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’m not old enough to know how this stunt affected public opinion (although I do remember when golf was an elitist sport).

This is the first I’ve heard of a connection between the golf swings and waning political support. Where can I read more about that?

> this only highlighted NASA's cultural bias

In 1971, even in the wake of the civil rights act, I don’t think many people cared about nasa being a whites boys club.

That's a great link, thanks! It demonstrates my point way better than any article I'd be able to find.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canceled_Apollo_missions

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.)