Whitey on the Moon’: Race, Politics, and the death of the U.S. Space Program 1958-1972

Description

We went to the moon. This is a fact. Indisputable, except to those conspiracy theorists clinging to their belief some sinister plot was hatched by the U.S. Government to conceal our inability to navigate to earth’s natural satellite. On July 20, 1969, man first stood on the moon; on December 18, 1972, man stood on the moon for the last time. What happened to end the dream of space exploration, left instead to the colorful imagination of Trekkies and science fiction fans believing some diverse band of humans could navigate the heavens in a Utopian future? The US Government neutered NASA by forcing a much different mission upon the space agency: diversity and the promotion of blacks. We went to the moon. On multiple occasions. When NASA was nearly all-white, with an all-white astronaut team. But in 1972, the Apollo program was grounded, with the Space Shuttle program becoming a glorified experiment in social engineering and special interest group cheer-leading. Each successive launch included women, blacks, and other racial minorities, not for the sake of exploration, but for the sake of gender and racial equality. The glory of NASA and mankind’s great moments in space exploration were all milestones performed under the watchful of an almost completely white NASA, devoid of the hindrance of affirmative action programs and the shackles of Equal Employment Opportunity mandates.