The Apollo Moon Landings in History and Memory

3 units

This course explores historically not only the familiar accomplishments and adventures of the Apollo moon landings, but their once-classified cold-war contexts and purposes, including questions the missions raised: What is the proper place of big science and big government in a liberal democracy? Do scientific understandings threaten or complement religious and aesthetic ways of comprehending nature and humanity? As machines are made more sophisticated, do they augment, or upstage, the human beings who produce them? Can we explore nature scientifically without conquering it imperially?