Nor was Kennedy alone in his demand. In the months following the Apollo 8 mission, the calls to reduce the American space program were incessant and many. For example, when the American Association for the Advancement of Science held a panel discussion on the space program at its December 1969 meeting, more than one hundred demonstrators also gathered to protest what they called a "moondoggle" and "our twisted national priorities." 21 The organizers of the protest later referred to NASA as a place ''where the most outrageous forms of waste for profit are perpetuated . . . and used to divert attention from the obvious neglect of peoples' needs." 22
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Frank Borman himself got a personal up-front look at this groundswell of hostility. That spring President Nixon asked him to visit a number of colleges and universities to explain what the space program was about. In writing about that college tour years later, Borman bluntly described it as "a disaster." Astronaut Borman, a former test pilot and military man, found himself the target for the student anger at the continuing Vietnam War. Often students refused to let him speak, drowning him out with boos and catcalls. At Columbia, birthplace of violent student protest, the audience threw marshmallows at him, while others climbed onto the stage in gorilla costumes.
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To Borman, one night at Cornell was particularly painful. "I wanted to talk about space, not an unpopular war, yet I ended up becoming almost an apologist for the military-industrial complex in the eyes of my radical-minded audiences who didn't want to hear about space." 23 Almost all the students Borman met, many of whom belonged to the S.D.S., seemed to reject the idea of exploration. "'How can you spend all this money going to the moon when there are so many poor, so many economic inequities, so much poverty?'" they asked Borman. 24 Rejecting the space program, the students, many of whom admired communism, instead wished to use the government to re-shape society, thereby solving other national problems that they considered more important. As former S.D.S. President Todd Gitlin wrote, "Much of the New Left . . . scorned the 1969 moon landing as a techno-irrelevancy if not an exercise in imperial distraction and space colonialism." 25
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Ironically, the United States had entered the space race to prove that in the competition between the totalitarian Soviet Union and the free and capitalist United States, individual responsibility and private enterpise could do it better.
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