Contamination Aloft

The possible troubles of space travelers are only the beginning of the space scientists' worries. There is a worrisome chance that moon-bound rockets will contaminate the earth's own atmosphere and cause serious difficulties for the men who stay behind.

The giant rockets designed to boost a man-carrying capsule to the moon will burn more than 2,000 tons of fuel, and a large part of their exhaust gases will be deposited more than 80 miles high, up where the air is only one-billionth as dense as at sea level. Once discharged at that altitude, the gases will not fall for weeks or months, and the air in which they will be floating is so thin that a small amount of contamination can have profound effects. Physicists Jerome Pressman, William Reidy and Winifred Tank of Geophysics Corp. of America have calculated that 25 tons of fluorine can scavenge out of the earth's atmosphere all the free electrons that now make long-distance radio communication possible. Some 25,000 tons of hydrogen, which is soon to be burned in just such vast quantities, could screen off the sun's ultraviolet light, changing the atmosphere's temperature, causing unpredictable and perhaps unpleasant effects on the earth's weather and climate.

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