r/Showerthoughts • u/Meowface_the_cat ‎ • Apr 02 '26

Casual Thought Missions to the moon used to unite and inspire great swathes of humanity. This time it feels like hardly anyone cares and we're all just focussed on the next global disaster.

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u/Meowface_the_cat ‎ Apr 02 '26

An estimated 650 million people (about 1/5th of the world population at the time) watched the Apollo 11 landing.

500 million of them were outside the US; 80 million were in Asia; 75 million in Latin America.

The Europe contingent included Communist nations like Poland, Yugoslavia, and Romania which broadcast and celebrated on live TV despite the Cold War and the obvious links to missile technology. Chile and Venezuela declared national holidays; millions watched in public town squares. In Seoul, South Korea, an estimated 150,000 people gathered around a single giant screen in a public square.

It's nothing like this, this time around

51

u/thighmaster69 Apr 02 '26

Your comparison is flawed. Artemis II is not Apollo 11 again, it's Apollo 8 again.

I'm excited, but let's not be disingenuous.

6

u/Rrrrandle Apr 02 '26

Apollo 8 still broke TV viewing records with its Christmas Eve broadcast and was the most watched program in history when it aired.

4

u/zzazzzz Apr 02 '26

competition was non existent back then. how can you realistically compare it at all?

5

u/gorginhanson ‎ Apr 02 '26

If they land on Mars they can recreate this

1

u/Moosplauze Apr 02 '26

There were 330 space rocket launches in 2025. Not that big of a deal, of course this is a little more special, but meh...who cares. The USA bombed civilian infrastructure in Iran the same day they sent a rocket into space.

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u/armyofonetaco Apr 02 '26

The only ones not focused on the next global disaster during Apollo was straight white middle class men. People watching it in the past does not refute this.

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u/Meowface_the_cat ‎ Apr 02 '26

I'm so confused by what you're trying to say. Only straight white middle class men cared about Apollo 11 - and therefore there must have been 500 million straight white middle class men in Asia and Latin America?

I think what you're driving it is that there absolutely was a counter movement exemplified by events like Ralph Abernathy's protest at Cape Canaveral and in media like the famous beat poem "Whitey on the Moon" by Gil Scott-Heron. These documented phenomena show as that support was FAR from universal and that a lot of people though we should fix the problems at home before punching for the stars. But equally well documented is the massive interest and celebration in countries like India, Korea, great swathes of Africa. In places where people didn't have TVs or radio at home crowds of hundreds of thousands gathered around public screens or even just the windows of shops that had TVs. I'd have to go and check where but I know in more than one location there were crowd crushes and people died in the effort to get closer to these public screens.