Space Invaders

As a 12-year-old boy on that July day 40
years ago, I knew the name and hometown of every U.S. astronaut who had
ever piloted a Mercury, Gemini or Apollo spacecraft. I could not have
imagined anyone not loving our space program. I still can’t. The
smoking rockets, the crew-cut dialogue and the limitless possibilities
for exploration—it was enough to keep boys my age up late staring at
the black-and-white screen.

Jack Manno is now an associate professor
at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He wrote a book
back in the early 1980s entitled Arming the Heavens: The Hidden Military Agenda for Space, 1945-1995 . In Arming the Heavens,
published by the now defunct Dodd Mead in 1984, Manno argues in great
historical detail that the American space program was, at its core, a
military project with the ultimate goal of extending warfare beyond
gravity’s reach.

So all these years later, how does the
professor react when the moon landing anniversary, wrapped by
coincidence into the coverage of the death of its chief narrator,
Walter Cronkite, floods page one and every major medium with lunar
nostalgia?

Jack Manno’s book Arming the Heavens tells how the 1969 moon landing was a front for the militarization of space. MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTO

 

“It’s complicated,” says the 58-year-old
Manno, a Westcott area resident and father of two, who for years headed
the Great Lakes Research Consortium and dabbles in poetry on the side.
Not your average tenured academic, he once peddled fresh vegetables in
the Syracuse University area with a pushcart business known as Huckster
Jack’s.

Although Manno still maintains that the
space race was inspired by the desire for military superiority, his
research indicates that the drive to go lunar was not part of the plan.
“The moon was really a distraction for the Pentagon,” says Manno. “The
moon program was a compromise for those people who were really focusing
on the militarization of space. For them the moon wasn’t of great
military value for the development of Earth-based systems. It’s hard to
make the case that the Apollo program had much value in the way of
military development.”

The space shuttle, maintains Manno, was
the original focus of the space program. The moon shot was necessary to
get public support for the costly space exploration.

“The military uses of space have to do
with satellites, reconnaissance, targeting and space weapons. None of
that was advanced with the Apollo program. The predators, the drones,
all these things that we use to fire at targets in Afghanistan and
Pakistan—none of that would be possible without a space program. It
wasn’t until the space shuttle program that the remilitarization of
space got going again.”

Manno’s book created a minor stir when
it was published. Its thesis tying the space program to the arms race
made him an immediate target among the nascent right-wing talk-radio
industry. “Shortly after my book was released, Dodd Mead was bought out
by a Bible publisher, Thomas Nelson,” he explains. “They were mailing
it out in boxes stamped ‘Arming Heaven.’ I’m sure they thought it was
quite the religious book. They were booking me on all these right-wing
radio shows. They didn’t know quite what to make of me.”

Like the rest of us, Manno was taken by
the images of Earth shot from the moon. The pictures of Earth really
transformed the way we conceptualize our place in the universe. That
incredible image recreated our sense of spatial relationships. It was
an image of an Earth without borders. It helped you realized that we
were all afloat on this planet.