-Nine.
Ignition sequence starts.
Six, five, four.
We remember the science and engineering
that first put a man on the moon.
-We have a lift-off.
Lift-off on Apollo 11.
But there was also another story.
-I believe the marketing aspect of Apollo
was as important as the spacecraft.
I absolutely do.
-No single space project in this period
will be more impressive to mankind,
or more important for the long-range exploration of space.
-The ability for us to communicate how important this is,
and how amazing it is, and how freaking cool it is,
was absolutely essential for us
to have been able to do that program.
The idea that we want to go to the moon is so audacious.
It's also so expensive
to be able to do that.
And we had to get the public behind it.
NASA did have one thing in its corner: fear.
In the decade before, Americans had watched with horror
as the Soviets stormed into space.
-Today, a new moon is in the sky.
A 23-inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket.
Rocketing not just the first satellite,
or the first canine cosmonauts.
-Surviving the shock of takeoff acceleration,
both animals, free from gravity's pull,
adjust themselves to the frightening feeling
of floating weightless in space.
The Soviet Communists also sent the first human
safely into orbit.
-It was the propaganda coup of the year.
-I think when Sputnik went up, it was a rude awakening
when it wasn't us who got there first.
They were the first to launch a woman into space.
They were first to do a spacewalk.
It was, like, oh my gosh, you know,
these guys are beating us every single time.
-And there was essentially panic across the world,
certainly across the United States.
Because of this, the U.S. government
wasn't about to lose the race to the moon.
But public support wasn't a guarantee,
so NASA set out to market the space race.
-In the beginning, NASA public relations people
actually came from the military.
And they were incredibly secretive.
And they said, we're not going to tell you
newspaper reporters and television reporters,
we're not going to tell you anything.
But very quickly,
people like Julian Scheer and others at NASA
realized that that wasn't the best approach.
-The United States
launches its two-man Project Gemini program at Cape Kennedy,
and once again, the event is reported fully, openly,
from pre-launch to recovery.
-So one of the things that NASA did
was they, in many ways, pioneered this concept
of content marketing, of creating the kind of content
that both journalists and the public would be interested in.
The photographs that were taken by NASA,
whether they were on the ground
or by the astronauts in the spacecraft,
were all freely available to the public.
They insisted on television cameras
in the Apollo spacecraft.
-Hello there, from the men on the moon!
-Creating the kind of content that both journalists
and the public would be interested in,
that would help to grow interest in the space program.
That was a radical thing for part of the government to do.
-This is Apollo,
the first of a family of spacecraft
designed to transport Americans to the moon.
-Here at the Marshall Space Flight Center
in Huntsville, Alabama,
we are static testing the fourth of the booster stages
of the Saturn 1B.
-There was a almost 300-page press kit for Apollo 11.
This massive document allowed different types of media
to figure out an angle that they wanted to talk about.
Did they want to focus on the spacecraft?
Did they want to focus on the biography of the astronauts?
Did they want to focus on something mundane,
as like, how do they go to the bathroom, how do they eat?
-Here the astronaut
is opening a packet of bite-sized items.
These may be either freeze-dried or compressed foods.
-Contrast that with the Russian program,
which was incredibly secretive.
And often, you wouldn't know
what was going on with the Russian program
until the spacecraft had actually landed.
NASA also encouraged consumer companies
to amplify the excitement.
-New, Post Count Off.
Post Count Off is made with nutritious oats.
You can count on it!
-Fisher pens, or Omega watches.
Tang is probably one of the most famous examples
of a product that was used by the astronauts.
-Have a blast, have some Tang.
-It got people to be very supportive of the space program.
We wouldn't have just been able to say,
O.K., we wanna spend billions of dollars.
We want to spend, you know, four percent of our national budget
to go to the moon for the next 10 years.
-This is launch control.
But holding the public's interest
after Apollo 11 was difficult.
-There's so much invested in it
in terms of it being a Cold War victory.
Many Americans see it as an endpoint
rather than a beginning.
-NASA did a fabulous job of pointing people
towards this audacious goal.
But once that goal was achieved,
it was less popular a program to just do it again.
-Apollo was of a certain moment, a Cold War moment.
We don't have that impetus again.
And it's possible it's because
we haven't had a Sputnik moment.
A Sputnik moment meaning a moment of national panic,
where we say, we have to come together
and we have to beat this or that competitor or enemy.
We just don't have that kick in the butt
that they had in the 1960s to do it again.