What in the world are you talking
about?? That is actually completely opposite of what happened!
As cool as this was to many of us, public support plummeted after seeing NASA "fooling around", and golf especially was seen as an elitist white man's activity. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, this only highlighted NASA's cultural bias. Political support, which was already waning, immediately fell off a cliff as well.
Had NASA not allowed this, the landings would have continued for at least a few more years.
I would be interested in evidence that "mundane" activities were directly connected with the decline of the program, but I think you're inserting modern biases of race into the public sentiment of the 70s. I don't think people looked at golf explicitly as a "rich white man's game" in a pejorative sense, nor do I think the people that would, were pulling the strings in Congress or NASA.
My understanding was one of "Okay, we beat the Soviets to the Moon, now what?"
> Had NASA not allowed this, the landings would have continued for at least a few more years.
Hardly. The number of missions was primarily capped by budgetary constraints [0] and the fact that they had only budgeted to build 15 Saturn 5 launchers. Flights after Apollo 17 were used for Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz mission.
I really wish the people downvoting me would go read a book and not rely on Buzzfeed listicles of top 10 cool things we did on the moon and other crap pulled up via a five second Google search.
If you aren't old enough to remember, go ask someone who was. If you can't find one, then do some actual reading, or check out any of the thousands of documentaries out there. (That doesn't include the History Channel's Nazi Moonbase conspiracy theories.)
As cool as this was to many of us, public support plummeted after seeing NASA "fooling around", and golf especially was seen as an elitist white man's activity. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, this only highlighted NASA's cultural bias. Political support, which was already waning, immediately fell off a cliff as well.
Had NASA not allowed this, the landings would have continued for at least a few more years.