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In an essay published recently in the New York Times, novelist Thomas Mallon made a provocative comment: “If any real scandal attaches to Project Apollo, it’s the extent to which hard science was allowed to dominate the astronauts’ hours on the moon. With less geology and more ontology, they might have kept the public fired up for further space exploration.”

It sounds harsh, even anti-science (heresy!), but I understand what Mallon means. Most of the men who went to the moon now say they regret not having had more time to savor the experience. They rushed around like rock-collecting robots, ever mindful of the checklist and the voice of Mission Control, and had to steal whatever time they could to pause, look around, and react like human beings to the alien world on which they’d landed. What a shame, for them and for us.

Journalist-turned-filmmaker Al Reinert must have felt the same regret when he set out to make his Oscar-nominated 1989 documentary For All Mankind—which still stands as the best film ever done on Apollo. Reinert almost singlehandedly changed the tone of Apollo reminiscences from grand-scale techno-worship to a focus on the individuals who journeyed to the moon. Instead of learning how many pounds of rocks he collected, we hear Charlie Duke recount a weird and vivid dream about finding his own body and that of fellow Apollo 16 astronaut John Young on the moon. Instead of triumphal music, we get Brian Eno’s eerie, ambient soundtrack. It’s Apollo as a personal story, scaled down but every bit as powerful as the bombastic narratives about national glory and heroism we’d been served before Reinert came along.

For All Mankind was re-released this summer on DVD and Blu-ray, with extras including An Accidental Gift, a mini-feature on the making of the film, in which Reinert claims that the film shot by the Apollo astronauts—not the geological samples—was the real treasure returned from the moon. Here’s a clip:

NASA is once again thinking of sending people to the moon, “this time to stay,” as the rallying cry goes. And once again, scientists are planning a busy schedule of fieldwork. Which is fine. For all the talk of expanding human civilization to the moon and Mars, nobody suggests what individual people might do there, other than tending science experiments or some grim corporate mining operation. But if we do return, this time could we please give the astronauts an occasional break to think/ write / sing / play/ take pictures/ meditate or do whatever else it is that human beings like to do, left to their own devices?

All over: A dusty Gene Cernan inside the lunar module Challenger after his third Apollo 17 moonwalk—one of the last photos taken on the moon.

Space historian Matthew Hersch writes:

This year marks the 40th anniversary not only of Apollo 11’s historic moon landing, but of the vigorous public debate that accompanied it—debate that, decades later, shows no signs of weakening. Human spaceflight has always been controversial, and condemnation of Project Apollo began almost immediately following President Kennedy’s announcement of the moon goal in 1961. Scientists and lay persons alike wondered whether the returns on the endeavor might ever equal its costs, or if it would, instead, be (in the words of one critic) “the most expensive funeral man has ever had.”

Of all the criticisms, only the technical ones seemed to diminish over time. In the fall of 1968, American journalists still weren’t sure if the United States could make it to the moon before the Soviets did. But within months, NASA proved that its astronauts could achieve lunar orbit (Apollo 8), dock with and pilot a lunar lander (Apollo 9) and take the lander to within 50,000 feet of the moon’s surface (Apollo 10). Whether America should go to the moon was another matter, and the diverse objections commentators raised have kept social critics and comedians busy ever since.

By 1969, NASA’s funding had already begun to decline; distress over the expenditure of resources was the most common complaint about Apollo from the Left and the Right: the program soaked up funds that many thought could be better spent on social welfare, defense, or nothing at all. Other criticisms were ideological: some felt that Apollo represented the worst of American culture instead of the best—a government project in the land of free enterprise; an example of American hubris, militarism, racism, and gender inequality; a garish form of public theater. Even the Soviet Union (itself the sponsor of a vigorous moon program) criticized Apollo, describing it as a grotesque farce the decadent West had orchestrated to lull its citizens into a false state of satisfaction—mindless capitalist “entertainment,” according to the government-controlled Soviet press. Other critics noted the uncertain pedigree of some of the foreign-born NASA engineers (Tom Lehrer’s “Wernher von Braun”), or condemned the loss of life in the January 1967 Apollo 1 accident.

The Apollo 11 landing tempered the objections, but only for a while. Ten days after the newspapers reported the triumph, moon news had been driven from the front page in favor of the usual topics of interest: Nixon, Vietnam, the Middle East. Landing on the moon hadn’t changed the world, at least not in a way that anyone would notice; the lunar surface had become just one more place—like the South Pole—that a few talented people might visit from time to time. The only thing likely to have preserved Apollo 11’s triumph from the critics (short of finding large lunar gold deposits) was continued interplanetary exploration; without it, Apollo became part of the past instead of the future.

