These were yesterday's rockets, except for the Minuteman. Today's--the Saturn IB--we saw being assembled on the launching pad from which it will send off the first Apollo flights, the beginnings of the actual moon program. It was being assembled within a huge gantry. A mechanic, crawling around the first-stage motor, stopped to explain. The engine consisted of eight Redstone motors in a circle around a Jupiter hull that served as a fuel tank.

He was from the Chrysler Corp., which was in charge of the first stage. Other parts of the rocket were in the hands of Douglas, North American, and Grumman Aircraft, and IBM, among others.

The engine had been ground-tested in Huntsville. "We haven't had a failure in the Apollo program yet," he said. "It'll work when it has to."

There were an incredible number of parts to that engine--it didn't seem possible that all of them could be depended on to work. But the IB's big brother, the Saturn V, had infinitely more parts and was a brand-new rocket, not a collection of dependable old Redstones.

We saw the building where the Saturn V will be assembled. "You could put the Pentagon and the Chicago Merchandise Mart inside it," said NASA guide Henry Decker, who can tell you every detail of every building on the Cape.

One of the details of this one was that it cost $100 million to build. In it, the rocket would be assembled stage, then moved by a "crawler" that can carry a 12-million pound load to a launching pad.

Next to the "vertical assembly building" was a control building, with instrument panels enough for all the technicians who would have to be present for the moon shot. There were also plush leather seats for a hundred or more VIP's who would arrive to watch the shot.

It was a long ride from the Kennedy Space Center--all NASA's--back to Cape Kennedy--a military complex with some land used by NASA. Bleachers were set up almost 2 miles from pad 19, where Gemini 7 was to take off (because the fuels used in the Titan rocket are poisonous, everyone, even the photographers, are kept at least 7000 feet from the pad).

The announcer at the launching pad introduced Sen. Howard Cannon (D-Nev.), Reps. George Miller (D-Cal.) and Don Brown (D-Cal), and Presidential assistant Jack Valenti, who had escorted a party of foreign diplomats, Shirley Maclaine was there incognito. Miss Florida Citrus strolled in front of the stands.

The countdown came in by loudspeaker. But tension didn't set in until it came down close to blast-off. At 30 seconds, the crowd suddenly shut up. The moment came, a cloud of smoke went up, and then a roar, a screaming, enormous roar that no TV microphone could ever reproduce. It left the pad, and seemed to hover above it for a few seconds. The crowd applauded. Then it was off, streaking across the sky into an open patch between the clouds, faster than you could believe, faster than the screaming jets that followed it, faster than the cameras can suggest. In less than two minutes, it was out of sight.

At dinner, conversation returned to the inevitable topic: why a space program; why one so expensive; and why one with these goals. The scientists, military men, and Life reporters available put up several answers in addition to the traditional, or Why-does-Rice-play-Texas approach.

1). The collection of scientific brainpower assembled for the space program should be kept together. "There's never been anything quite like the program we've assembled," said a NASA official. "Our progress has astonished us. Given a problem in space flight, this group of people can come up with the knowledge to solve it. Should we now break them up?"

2). We are raising the level of education enormously by the investment in space. Since other investments of $20 billion would obviously raise the level more, the concomitant argument is that if America were not spending the money on space, she would not be spending it. "Every few months some scientist comes up with a shopping list of things we could have if we didn't have a space program," said a Life editor. "We could cure cancer and we could give every teacher in the U.S. a huge pay raise and so on. But that's absurd."

3). Once you decide to have a space program, one, which attempts to reach its goals quickly, is the only efficient one. "If President Kennedy had said in 1961, 'I want us to reach the moon by 1975,' it would have been much more expensive for us," said a NASA official. "We'd have had to pay people to do the same work over a longer time. This is not a crash program--we're not developing duplicate systems and then discarding the least efficient, as they did in the atom-bomb project."

The explanations were general, as befitted a group of well-educated engineers talking to college journalism and liberal arts majors. They were argued with the conviction of men who care about the results of this program, who look forward to their further encounters with the unknown. And none of them was as impressive as the technical miracle of the rocket streaking across the Florida sky towards its rendezvous with space, two minutes away.

But other things impress one about the Cape too. To look at the acres of palmetto, the hundred million-dollar buildings, the miraculous machines, and to breathe the words "twenty billion dollars" can't fail to make one wonder. This money is now committed. Beyond it lie the prospects of travel to the planets and the stars, and costs mounting with the same speed as those rockets. And perhaps a few thoughts about priorities. Someone may finally have to answer the question: Why does Rice play Texas