fly.
Makemson unearths a wealth of details about how NASA balanced the needs of a more and more demanding press with the need to shelter the agency from scrutiny while it attempted to work out a staggering number of technical and mechanical difficulties. After a series of difficult negotiations, NASA permitted a live pool video feed of the first U.S. manned flight, a suborbital journey by Alan Shepard, despite the chance that the mission might spectacularly fail. President John F. Kennedy himself touted the mission as proof that America could accomplish as much as the Soviets, and under the full scrutiny of the world.
Throughout the Mercury and Gemini programs, NASA generally loosened many press restrictions. Especially for broadcast journalists who anchored live programs, this led to an unprecedented chance to connect with audiences and display knowledge and familiarity with mission details. The network anchors, especially Walter Cronkite, heralded each mission as another step forward in the race with the Soviets to the moon. Makemson devotes some attention to criticism that the networks were overly enthusiastic boosters and failing in their watchdog duty. This became all too real a charge when the Apollo 1 fire on the launch pad killed three astronauts and taxed NASA’s ability to respond to a media, as well as a programmatic, crisis.
The agency’s behavior regarding releasing information in the hours and days after the Apollo fire was misguided, at best. The ensuing investigation by a congressional review board blamed, in part, NASA’s rush to meet the timetable of putting a man on the moon by 1970, a goal repeated over and over by the media. The space press corps used the accident as an opportunity to look inward and determined that they had perhaps become willing partners with NASA in creating a mythic vision of American spaceflight that was impervious to questions of funding, competence or discretion. Twenty years later, both NASA and the space press corps would revisit such self-examinations in light of the space shuttle Challenger disaster; another incident in which early NASA reports that insisted the crew had died instantly were later contradicted by heart-wrenching audiotapes from the doomed vehicle.
After painstakingly detailing the early years, Makemson seems to rush through the remainder of the Apollo program, focusing most of his attention in the final two chapters on Apollo 8, the first flight to send a U.S. crew around the moon, and Apollo 11, which landed men on the lunar surface. The final two chapters deal with the prolonged arguments over whether astronauts would take TV cameras with them and send live video back to earth during the missions. It is breathtaking to think that the iconic Christmas Eve images of the earth rising above the horizon of the moon or the ghostly video of Neil Armstrong as he made “one small step for a man” might not have been available to an awed public. Even then, some NASA officials and some of the astronaut’s themselves did not want to accommodate the media.
Makemson deals with the remaining Apollo flights only briefly, stating that the American public lost interest in the space program. He might have spent some time exploring how the technological advances of the manned space program indirectly benefitted the media—the miniaturization of video cameras, the invention of the first personal-sized tape player for astronauts to listen to music in the capsule, etc.—but overall the book makes a useful contribution to our understanding of this time period in U.S history. Makemson has pulled together hundreds of materials from news sources, print and video archives, oral history projects, books written by some of the key players, and government documents and reports into one thorough narrative that helps the reader understand the complexities of this relationship. On the eve of the end of the U.S. government-funded manned space program, it is fitting to look back to where we’ve been.
KATHLEEN A. HANSEN
University of Minnesota