In his 1971 presidential memoir The Vantage Point, Lyndon Johnson concluded his chapter on the space program as follows:
On the morning of July 16, 1969, at President Nixon’s request, I stood under the Florida sun at Cape Kennedy and witnessed the launching of Apollo 11, carrying the voyagers who would first set foot on the moon. As I watched that vehicle rise on its pillar of flame, seeing sky and earth and rocket all tied together in one majestic and unforgettable panorama, I could not help remembering that earlier vigil, twelve years before, when we strained to see the Soviet Sputnik orbiting overhead. In the short span of time between those two events, we wrote a story that will be told for centuries to come. We developed the ability to operate in space with both men and machines. From outside the earth’s environment we studied the sun and the planets. We used space machines to forecast weather and to improve communications a hundredfold. But there is even more to the story than that, I believe.
Space was the platform from which the social revolution of the 1960s was launched. We broke out of far more than the atmosphere with our space program. We escaped from the bonds of inattention and inaction that had gripped the 1950s. New ideas took shape. If we could send a man to the moon, we knew we should be able to send a poor boy to school and to provide decent medical care for the aged. In hundreds of other forms, the Space program had an impact on our lives. Across the entire range of our technology we are beginning to reap benefits from the investment we have made in space—from the Pacemaker, which can add years to the life of a heart patient, to intercontinental television; from new lightweight electronics equipment to improved navigation techniques for ships and planes.
Within another decade the spinoffs from space will be improving life in ever-increasing ways, from medicine to urban planning. We will use the vantage point of space to locate new supplies of food and new resources on earth. Weather control will save lives and crops and cattle. New concepts of communication will help to banish ignorance. Cameras in space will warn us of crop plagues before they have time to spread across half a nation. We can build laboratories in space that will enable us to learn more about our own earth as well as the planets. We can build natural resources satellites at relatively little cost that can tell us about mineral and oil deposits, water and fish supplies, and dangers from flood and fire. We can build an Antarctica-type station on the moon. We can marry aeronautics and astronautics to develop a spacecraft that can be reused, and thus lower the cost of space travel.
And we can go on from there. I hope we will move out to other planets. I hope we will pursue new dreams. We must not be content to relegate this great adventure to a business-as-usual status. We should never permit the plaudits that President Nixon and our other leaders have given our spacemen in this noble effort to be silenced by the pleaders for economy. I am concerned and disappointed that as I write this some of our previous plans are being abandoned and our vision appears to be in the process of being replaced by that of thinkers of another day who compared this magnificent thrust to an “outer space basketball game.”
The new adventures in space that lie ahead will bring with them excitement and accomplishment as great as anything we have witnessed in the epic period just past, when we proved ourselves once more to be the sons of pioneers who tamed a broad continent and built the mightiest nation in the history of the world.
There are a few things that stand out when we read this passage today, as the Artemis II astronauts return to earth. The first is that it offers one of the era’s most explicit articulations of the presumed complementarity of technological, material, social, and moral progress—an assumption that fell apart in the subsequent years. The second is that, like so many others at the time, LBJ seemed confident that the progress he had overseen in all these areas would continue steadily, even if he did express concern about the influence of the “pleaders for economy” who viewed space exploration as a mere extravagance. In fact, the Apollo program would be terminated the year after he published Vantage Point, one of many casualties of the fiscal strain that was beginning to erode the foundations of American power in the early ’70s.
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