Everyone in the New Left opposed Kennedy's space program, seeing it (correctly) as a cold war episode that they thought (incorrectly) was being carried out to no-good purpose by crew-cut military squares. (Only Abbie Hoffman disagreed with his compatriots: “Are you kidding? We're going to the fucking MOON!”) Environmentalists joined the leftist opposition to the space program: “We have to clean up the Earth before we can leave it.”
The exception was Jacques Cousteau, the pioneer of underwater exploration. In a 1976 interview for CoEvolution, he told me that in the 1960s his fellow ocean specialists were scandalized by the expense and irrelevance of the U.S. space program, but he supported it for philosophical reasons that quickly became practical. Cousteau realized that satellites were the only way to monitor the health of the oceans.
Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. (New York: Viking, 2009), 214.
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