Catherine Cooper speaks with Bret Bennington and Rodney Hill, professors at Hofstra University about the far-ranging cultural importance and impacts of the Apollo Program.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with ...

Bret Bennington: Bret Bennington. I'm a Professor of Geology at Hofstra University on Long Island in New York.

Rodney Hill: And I'm Rodney Hill. I'm an Associate Professor of Radio, Television, Film, also at Hofstra University in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication.

Catherine Cooper: You just published a book called After Apollo. Where did this project start?

Bret Bennington: It started because someone in the administration at Hofstra University thought it would be a good idea for Hofstra to do something to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing, and the reason for that is probably the location of Hofstra University in Nassau County on Long Island, Nassau County is where there were many milestones in the early history of flight, but it's also where the lunar module was built by the Grumman Corporation. And so there's this connection. Charles Lindbergh took off from a spot about a mile north of Hofstra University, basically from what is now the entrance to Macy's at the mall. So the call went out for faculty who would be interested in organizing a conference, and I've always had an interest in space flight. I was always a wannabe astronaut growing up. I'm an amateur astronomer. My day job is paleontologist, but I'm an amateur astronomer. So I immediately saw that this would be a great opportunity to maybe do something interesting related to the history of space flight. And then they decided they also wanted a faculty member who represented not so much the sciences but the humanities. And ...

Rodney Hill: Yeah. I will just also add that Hofstra University has a wonderful cultural center, and they put on conferences throughout the year on many different topics. They're actually known for their series of presidential conferences, looking back on the presidencies of recent administrations. I think the last one they did was ...

Bret Bennington: They just did Obama?

Rodney Hill: They just did one on Obama.

Rodney Hill: So they do conferences on all sorts of things, and so it was kind of natural, given the Long Island connections to Apollo, that they would do something on the 50th anniversary. And as Bret said, they wanted to cover not only the science aspects, but also the humanities and the arts. And so the administration sort of came to me and asked if I would help and sort of oversee the humanities and arts side of things. I do film studies, and one of my big interests is Stanley Kubrick, and of course, Kubrick did 2001: A Space Odyssey, so we were actually able to work that into the conference.

It came out in 1968. So the film came out before Apollo, and I think it came out even before we had very good photographs of the Earth from space. So all those visual effects in 2001 are just completely imagined, it's from the imagination of the filmmakers. So that interest in Kubrick, and I've also always been interested in science fiction film, and so this was a great fit for me as well. So out of that conference, so Bret and I ended up sort of co-directing the conference. We had scholars from all over the country.

Rodney Hill: One of the high points of my life, and I'm probably speaking for you as well, one of the guests of the conference was Dr. Mae Jemison, one of the Space Shuttle astronauts, and Bret and I did a Q&A with her on stage. And I could have died then and there and been quite satisfied with my life. It was a real honor to meet her. She was just delightful.

Bret Bennington: A very impressive person.

Rodney Hill: Gave a wonderful keynote talk for us, so that was really nice.

Bret Bennington: And there were a lot of little kids in the audience who knew exactly who she was and were really ... There was a little girl, who was probably six or seven, sitting in the second row holding a Mae Jemison doll, and this kid was vibrating in her seat. She was so excited. So that was really cool.

Rodney Hill: Yeah, that whole experience really brought tears to my eyes just being there with her and seeing the audience reaction to her. We also did a screening at the Cradle of Aviation Museum of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and we brought over Jan Harlan, who was Stanley Kubrick's producer, and he introduced the film and did a Q&A afterwards. And that was a real honor for me to get to meet Jan Harlan in person.

Bret Bennington: And we had a film student.

Rodney Hill: Oh, yeah. One of our film students, she was a senior at the time, Connie Anderson Castilla, I think professionally now she goes by Connie Tais, she was one of my students in film, but she was also taking an honors course with Bret, and that's how she found out about our conference at Hofstra. And she approached you about, she wanted to do a documentary on the Grumman engineers.

