Caribbean Cruise Attempts to Seek Meaning of Apollo
Tom Buckley's New York Times report on the S.S. Statendam cruise to observe the Apollo 17 launch, where Mailer joined panels with Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Ben Bova, and others and again criticized NASA for making the moon shot boring.
“Caribbean Cruise Attempts to Seek Meaning of Apollo,” an article by Tom Buckley in the New York Times (12 December 1972), reports a cruise aboard the S.S. Statendam organized to observe the launch of Apollo 17 and to hold seminars on space and humanity’s future. Mailer joined panel discussions with Hugh Downs (narrator), Dr. Robert D. Enzmann, Isaac Asimov, Ben Bova, and Robert Heinlein; Katherine Anne Porter, covering the event for Playboy, was in the audience. Mailer again criticized NASA for having “taken the most exciting event of the 20th century [Apollo 11, the moon shot] and succeeded in making it monumentally boring and profoundly depressing.” See Of a Fire on the Moon (71.1), 72.9, 73.1.