NINE MILES FROM THE GOAL

MAN has peered into the nucleus of a cell and unlocked its secrets, probed deep within his own psyche to dissect its motives, even learned to uproot a heart and replant it in the body of another. He has done much with his own world, good and bad, but he has not learned to conquer it--or himself. Yet it is in his nature, even while he struggles with the challenges of new frontiers, to keep on creating ever newer ones. Last week the latest frontier in man's long journey through history moved more than 250,000 miles from the earth into the blackness of space. There, in the most ambitious and dangerous space flight yet undertaken, U.S. astronauts came within nine miles of the surface of the moon, nearer than any man has ever been to another celestial body.

Held in Thrall. The flight of Apollo 10 was an elaborate preparation for a manned landing on the moon, now scheduled for July 20, but it was also vastly more than that. This close approach to a planet's familiar satellite was, in a more remote sense, a step toward the planets themselves. Through the first color telecast from space and massive coverage by TV, radio and the press, a worldwide audience vicariously shared the astronauts' excitement and exuberance, the tension and terror, the close-up views of the stark and rugged moonscape. Yet there was a lighthearted air to the whole adventure, complete with jokes, corn pone and two spaceships named Charlie Brown and Snoopy, after the blithe-spirited characters of Charles Schulz's comic strip.

After another perfect launch and a three-day journey to the vicinity of the moon, Astronauts Eugene Cernan and Tom Stafford climbed into Snoopy, left Astronaut John Young in Charlie Brown, and streaked off across the lunar sky in their spiderlike module. As they approached the moon's surface at a speed of 3,700 m.p.h., Cernan cried: "We're right there! We're right over it! I'm telling you, we are low, we're close, babe. This is it!" At one point, the astronauts swooped to within 47,000 ft. of the moon's surface--not much higher than the altitude at which commercial jets fly over the earth. "We're getting so close," said Stafford, "all you have to do is put your tail wheel down and we're there." As the spacecraft headed back toward earth at week's end, Flight Director Milton Windier summed up the immediate import of the flight, which was designed to test out Snoopy's performance before an actual moon landing: "It's all downhill from here. I see nothing to constrain the launch of Apollo 11."

If the flight held most of the world in thrall, it was at least partly because of the infectious enthusiasm of the crew, who are all veterans of earlier space flights but nonetheless "oohed" and "ahed" at each new sight with the wonder of rookies. From the first moments of the flight, when Cernan cried, "What a ride! What a ride!," the astronauts bubbled with excitement. They repeatedly used the word fantastic. They talked so much that one capsule commentator in Houston complained half-seriously: "I couldn't get a word in edgewise." They joked with ground controllers and serenaded them with such pretaped tunes as Up, Up and Away and Fly Me to the Moon.

Shortly after leaving earth orbit, the astronauts separated their command and service module (Charlie Brown) from the third stage S-4B rocket. Hurtling through the inky void, they pivoted their craft around and moved back to dock with Snoopy, still nestled in the rocket's nose. As the gap between the two craft narrowed, the newly developed 12-lb. color television camera focused on Snoopy during a live transmission 4,120 miles from earth. "This has got to be the greatest sight ever," said a capsule communicator in Houston. Turning toward the receding earth, the TV camera captured a breathtaking view of a blue, white and brown globe, trailing wispy clouds and suspended in a black sky.

Hint of Trouble. Some of the minor annoyances of earlier flights were missing aboard Apollo 10. None of the crew caught cold, probably because of a less tiring preflight schedule. None suffered nausea caused by weightlessness, possibly because of in-flight head-movement exercises prescribed by the astronauts' physician, Dr. Charles Berry. For the first time since John Young smuggled a corned-beef sandwich aboard the Gemini 3 flight in 1965 and littered the spacecraft interior with crumbs, the astronauts were allowed a supply of bread. To withstand the pure-oxygen atmosphere, which quickly dries bread and makes it crumbly, the slices of white and rye bread had been flushed with nitrogen, a process that keeps them fresh for two weeks.

Early in the flight, however, a few minor problems developed. Expecting to take his first drink of water, Stafford instead got a mouthful of highly chlorinated water; because of ierroneous instructions from the ground the crew had failed to open a valve to the water tank, leaving only the evil tasting liquid in the drinking tube. As on on previous Apollo missions, there were troublesome hydrogen bubbles in the drinking water, which is produced by the fuel cells in the same oxygen-hydrogen reaction that supplies the spacecraft's electricity. The astronauts were forced to take Lomotil, a medicine for taking the butterflies out of unsettled stomachs.

The first hint of more serious trouble occurred after Apollo 10 had slipped into its nearly circular 69-mile orbit around the moon. Crawling through the tunnel connecting Charlie Brown to Snoopy, Stafford discovered that the padding on Charlie Brown's hatch had been ripped during the pressurization of the lunar module early in the flight, allowing snowlike fiber-glass insulation to escape and drift around the tunnel interior. During Apollo's eleventh revolution, as Stafford and Cernan prepared to undock Snoopy for its descent toward the moon, the astronauts found that they could not depressurize the connecting tunnel. The drifting fiber glass had clogged a 1/4in. tunnel vent. If something was not done, ground controllers feared, the unvented pressure might impart too much velocity to Snoopy as it undocked.

Angle of Twist. To solve this problem, Stafford and Cernan reopened Snoopy's sealed hatch. Much of the oxygen in the tunnel promptly flowed into the lunar module, where the pressure was less. The excess oxygen was then released into space through a vent in Snoopy.

