Abundance

by Ezra Klein

The moon race is remembered today as a necessary and broadly popular response to the Soviet threat. But one of the most misunderstood aspects of the space race is that the Apollo program survived because of political persistence, not because of its popularity. In its brief history, the moon mission polled poorly. A 1965 Gallup survey found that “only 39 percent of Americans thought that the US should do everything possible, regardless of cost, to be the first nation on the moon.”87 A majority of Americans consistently told pollsters that the Apollo missions weren’t worth the cost, with up to 60 percent saying the government was spending too much on space.88 At one point, President John F. Kennedy—who famously said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”—told NASA chief James Webb, “I’m not that interested in space.”89 A majority of Americans supported the lunar missions only once in the 1960s: in a poll taken just after Neil Armstrong’s televised landing.