star Stephen Curry, who expressed his doubts in an interview last year.
In 2001, the Fox television network stoked doubts by airing the documentary “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?” Famous skeptics have included the N.B.A. A popular fantasy had it that the government had hired the director Stanley Kubrick, fresh off his film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” to create mock footage on a secret set. And he was less than thrilled not to receive compensation for inspiring the name of a “Toy Story” character, Buzz Lightyear.Īs the years went by, conspiracy theorists claimed the moon landing was fake. Aldrin appeared in a “Transformers” movie, competed on “Dancing With the Stars” and teamed up with Snoop Dogg on a song called “Rocket Experience.” He has said that being in the spotlight contributed to his divorces and years of drinking and depression. The cable network still hands out trophies inspired by Apollo 11 at its annual awards ceremony.Īrmstrong, an unassuming Midwesterner who once described himself as “a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer,” made an exception to his habit of avoiding media hoopla in the years after he walked on the moon by talking up Chrysler cars in a 1979 Super Bowl commercial. MTV opened for business in 1981 with a montage of NASA images from the mission assembled by a Greenwich Village firm, Manhattan Design. Scott, a way to cast a warm glow over the United States during a tumultuous time, showing that the country was capable of “something positive for humanity that was completely the opposite of what was going on with the Vietnam War.”Īpollo 11 went on to have a long media afterlife. In one ad, Panasonic showed astronauts on the moon watching a television set under the words “Now you can watch the Russians coming even if you’re 250,000 miles from home.” Space-themed ads also appeared from Stouffer’s, Sony, Ford, United, Motorola and other companies.Īfter the Apollo 11 crew members returned to Earth and emerged from quarantine, they embarked on a good-will tour of more than 20 countries. The advertising industry got in on the craze, too. He characterized Armstrong as “wooden” and “ extraordinarily remote.” That’s mythmaking.”įor balance, Life magazine also dispatched Norman Mailer, a writer not known for pulling punches, to cover the mission.
“You’d flip through magazine pages and see Joe DiMaggio, a hero of baseball, and then a few pages later, an astronaut. “That had a large effect in showing how big a deal it is to go to space, and it helped to make the astronaut-as-celebrity culture come alive,” Mr. Americans became emotionally invested in the crew members thanks to cover stories documenting the “making of a brave man” and the “inner thoughts and worries” of the spacemen’s wives. In the United States, NASA had spent years molding its astronauts into mythic figures, giving Life magazine exclusive access as part of its attempt to shape public opinion. “It was not secret, but it was not shown to the public,” Sergei Khrushchev, the son of the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, told Scientific American in 2009. The coverage of Apollo 11 was subdued in Moscow. The Kokomo Tribune, in Indiana, went with “Astronauts Etch Names Beside History’s Great Explorers.” The Oil City Derrick, in Pennsylvania, was more succinct: “Yanks Land on Moon.” The New York Times’s banner headline - the straightforward “Men Walk on Moon” - was set in some of the largest type ever used in the paper. Headline writers conveyed the news with attempts at deadline poetry. He made his television debut as a vocalist, performing the song he had composed, “Moon Maiden,” live on the air. The network had also commissioned Duke Ellington to create something new for the occasion. On ABC, the science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov chatted with Rod Serling, the creator of “The Twilight Zone” television series. Networks in the United States rounded out their coverage with hours of analysis and moon-related entertainment.