There was also a lot of social commentary on it. Particularly striking is this spoken word piece:
This poem is certainly good at getting it's message across, but that message is racist degenerative trash.
Sure, perhaps a black person should have been among the first involved, I can certainly get behind that criticism. But that's not what the poem critiques, and it's not what activists who protested the moon landing asked for either.
So yes it's racist, the real kind.
Perhaps aspirationally, but empirically, the Apollo program did not transcend race. It's not racist to call out racism - the "He who smelt it, dealt it" defense is intellectually lazy.
> But that's not what the poem critiques,
I don't see how you can say that, when the poem is literally titled "Whitey on the Moon". One would have to assume the decision to highlight whiteness was deliberate - it easily could have been "Neil on the Moon" or "Man on the Moon" if the author/perfomer so desired.
You are wrong. I'm unwilling to debate this fact with you, or even discuss the matter any further frankly, I have made my position clear. Your interpretation of the poem shows a clear lack of understanding on the historical context surrounding it.
> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Now admittedly this is talking about about the cost of the military industrial complex rather than the cost of scientific pursuits. But I'm sure someone could make a case for the Apollo program merely being an ICBM manufacturing program in a trench coat.
In a sense you're right that the US Space Program is a drop in the bucket compared to other spending but Gil Scott-Heron's poem was never a financial proposal. It was trying to express a sentiment that the US government's priorities were messed up, something that still resonates today.
As a counterpoint, there's Home on Lagrange: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRns6u5bHuw
Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus
Where the three-body problem is solved,
Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K,
And the cold virus never evolved.
(chorus)
We eat algea pie, our vacuum is high,
Our ball bearings are perfectly round.
Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,
And a kilogram weighs half a pound.
(chorus)
If we run out of space for our burgeoning race
No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch
When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart,
If we just find a big enough wrench.
(chorus)
I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space,
And living up here is a bore.
Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye
'Cause I'm moving next week to L4!
(chorus)
CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.
--Home on Lagrange (The L5 Song)
© 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm
I think that was the point. White Americans and Black Americans weren't living in the same world in the 1960s.
And you're not providing a counterpoint, you're answering a community's outrage at the literal interplanetary scale gulf of racial inequality (the US was still dealing with desegregation at the time) with twee nerd humor.
The criticism that the space program came at a social and economic cost that primarily burdened black Americans while only reinforcing the narrative of white supremacy and racial inequality seems legitimate. The Wikipedia article links to a paper that quotes MLK on the matter:
Today our exploration of space is engaging not only our enthusiasm
but our patriotism. ... No such fervor or exhilaration attends the war on
poverty. ... Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is a striking
absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, while
only a fraction of that amount is appropriated to service the densely populated
slums. If these strange views persist, in a few years we can be assured that when
we set a man on the moon, with an adequate telescope he will be able to see
the slums on earth with their intensified congestion, decay and turbulence.