“There are contemporary interviews of young Baby Boomers whining that space program money could be spent to solve all of our society’s ills instead of being wasted on exploration.”
I was 18 at the Moon landing so I remember it well. The film makers must have looked long and hard to find someone saying that because I never, ever heard anyone whining about the Moon landing. It easily could have been staged by the news crew at the time considering the liberal dominance of the news even then.
I was driving across the South one night in July 1969 and I stopped at a gas station in Cajun country. I went into the office to pay for my gas and when I glanced at the black and white TV they had there I saw an astronaut standing on the Moon.
“I never, ever heard anyone whining about the Moon landing”
Ditto. I was just two weeks shy of my 18th birthday. My Dad was in aerospace building critical missile and spacecraft systems (Polaris, ERTS/Nimbus, MJS/Voyager) so we watched closely. Like you, I never recall any “baby boomers whining about the moon landing.” There was lots of debate in the early and mid 60s about the size of the space budget and whether we should spend that money here to fix social ills, but as the moon landing drew near, the entire nation and world became transfixed and those concerns faded away.
It was a most amazing time. It was probably the one event that drew the entire world together more than any other event in my lifetime.