 Moonwatch, in other words, was an expression of 1950s popular culture and fixed properly within the context of the Cold War.Moonwatch was the brainchild of Harvard astronomer Fred L. Whipple.In 1955, as the recently appointed director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Whipple proposed that amateurs could play a vital role in efforts to track the first satellites.