There have always been those who were made uncomfortable by American success, and there were many of those voices heard during Apollo. In later years, I heard these voices more clearly in the pages of the "Coevolution Quarterly," which addressed a couple of issues to O'Neill's space colony concepts, and included many opinions both pro and con. A great deal of these issues are collected online here, and Lewis Mumford's comment was one of those that struck me particularly:

Dear Stewart Brand,



If you were familiar with my analysis of "The Pentagon of Power", you would know that I regard Space Colonies as another pathological manifestation of the culture that has spent all of its resources on expanding the nuclear means for exterminating the human race. Such proposals are only technological disguises for infantile fantasies.



Well. Okay.

While certainly many leftists have expressed hostility toward NASA and the space program, the history of the space program is more complex and more interesting than simple "left" vs. "right."

A few observations:

John F. Kennedy, a Democrat (though probably more like a modern Republican than any modern Democrat), certainly deserves credit for initiating the Moon program, for whatever political reasons, and I doubt Apollo would have happened otherwise. Whether we would have eventually gone the more sedate Willy Ley/Von Braun "manned reusable launch vehicles-manned space station-lunar vehicle" route is unknown.

The Soviet Union, leftist if anything was leftist, was instrumental in pioneering space and goosing America into a Moon landing. Fortunately for them, their inability to make small nuclear warheads gave them some really nice, BIG rockets.

In an ideal libertarian world, where the free market held sway and government was limited to Constitutional functions, there wouldn't have BEEN a government Moon program, and space development would have been limited to Defense Department uses like missiles and satellites, until sufficient incentive for commercialization appeared. There might not even have been a manned space program for many more years if no military use for men in space had been established.

Ayn Rand, in the article "Apollo 11," expressed her admiration for the Moon program, despite it being a government program, and described much the same dichotomy that SDAI sees in the article he quotes. I may post the article in its entirety here if I get ambitious. While her lack of depth in science is evident in spots (I'd like to see how we would plant an American flag on Jupiter), her philosophical outlook on it is right on the mark.

Certainly many people who are politically on the left are deeply in love with space flight and space in general, and I offer this board as Exhibit A. And many other leftists feel the same way. Tom Hanks is a Democrat who comes immediately to mind, who obviously loves space.

I think the type of mind who feels that man should never go into space regardless of the means or objectives, or for that matter strive to achieve any technological goals at all, is rotten on a much deeper level than the simple political spectrum. Some of the nihilistic radical environmentalists fall into this group, and there are others.

BTW, not sure why this subject is less "space-related" than the environmental notes that pop up on the Space section now and then, but it ain't my call.