During the 1960s, America saw a unique shift in youth thinking with the earlier "beatnik" movement in the east and the later "hippie" movement centered along the west coast. Songs like David Bowie's "Space Oddity" show an obvious inspiration from American endeavors in space during the era. How did the moon landing affect these movements? What were the movement's leaders saying about this event? How did it inspire changes in the emerging drug culture and folk/ rock music during this period?
Not sure about any specifics regarding counterculture and the 1969 voyage, but I do know that photos of Earth certainly had a significant impact on counterculture before 1969. There was even a movement to force NASA to capture a photo of our planet, led by environmentalist, technologist, and Merry Prankster, Stewart Brand. Brand's campaign started in 1966 by giving out with pins which simply asked "Why haven't we seen a photo of the whole Earth yet?". By 1967 the NASA satellite, ATS-3, took this photo of earth which adorned the front cover of Brand's Fall 1968 Whole Earth Catalog. By 1970 the world celebrated its first Earth day.
The Whole Earth Catalog was very significant for many, many reasons, but most importantly it connected and networked countless 'hippies' who had dropped out of traditional American society and into far-flung commune communities. Brand's catalog provided a resource for these communes to sustain their way of life without having traditional systems (Government, Academia, Religion) encroach on them. When they said 'drop-out', they meant it.
In a sense, a Whole Earth Catalog was 1968's Google, and was even characterized as that by Steve Jobs in his famous 2005 Stanford commencement speech, which also happened to be Brand's Alma Mater. I could write for days about Brand's impact on Jobs and visa-versa but I don't want to lose focus. I'll just add this direct quote from his Stanford speech:
"It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of the Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: 'Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.' It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you."
The photograph of Earth had a huge impact on counterculture's attitude regarding just about everything, especially the environment. Seeing the Earth suspended in nothingness left viewers with a greater sense that we were one planet, one people, one environment. It could be argued that these ideas are at the very root of what we might deem 'hippie' ideology. In my senior-year history thesis I wrote about these topics, though admittedly I focused my work on the impact Brand had on technology more so than environmentalism.
I'm sorry I can't write specifically about space travel's effect on musical culture but, based on what I've read, I'd say that counterculture's fascination with space has some roots in the emotional response elicited from both NASA's photography and it's lunar missions. Hope this has been helpful!
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