Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1969, half of the world’s population followed the first lunar landing. Power companies logged a record-breaking upsurge in energy consumption brought on by the number of televisions and radios tuned to the broadcast of astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. Never before had a human been so far away from Earth, and critics worldwide were convinced that later generations would hail this unprecedented achievement as an epoch-making event. Even though more people turned their attention to the moon landing than to any previous event in world history, for years historians have largely understood Apollo as a domestic US affair, referencing but not always engaging with the complex dynamics of 1960s geopolitics and the ensuing, crisis-ridden 1970s. Two low-priority by-products of the $20 billion program, the photographs Earthrise (1968) and Blue Marble (1972), have enjoyed particular scholarly attention. But the history of the $20 billion program is more than a story of gigantic rockets, astronauts-cum-celebrities, moon rocks and a cross-border community of emotionally engaged television viewers, the so-called moon children. It is also a history of geopolitical maneuvering, territorial debates and technoscientific diplomacy, of world-wide attention and globe-spanning resonance, and of short-lived hopes for fostering human unity from the vantage point of outer space.

The proposed panel, Rethinking Apollo: Technopolitics, Globality and the Space Age, takes the forthcoming anniversary as an impetus to reevaluate the six moon landings, undertaken between 1969 and 1972, from three complementary historiographical perspectives: legal, diplomatic and temporal. Stephen Buono examines how the 1967 Outer Space Treaty intersected with Cold War debates about post-colonialism, territory and US empire. Teasel Muir-Harmony demonstrates that US government officials employed Project Apollo to advance foreign relations in different national contexts. And Alexander Geppert probes the implications of the first moon walk as a transient moment of global synchronicity. Finally, Andrew Jenks, a historian of Russia, offers comments on the landing’s transnational dimensions, while Pedro Raposo, a historian of colonial science, engages in the post-presentation conversation about the relationship of technopolitics, global consciousness and sovereignty.

The panel uses the Apollo moment as a trigger to address larger issues in the history of space exploration, science and technology on the one hand, and 'general' twentieth-century historiography on the other. It contends that reassessing the moon landings as a key caesura which both ended the classical Space Age and heralded the ensuing Post-Apollo period has far-reaching implications for our understanding of the distinctive contradictions that characterized 1968 and the ‘long’ 1970s. Apollo showed how large-scale, national technological programs reshaped international power configurations. It played a decisive role in redrawing crucial boundaries – forging alliances across national borders, redefining concepts of territory, and enabling a sense of interconnection – that would frame expectations of the global order for decades to come. As such, putting a human on the moon was a singularly defining, if unrepeated moment in the making of our planetized present.