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From the Bookshelf: Marketing the Moon
Dec. 10th, 2014 06:50 pmFaced with the temptation of a bookstore discount coupon, I succumbed and bought a coffee-table-style book I'd heard a bit about before seeing it on local shelves, "Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program." It delves into the "public relations" of the American space program in the 1960s, beginning with the private ventures (including Wernher von Braun teaming up with Walt Disney) that had begun to make space travel seem just around the corner the decade before and ending with the hangover at the beginning of the next decade after the goal everyone knew about had been accomplished but selling "the obvious next step" (which was only really started after the first landing for fears it would seem like asking for too much), much less keeping up public interest in the simplest of next steps in going back to the goal, turned out to be more difficult. The authors (one of who, David Meerman Scott, includes his middle name on the cover to try and not be confused with the astronaut) don't editorialize too much anyway about how "it should have been done."
There turns out to be a good amount of emphasis on "live from the Moon" (including a picture of the marionette astronauts NBC resorted to when Apollo 12's TV camera burned out) and the news coverage of Apollo 11, but in reading that I suppose I did think back to the ads I saw on the back cover and the chapter on the NASA-industry partnership which included some ads from the companies providing products for space missions. That a good number of the ads are for prepared and processed food (including, of course, Tang, even if that was in fact an off-the-shelf product and not "developed for the program" as the urban legend has it) did get me thinking a bit about how fashions changed just in the decade that followed, but I suppose I also got to wondering about what sort of memorabilia had been "sold to the junior spacemen," which might have seemed similar to the "private ventures" at the beginning of the book. Things close with a page about the modern "independent businessmen" Elon Musk and Richard Branson, but not before a note that caught my own attention about the "fanciful space" of Star Wars that followed the hangover (although it was after first seeing that movie that my own youthful interest in "being an astronaut" kicked up...)
There turns out to be a good amount of emphasis on "live from the Moon" (including a picture of the marionette astronauts NBC resorted to when Apollo 12's TV camera burned out) and the news coverage of Apollo 11, but in reading that I suppose I did think back to the ads I saw on the back cover and the chapter on the NASA-industry partnership which included some ads from the companies providing products for space missions. That a good number of the ads are for prepared and processed food (including, of course, Tang, even if that was in fact an off-the-shelf product and not "developed for the program" as the urban legend has it) did get me thinking a bit about how fashions changed just in the decade that followed, but I suppose I also got to wondering about what sort of memorabilia had been "sold to the junior spacemen," which might have seemed similar to the "private ventures" at the beginning of the book. Things close with a page about the modern "independent businessmen" Elon Musk and Richard Branson, but not before a note that caught my own attention about the "fanciful space" of Star Wars that followed the hangover (although it was after first seeing that movie that my own youthful interest in "being an astronaut" kicked up...)