Talk by Neil Maher: Cold War Star Wars: The New Left and the Space Race During the Vietnam War

In the mid-1960s, NASA began building space technologies for the war in Vietnam. Students from the New Left vigorously protested against the space agency, which responded in the early 1970s by scrapping several of its military projects and instead developing satellites that could collect useful ecological data on natural resources around the world.  Soon scientists, engineers, and politicians from Latin America, Africa, and Asia—including even Vietnam—were cooperating with the U.S. government to acquire satellite data about their countries’ natural resources. The Soviets did similarly with their own space technology and developing communist nations. The result was a more subtle, but still hegemonic, superpower rivalry

Neil M. Maher is Associate Professor in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University at Newark, where he teaches environmental history and political history.  He has published widely in academic and has edited a collection of essays by historians, scientists, and policy analysts titled New Jersey’s Environments: Past, Present, and Future (Rutgers University Press, 2006). His first monograph, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press, 2008), received the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award for the best monograph in conservation history. He has recently completed his second book, tentatively titled Ground Control: How Apollo Scrubbed the Age of Aquarius (Harvard University Press, 2017), which will examine how efforts to put humans on the Moon influenced the social and political movements of the “long 1960s.”

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