Episode 5 - A Gift or a Curse?

**Casey Dreier** (0:00)
This is A Political History of Apollo, a limited series podcast from The Planetary Society, exploring the reasons why the United States decided to send humans to the moon, and why the nation pulled back after landing only six times. I'm Casey Dreier, The Planetary Society's Chief Advocate and Senior Space Policy Advisor. I'm going to be joined by some of the world's leading experts in space policy and history in interviews originally broadcast as part of our monthly show, Planetary Radio, Space Policy Edition. We grouped these interviews together in an attempt to tell a fuller story about Project Apollo, to get beyond the flags and footprints we so often see, and look at the deeper issues, like the political prehistory of the space age, the Cold War, the political opposition and cultural impacts to the nation, and even look at the Soviet side of the space race to the moon.
The show is a production of The Planetary Society, a non-profit dedicated to space science and exploration. So if you like what you hear, please consider joining or donating at planetary.org/membership. This is episode five, Apollo as a gift or a curse.
For this episode, I wanted to step back and look at the totality of the issues we've discussed. Reference back to the original interviews that I've had with our experts, but also have a conversation with my colleague, Mat Kaplan, who is going to join me today to really look back and say, what can we take from Apollo, if anything, and what does it mean for us as we move forward today, whether or not it's as we record this or going into the future, as human exploration once again turns its eyes beyond the Earth. Mat Kaplan, the producer and host of Planetary Radio, joins me right now. Mat, thanks for coming on.

**Mat Kaplan** (2:02)
My pleasure, Casey, and it has been a pleasure to work with you on this limited series, which has taught me a lot and also reminded me of the exciting period that, unlike you, I was lucky enough to live through.

**Casey Dreier** (2:16)
Yes, you remember that.
And if you can't already tell, this is going to be a more casual and extemporaneous discussion compared to some of our previous episodes. But I think it's going to be important. You'll hear us both try to work through this as well. And I think the essence of this episode, if I can give it away a little bit, is that there's no clear answer to this. Maybe that's going to be disappointing.
But it's worth trying to process together. So, Mat, I'm happy to have you on and kind of fun to have this role reversal. I'm not used to introducing you.

**Mat Kaplan** (2:49)
It's got to be fun for me. It used to be more disturbing, but now I kind of enjoy it because people who interview me get to squirm the way I do when I do these. So have fun, Casey.

**Casey Dreier** (3:01)
I won't go through your long and illustrious CV.
Well, let me start with something because, again, just looking back, Mat, you were listening very closely and part of all those interviews that I did for this show and for the Space Policy Edition. You've been thinking about these issues for a long time now. As you said, you were alive to experience Apollo as it happened. A large part of our audience is, but a large part of our audience wasn't.
And so how has Apollo changed for you, your understanding of it as you have gone through life? Have you had an evolving appreciation for it or have you always kind of remained this childhood experiential aspect of it? Has that remained in the forefront?

**Mat Kaplan** (3:44)
I've been able to retain that childlike wonder and fascination, which probably people hear as I host this show, the weekly version of Planetary Radio.
But it has been so rewarding in many ways to learn that the story is so much deeper. I want to give you an analogy.
Minutes before we started recording, I was downstairs on the treadmill watching a new documentary from American Experience about Woodstock, about the coming together of this three days of peace and music, which of course was happening right in the smack dab in the middle of Apollo. The concert was like a month and a half after, or a month after Neil and Buzz walked on the moon. Very much like my understanding of Apollo at the time and for years since, there was so much more going on behind the scenes to pull those three days of what seemed like just hippie peace and love together to make it happen because of the infrastructure that it took and the politics that went into it and the policy decisions, if only on a local level in upstate New York. It's a fascinating story. I do see parallels to what you and your guests were able to reveal over the four episodes of this series about Apollo. There is far more to think about and far more to understand about what was going on in American society through those years. Not all of it was peace and exploration and feeling simply jubilant that we had people walking on the moon. There was that, of course, and that seems to be the dominant memory that we are left with, but there was so much more of it going on at the time, as your guess so ably demonstrated.