Hi there - we're happy to approve your question related to your creative project, and we are happy for people to answer. However, we should warn you that many flairs have become reluctant to answer questions for aspiring novelists and the like, based on past experience: some people working on creative projects have a tendency to try to pump historians for trivia while ignoring the bigger points they were making, while others have a tendency to argue with historians when the historical reality does not line up with what's needed for a particular scene or characterization. Please respect the answers of people who have generously given you their time, even if it's not always what you want to hear.

Additionally, as amazing as our flair panel is, we should also point out that /r/AskHistorians is not a professional historical consultation service. If you're asking a question here because you need vital research for a future commercial product such as a historical novel, you may be better off engaging a historical consultant at a fair hourly rate to answer these questions for you. We don't know what the going rate for consultancy work would be in your locality, but it may be worth looking into that if you have in-depth or highly plot-reliant questions for this project. Some /r/AskHistorians flairs could be receptive to working as a consultant in this way. However, if you wish for a flair here to do this work for you, you will need to organize this with them yourselves.

For more general advice about doing research to inform a creative project, please check out our Monday Methods post on the subject.

If you're working on a novel set in the United States of the 1960s, I'd strongly advise taking time to read some of the abundant literature on the topic and the period. That will help to give you a much more rounded, fuller sense of what's going on, the state of public opinion, etc. If you really want your novel to be firmly grounded in the era, then this kind of research is crucial. What follows is a very (very!) short bibliography of works that you might find interesting and/or useful for your project:

Belmonte, Laura, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)

Chaikin, Andrew, A Man on the Moon (New York: Penguin, 1998)

McEnaney, Laura, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life In the Fifties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) [if you are able to get access - perhaps through a library - McEnaney's chapter “Cold War Mobilization and Domestic Politics: The United States,” in the Cambridge History of the Cold War is an excellent introduction]

McNamara, Bernard, Into the Final Frontier: The Human Exploration of Space (Monterey: Brooks Cole Publishing, 2000)

Oliver, Kendrick, To touch the face of God: the sacred, the profane and the American space program, 1957-75 (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)

Westad, Odd Arne, The Cold War: A World History (London: Penguin, 2018) [perhaps the best, most accessible overall history of the global Cold War, and I'd certainly advise reading this first to get a good overall grounding in the broader nature of the Cold War]

Hope this helps.

Malcolm