Project Apollo, Cold War diplomacy and the American framing of global interdependence

Abstract

This dissertation examines the distinctive and critical role that space exploration played in American foreign relations and national image making in the 1960s. Proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, Project Apollo was established, in large part, as a means of demonstrating American power and promoting technocratic values in an international landscape defined by the Cold War, the collapse of colonialism, and the emergence of newly independent nations. While existing scholarship has gestured to this geopolitical context, it has tended to examine activity that takes place on American or lunar soil. This dissertation argues that the geopolitical context was not simply a backdrop but instead the main theater of Project Apollo. By embedding this familiar story back in its global context, this dissertation reinterprets the established narrative of Project Apollo in three significant ways. First, it places greater emphasis on the international stage and the relationship between the US and the world. Second, while the role of the Executive Branch remains essential to this story, this dissertation shifts the focus from engineers and managers, to key actors within the State Department and United States Information Agency, as well as foreign leaders and the world public. Finally, the role of Project Apollo in foreign relations, and public diplomacy in particular, becomes the defining feature of this investigation. By examining how US government elites promoted and disseminated information about space exploration to support American foreign relations interests, this dissertation offers a lens onto attempts to establish national power by fusing perceived values and strengths of science and technology- like rationality and progress- with the image of the nation's political system. These efforts, this dissertation demonstrates, were not only aimed at boosting American prestige, but were also strategic attempts to promote an idea of global unity and progress ushered in by American scientific and technological leadership.