But why, say some, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And, they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 36 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? John F. Kennedy   Rice Stadium, Houston   Sept. 12, 1962.

Some things about Cape Kennedy surprise a veteran television-watcher of rocket launchings. I had envisioned a compact base, with launching pads and rockets bunched closely together. But the Cape is huge, much of its acreage still covered by scrubby palms. Occasional rattlesnakes are still found there, and when a hurricane drives them inland, the snakes become a serious nuisance. The pads are spread out, miles from each other, connected by a series of highways with names like "Solid Motor Road," "Central Control Road," and "ICBM Road."

The Cape is a boom town. It is surrounded by a string of airplane-factory plants, then, further away by brand-new bars and motels. The bars and motels all have the same names--the Polaris, the Satellite, and so on--all changing, no doubt, as missiles become obsolete.

Life's Little Baby

It's impossible not to be swept up by the sense of adventure just by being in Cape Kennedy--especially if you go, as I did, as a guest of Life Magazine. Since the first seven astronauts signed a contract to report their stories in Life, the magazine has adopted the space program. While NASA's officials and the astronauts themselves seem a bit embarrassed by space jargon, Life' men talk enthusiastically of "birds," "aborts," and so on. Last spring they had given a party of businessmen a tour of the Cape, Houston's Manned Space Center and some of the country's other space facilities. Impressed by their guests' enthusiasm, they had now invited 25 college editors to watch James Borman and Frank Lovell blast off in the Gemini 7.

The launch was to come on Saturday; on Friday night, we attended a cocktail party. So did Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, Walter Schirra, and Pete Conrad. We were impressed.

Schirra, theoretically just nine days away from the launching of his own Gemini 6, was by far the most relaxed of the group. He was the only one without a certain wild-eyed look that seems to reflect the two-sided nature of the astronaut's world--half survival training in the desert and half telling college editors at cocktail parties what it's like to have been in space.

He didn't have to go into hibernation until four days before his flight he said, and until then he could live a normal life (All the motel's barmaids seemed to know the astronauts by first name and preferred drink).

Schirra would have to pilot Gemini 6 into a rendezvous with Borman and Lovell. How hard would it be, he was asked? If Ranger 7 could find a tiny area on the moon accurately, would it be harder to rendezvous with a much-nearer satellite?

He answered that the problem wasn't the same. "We know where the moon is--perfectly. But no matter how hard you try, you can't compute a rocket's path as perfectly. We just don't know where it is as well." Still he was confident. "If we can just get into the same plane with Gemini 7, we'll be OK. We have all the correcting devices we need to home in--there won't be a near-miss on this flight."

He talked on, easily. Did he foresee any military uses of space? "No--I'm against it myself and I don't think it's possible. We've tried as hard as we can to hit an exact target area on the earth with a man aboard, and with the firing of retro-rockets perfectly timed, pre-tested, and computerized. I got within four miles, and so did Cooper and Conrad. That's good for our purposes, but it's ridiculous as far as military purposes go."

"If you ask what we're most afraid of when we're up there," he added, "it's that retro fire. If something goes wrong going up, you can only come down. But if those things don't fire..."

Press the Little Button

Saturday morning we drove to the Cape. Already, the place is taking on the aspects of a museum. We rode past the abandoned launching pad from which Alan Shepard had been fired down the Atlantic. The gantry from which he was launched was near the site, hugging a Redstone rocket like Shepard's. The gantry was a converted oil derrick, bought hastily after Sputnik (the night before Kurt H. Debus, director of NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center, had described details of Shepard's launch: "We had a man in a block-house watching the color of the flame, about 150 feet away. If it looked too bluish, or whatever, he was supposed to press a little button next to him...").

Other obsolete missiles lay around on the ground, waiting for the Air Force to build a museum to house them--a Snark, like the air-breathing monster that ran wild over South America and landed in a jungle in Brazil; a Skybolt; a Minuteman model, slim, looking like three bullets, glued one on top of the other.