Apollo 11 Anniversary: Debate Continues

July 16, 2009 — -- "Twelve, eleven, ten, nine..."

It was July 16, 1969, and even now, 40 years after Apollo 11 left for the moon, the argument still simmers.

"...three, two, one, zero, all engines running -- liftoff, we have liftoff, 32 minutes past the hour, liftoff on Apollo 11, and --"

"Why are we wasting billions of dollars on the space program?" ask many visitors to ABCNews.com and other Web sites. 40 years after Neil Armstrong took that one small step on the lunar surface, NASA still provokes the same argument.

"For all the trillions of dollars we have spent on the space program, all we have are some moon rocks, several tons of space junk and a dozen and a half or so dead astronauts," wrote a person commenting on a recent story we posted about a space shuttle mission.

In fact, public opinion has always been split. In a July 1967 Harris poll, two years in advance of the first moon walk, 43 percent of Americans were in favor of the effort, 46 percent opposed -- hardly a rousing endorsement. And in 1970, a year after the landing, 56 percent said it had not been worth its allotted $4 billion a year for nine years.

President John F. Kennedy, who set America on course for the moon program, spoke resoundingly in its support:

"Space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own," he said in a 1962 speech at Rice University in Houston. "Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war."

But even Kennedy was less of an enthusiast than he led the nation to believe. In a 1962 audio tape from the White House cabinet room, later discovered by the staff of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, he brushed off suggestions from NASA's then-chief, James Webb, that the space program should be about more than beating the Soviet Union to the moon.

"This is important for political reasons, international political reasons, and this is, whether we like it or not, an intensive race," Kennedy is heard saying on the tape.

"Otherwise, we shouldn't be spending this kind of money, because I'm not that interested in space."

John F. Kennedy? "Not that interested"? Every president since has found lukewarm support.