Given this outlay during the 1960s, a time of great social unrest, you can bet people protested spending this much money on a moon landing. Many more quietly opposed the missions. Space historian Roger Launius of the National Air and Space Museum has called attention to public-opinion polls conducted during the Apollo missions. Here is his conclusion:

For example, many people believe that Project Apollo was popular, probably because it garnered signiﬁcant media attention, but the polls do not support a contention that Americans embraced the lunar landing mission. Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45-60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much onspace, indicative of a lack of commitment to the spaceﬂight agenda. These data do not support a contention that most people approved of Apollo and thought it important to explore space.

We've told ourselves a convenient story about the moon landing and national unity, but there's almost no evidence that our astronauts united even America, let alone the world. Yes, there was a brief, shining moment right around the moon landing when everyone applauded, but four years later, the Apollo program was cut short and humans have never seriously attempted to get back to the moon ever again.

I can't pretend to trace the exact process by which the powerful images of men on the moon combined with a sense of nostalgia for a bygone era of heroes combined to create the notion that the Apollo missions were overwhelmingly popular. That'd be a book. But what I can do is tell you about two individuals who, in their own ways, opposed the government and tried to direct funds to more earthly pursuits: poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron and the sociologist Amitai Etzioni, then at Columbia University.

Heron performed a song called, "Whitey on the Moon" that mocked "our" achievements in space.

The song had a very powerful effect on my historical imagination and led to me seeking out much of the other evidence in this post. The opening line creates a dyad that's hard to forget: "A rat done bit my sister Nell / With Whitey on the moon." I wrote about this song last year when Scott-Heron died, reflecting on what it meant for "our" achievements in space.

Though I still think the hunger for the technological sublime crosses racial boundaries, [the song] destabilized the ease with which people could use "our" in that kind of sentence. To which America went the glory of the moon landing? And what did it cost our nation to put whitey on the moon?

Many black papers questioned the use of American funds for space research at a time when many African Americans were struggling at the margins of the working class. An editorial in the Los Angeles Sentinel, for example, argued against Apollo in no uncertain terms, saying, "It would appear that the fathers of our nation would allow a few thousand hungry people to die for the lack of a few thousand dollars while they would contaminate the moon and its sterility for the sake of 'progress' and spend billions of dollars in the process, while people are hungry, ill-clothed, poorly educated (if at all)."