With each successive anniversary of Apollo 11, pride mixed with ever greater quantities of nostalgia, fueled by scholarship casting new light on the moon decision. For each work of solid scholarship (like Walter McDougall’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age) there were hundreds of editorials, opinion articles, and funny but flippant riffs on a national preoccupation that seemed very serious at the time, but increasingly strikes modern audiences as absurd (Gerard DeGroot’s Dark Side of the Moon; Jon Stewart on The Daily Show). The arguments, like Apollo itself, are frozen time: that establishing NASA was a mistake; that NASA should have gone to the moon in partnership with the Soviets or not at all; that it should have stopped at the first landing, or flown people better able to interpret or take advantage of the trip (scientists, philosophers, artists). Other critics have balked at America’s loss of nerve, wondering why it failed to capitalize on its moon success with further explorations of the solar system. Conjuring the unsavory image of Holocaust deniers, some would even rob Apollo of its history, insisting that the landings were faked on a soundstage. Efforts to debunk the debunkers have spawned a sub-literature (Moon Base Clavius) that is in equal measures fascinating and sad.

Long after Apollo’s technical achievements are dwarfed by other adventures, its greatest legacy may be the volume of comment it generated. As a free society, the United States tolerated public criticism of the space program in a way other nations would never have allowed. The criticism almost certainly made Apollo a better program: stronger, more focused, and imbued with urgency. Were they to visit our world in a time machine, the emperors of ancient civilizations would easily understand why America went to the moon in 1969. What might make them wonder is why the nation tolerated such criticism, or how it could pull off the landings in spite of it.

Hersch, an HSS/NASA Fellow in the History of Space Science at the University of Pennsylvania, is writing a labor history of American astronauts.

Dr. Bill Carpentier, in orange, follows the astronauts into their quarantine trailer on the deck of the U.S.S. Hornet.

Riding in a helicopter with the Apollo 11 astronauts following their Pacific Ocean splashdown on July 24, 1969, Bill Carpentier might have had a thousand questions for the first men to return from the moon. But there would have been no point in asking. Even if Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins hadn’t been wearing bulky masks, the helicopter noise would have drowned out their answers. So there was no conversation at all between the astronauts and their NASA doctor on the short flight to the waiting aircraft carrier U.S.S. Hornet, where they entered a mobile trailer to begin two and a half weeks of quarantine.

The isolation was a precaution against some exotic moon-bug contaminating the Earth, which even the doctors considered far-fetched. Still, recalls Carpentier, now 73, “nobody thought the probability was zero.”  So they did “whatever it took” to follow protocol to the letter.

Once inside the trailer, the astronauts took off their isolation garments, and Carpentier immediately collected swab samples to send off to the lab. Then the three lunar explorers headed one-by-one to the shower before meeting (through thick glass) with President Richard Nixon, who was waiting on the carrier.

Carpentier remembers the day as businesslike. “There wasn’t a lot of time to talk or reflect,” he says. Later, after the ceremonies were over, they relaxed over drinks (Carpentier was the bartender). But soon it was back to work. The astronauts had reports to write and a spacecraft to unpack. The doctor kept to his medical tests and sample collection, all in the name of research. “I felt very strongly that we owed it to the program, that we needed to learn as much as we could, as carefully as we could, for the future.”

After the quarantine ended in Houston on August 10, Carpentier joined the astronauts on their round-the-world goodwill tour, which he remembers as “an incredible journey” and “very heady stuff” for a young doctor from a small town in Canada.

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 1979, Carpentier, who had left NASA by then, helped commission an oratorio composed by Richard Willis, Composer-in-Residence at Baylor University, based on poetry by Cynthia Linzy. The piece, which the doctor describes as “an outstanding example of 20th century atonal choral music,” was performed by the Temple (Texas) Civic Chorus, where Carpentier sang. Called “For All Mankind,” the music “comes to an end but does not resolve,” he says. Just like Apollo.

Twenty years ago, performer/director Andrew Dawson, who calls his type of art “physical theater,” accepted a challenge. Could he create a one-man show using only a table as a stage? With such a small set, he realized he’d need a big subject. “And I couldn’t think of anything bigger than going to the moon,” he says.

The result was “Space Panorama,” his one-man, 30-minute recreation of the Apollo program, which he staged for the first time at a festival in northern England in 1989. Since then he has performed it around the world, including, most recently, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington to mark the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing.

Apollo 16 astronaut John Young saw the show in London, and was so tickled that he invited Dawson to perform it at an astronaut reunion in Houston in 2001—”the most nervous I’ve ever been,” he says. Over the years he has varied the tone. The show started out serious and reverent, became more humorous, and now has settled somewhere in between. But always, Dawson delights his audience by telling a big story using only his hands, whether to represent the frenzy of a rocket liftoff or the moon hanging in the sky overhead.

Here’s an excerpt from “Space Panorama,” courtesy of the artist. The music is from Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony:

Since the first Space Camp opened in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1982, the idea has spawned many imitators. Today there are space camps in Turkey, Norway, Canada, and Japan, not to mention a host of smaller-scale space “experiences” at science museums around the world.

Now there’s a space camp at the cosmonaut training center in Star City, outside Moscow. Russia Today has the story, and a video: