Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

Some are unhappy that the rest of the country has never truly comprehended the historic nature of our first journey to another world. Most people think of Apollo as just another episode in the tumultuous sixties, secondary to the Vietnam War and America’s social upheaval, not as something that will still figure large in the history books when Vietnam and John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson are consigned to footnotes. But the failure to understand goes beyond that, argues Rocco Petrone. “We’ve had a lot of reporting of how big the rocket is, how much noise it makes, pictures of guys on the moon. But what was the real meaning of Apollo? What did it symbolize? What were we after?” For a few short years, Apollo was almost like a Renaissance, Petrone thinks, but nobody wants to confront that kind of possibility now—to do so would make the nation recognize how much it abandoned so casually.