A lot of people have asked me why I wrote Children of Apollo to begin with. Aside from a desire to make money on royalties, my desire was to answer two of the most haunting questions of the last century. Why didn’t the Apollo Program lead to a space faring civilization, with people living on other worlds, and space craft voyaging further and further out to the planets and hence the stars? The second question stems from the first. Could things have turned out different?
The answer to the first question is that the Apollo Program, born of the Cold War politics of the early 1960s, perished of the Vietnam era politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Neil Armstrong had barely lifted his foot from the surface of the Moon when people began to decide that we now needed to spend more money on social programs and less on space adventures. We had beaten the Soviets, now it was time to help the poor, clean the environment, and so on. Liberal politicians and the media encouraged the attitude. Some did that because they believed the proposition that every dollar spent on space was food taken from the mouths of the hungry. Others, with more sinister motives, saw an irresistible issue. Then Senator Walter Mondale expressed the latter very well, in the wake of the Apollo Fire, when he said, “I don’t give a hoot in hell for the program or your future. I intend to ride this thing for all the political advantage I can get.”
WOW! Can you get another source for that? Was this info also in the video?