Word: spaces
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...novelty of going to the moon, and of space exploration in general, wore off quickly, in part because the government's commitment to those programs came out of political and military expediency ("Beat the Commies"), rather than any scientific motivation. In aligning itself in the public eye with Johnson and Nixon, the Pentagon, and other symbols of conservatism, NASA unintentionally hurried its own decline. For these "friends" of the space program aided it only when such help was good policy...
...Eagle but the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne in Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquidick the morning before. By the time "Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed" reached Houston, the White House had already dispatched Tony Ulasewicz to dig up all the dirt on the incident. When space lost its public appeal and propaganda value, most "supporters" dropped...
Opposition had been growing long before Apollo XI left the pad at Cape Kennedy. The $25 billion price tag for the manned space program, spread out over ten years, provided a nice target for those who thought we should "solve our problems on earth before we worry about space." The public image of NASA and space exploration evolved into one of tremendous waste, of massive expenditures for little or no return...
...MOON STILL WAITS. There are no plans to go back. Some day, though, assuming we don't destroy ourselves first, humans will probably quicken the pace of what one writer has called "our hesitation waltz into space," and return to the lunar surface...
...when moonshots started boring people and networks no longer felt like covering them in depth, support for space fell faster than Skylab. Nixon, whose obnoxiousness had interrupted the moonwalk, turned around and canned the last three Apollos. The funds for the proposed space station were cut sharply, meaning that Skylab would be built on the cheap, out of a mishmash of spare parts from the Apollo programs. NASA wanted to put the station into a higher orbit than the one ended in Australia last week, but the money wasn't there...