Bret Bennington: So about half-a-mile from campus is the Cradle of Aviation Museum, which has the lunar module, the actual lunar module that would've flown on either Apollo 18 or Apollo 19. And they have volunteers, who are the former engineers, retired engineers, who worked on the lunar module, who kind of hang around the exhibit and will talk to you and tell you everything you want to know about it. And so I was able to connect Connie up with the people at the museum who worked with these volunteers, and she ended up interviewing a bunch of them and doing this wonderful oral history documentary. It was very moving, I thought.

Rodney Hill: When she first told me about the project, I was thinking, "Okay, this is going to be like a 10-minute student documentary. It'll be very nice." And she said, "Oh, no. This is going to be like forty-five minutes long." And I thought, "No, no, no, you can't do that. That's way too ambitious." But when I saw it, I was really blown away. She did a magnificent job. She traveled down to the National Archives and got a lot of footage and research and things.

Bret Bennington: She got a bunch of NASA images and footage, and sort of interspersed them in with the footage of the gentleman that she was interviewing.

Rodney Hill: It was really an extraordinary piece of work, and they showed it at the Cradle of Aviation, and I think it's been in a couple of other festivals. And Connie is now working with Ken Burns' company. So yeah, so we're very proud of her.

Bret Bennington: Yeah, for sure.

Rodney Hill: And so we took the best of those presentations and asked those authors to flesh things out and give us really full-blown essays that ended up in this book.

Bret Bennington: I know it's a good example of how if you volunteer to do things that are outside of your comfort zone, it very often leads to interesting opportunities, and that's how you broaden yourself intellectually.

Rodney Hill: So these essays come from all sorts of different approaches, different fields of academia. So we have chemists represented in the book, but we also have political scientists and film studies people and cultural studies people. It's a really great collection. I'm pretty proud to be associated with it, to be honest.

Catherine Cooper: There's so much variety, and it really shows how interdisciplinary and how broad-reaching Apollo was, how important it was to all spectra of American society.

Bret Bennington: One of the things I think that comes out of this book is how it didn't necessarily have to happen. It wasn't inevitable. And there's a chapter that discusses how these German rockets ... So if you think about contingency, one of the things that happens after World War II is we invade Germany, and we capture a bunch of German rocket scientists, including Wernher von Braun, and we bring them back to the US, and we put them to work. Itjust so happens that Wernher von Braun was an evangelist for space travel. The thing that he cared about more than anything was getting humanity off this planet, regardless of what you think of him as a human being because of the fact that he used slave labor to build the rockets in Germany, and he was bombing London and everything. If you listen to him, he did what he had to do to realize his vision of getting humans off the planet.

And he ends up teaming up with Walt Disney to basically sell the idea, this idea that space travel is human destiny to the American public. And I don't think the space program would've been possible without that sort of propaganda groundwork that was done that planted the idea in the public, because it costs so much money to put astronauts on the Moon.

Rodney Hill: Actually, the chapter on Disney and Wernher von Braun is written by somebody who was not at our conference, a former grad school buddy of mine named Chris Robinson. And I knew that he was interested in Disney television and that he had sort of been researching this, so I said, I contacted him and said, "Hey, Chris. We're putting together this book. If you have something, we'd be happy to take a look at it."

Rodney Hill: And this is like mid-1950s, we're talking 1955 or so, when Disney had just started his Disneyland TV series with ABC, which really was all about promoting the idea of Disneyland as he's building the park and then getting people excited about that. But then there were these different segments, including Tomorrowland, and this is where the man in space segments with von Braun sort of came into play, this Disney imagination of the future of humanity, right? Kind of fun that way.

Bret Bennington: It's good old German propaganda and American fantasy, sort of ...

Catherine Cooper: Capitalism.

Bret Bennington: ... capitalism combining to lay the groundwork. And then the first chapter in t...

Cultural Impacts of the Apollo Program