Beyond the Moon

The moon seemed closer than ever last week when the hatch of an Apollo lunar vehicle opened and three smiling astronauts clambered out. In a giant vacuum chamber at Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center, the bearded, bone-tired trio had just spent eight days simulating a trip to the moon and back. Reported Spacecraft Commander Joseph Kerwin: "A prime reason for the mission was to come back and say 'Yes sir, the darned thing works.' We sure are going to be able to report that."

For NASA officials, the mock space voyage had particular significance. To prevent a repeat of last year's tragic Apollo fire, they had spent $75 million improving and fireproofing the lunar command ship. And apart from some unexpected itching from the astronauts' new flameproof space suits, and a temporary breakdown of the huge vacuum testing chamber, the modified capsule's first full-fledged ground test was an unqualified success.

Jovian Gases. For all its promise, though, the ground-bound lunar voyage failed to stem rising scientific impatience with the U.S. space program. The scheduled Apollo moon mission is only 18 months away, and space specialists are already demanding that the U.S. start looking beyond the moon to more distant and challenging targets. At the Fourth International Symposium on Bioastronautics and the Exploration of Space in San Antonio last week, scientists repeatedly urged NASA to get on with the job of planning trips to the earth's planetary neighbors. Since unmanned probes have all but proved that the moon is devoid of life, Nobel Prizewinning Chemist Harold C. Urey, for one, believes that it may be a "terribly dull object." Urey and many of his colleagues are now leaning more and more to the once unfashionable notion that life may be found elsewhere in the solar system--even if it is nothing more complicated than simple plants like moss or lichens.

Three planets were nominated as possible havens for such life. Nobel Chemistry Laureate Willard F. Libby speculated that oxygen detected on Venus by a Soviet space probe last October may well be the product of plant photosynthesis. Jupiter, said NASA Chemist Cyril Ponnamperuma, has an atmosphere similar to that which enveloped the earth during its first 100 million years; the swirling Jovian gases, he added, may already have combined into basic life-building molecules. But the strongest argument was made on behalf of Mars. Despite its freezing temperatures and apparent lack of oxygen, explained NASA Microbiologist Harold P. Klein, life could have been spawned when the red planet's climate was more favorable. Whatever form that life once had, it may have survived over the ages through evolutionary adaptation.

A practical preliminary step toward planetary voyages, suggested Spacecraft Center Director Robert R. Gilruth, would be to orbit a giant, cigar-shaped capsule around the earth in the mid-1970s. The big space station, said Gilruth, would be 615 ft. long, carry a crew of 100, and rotate end-over-end 31 times a minute to create an artificial gravity for those on board. Freed from the earth's atmosphere, astronomers on the station could peer through telescopes for an undistorted view of the destination of future space trips. How would this ambitious multimillion-dollar project be financed? An idea by Chemist Libby suggested one possible source of funds. In the nearly perfect vacuum of space, he said, scientists would finally have available the contamination-free conditions that would allow them to make diamonds out of coal.

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