No sooner was one problem solved than another cropped up. Ground controllers discovered that Snoopy had twisted about 3DEG at its junction with Charlie Brown, placing a strain on the docking mechanism. Just before Apollo disappeared behind the moon--where undocking was scheduled to occur--the controllers ordered the astronauts not to undock if the angle of twist reached 6DEG or more. Houston--and the rest of the world--could only wait to find out what had happened.

Forty-five minutes later, as Apollo reappeared from behind the moon, Stafford radioed the good news: Charlie Brown and Snoopy had parted company. With a brief burn of his thrusters, Astronaut Young moved Charlie Brown about 2,500 ft. away from Snoopy and made a final check of instruments. Alone in the command and service module, he plaintively called to Stafford and Cernan: "Keep up the good work, boys. You will never know how big this thing gets when there ain't nobody in it but one guy."

Accurate Burn. Stafford and Cernan had more reason to be concerned. To return safely to earth, they would eventually have to redock with Charlie Brown. Without a heat shield, Snoopy itself could not survive the fiery re-entry into the earth's atmosphere. Hidden behind the moon during the first of Snoopy's four orbits, Stafford and Cernan fired their craft's descent engine for 27 seconds to cut their speed and begin dropping toward the lunar surface. Only three extra seconds of thrust would have placed Snoopy on a collision course with the moon. But the burn was accurate, and the little craft entered an orbit with a pericynthion (closest approach to the moon; the word comes from Cynthia, one of the names of the Greek goddess of the moon) of 8.9 miles. Again, ground controllers did not know the results of the crucial maneuver until Snoopy came around the eastern edge of the moon. "We is going," cried Stafford exultantly to Capsule Commentator Charlie Duke. "We is down among them, Charlie!"

Snoopy's descent radar, which will be essential for the landing of Apollo 11 's lunar module, was designed to sense the lunar surface from a height of 50,000 ft.; that is as low as the command module can descend to rescue an LM in the event of trouble. The radar surpassed expectations. At an altitude of 65,000 ft., it sensed the surface and began collecting data on rate of descent and altitude. As Snoopy approached closer to the Sea of Tranquillity to scout the prime Apollo 11 landing sites, Stafford and Cernan could not contain their excitement: "Oh Charlie, we just saw an earthrise, and it's just got to be magnificent. There are enough boulders around here to fill up Galveston Bay. It's a fantastic sight. O.K., we are coming up over the site.

There are plenty of holes there. The surface is actually very smooth, like a very wet clay--with the exception of the bigger craters."

A Note of Terror. Just beyond the Sea of Tranquillity, Snoopy's descent engine again fired, this time for 42 seconds. Speeding up, the little craft entered a looping orbit that swung it 219 miles away from the moon at apocynthion (see chart) and then back into a position in which it could simulate an ascent from the surface of the moon. As Snoopy descended again toward the landing sites, where Apollo 11 astronauts may touch down, Stafford and Cernan prepared to jettison the descent stage. Their voices were calm and confident. Suddenly came a note of terror.

"Son of a bitch" shouted Cernan. "Something is wrong with the gyro." As explosive bolts blew off and the descent stage went into permanent orbit around the moon, Snoopy began to gyrate violently, pitching up and down. Cernan's heart rate, normally 60 beats per minute, soared to 129. Wrestling with the hand controls, Stafford got the craft stabilized after about a minute. "I don't know what the hell that was, baby," a shaken Cernan told ground control, "but that was something. I thought we were wobbling all over the skies." What caused the unexpected and totally terrifying gyrations, ground controllers later concluded, was a control switch left in the wrong position; technicians had simply failed to include instructions to throw the switch in the detailed check list prepared for the astronauts in the LM.

A Hug in Space. As Snoopy zoomed within 71,744 ft. of the lunar surface on the astronauts' second pass, Cernan marveled: "I'll tell you, we're down here where we can touch the top of some of the hills." Just after reaching the low point of their new orbit, Stafford and Cernan fired their ascent engine and began the maneuvers that would enable them to rendezvous and dock with Charlie Brown, still orbiting above them at an altitude of 69 miles. From that point on, their flight plan was identical to the one that Apollo 11 's lunar module would follow after blasting off from the lunar surface.

As the two craft sailed out from behind the moon, Stafford radioed to Young: "Okay, you ready to dock?" Minutes later, twelve latches audibly snapped shut around the tunnel in a swift and surgically precise operation. Cried Stafford: "Snoopy and Charlie Brown are hugging each other! We is back home--almost," said Stafford. "That rendezvous was the best one we ever had."

Two hours later, after Stafford and Cernan had crawled back into the com mand module and sealed the hatch, Snoopy was jettisoned and sent off into orbit around the sun when ground controllers fired its rocket until its remaining fuel was exhausted. "God, I feel sort of bad about that because he's a pretty nice guy," said Cernan with a trace of sentiment. "He treated us pretty well today." Snoopy certainly had. In its first test in the vicinity of the moon, the Grumman-built lunar module had performed with perfection for eight hours and ten minutes.

As Charlie Brown again passed behind the moon on its 31st and final complete revolution, after more than 61 hours in lunar orbit, its reliable service system propulsion engine (TIME, Jan. 3) was fired once more to increase its speed. Swinging wide around the eastern limb of the moon, the spacecraft wrested itself from the embrace of lunar gravity and soared back toward earth, then a chilling 246,154 miles distant. As the moon receded, Stafford noted, with a touch of awe in his voice, that it was set "against the blackest black you ever saw."

Tantalizingly Close. While astronauts Stafford, Cernan and Young made preparations for their splashdown off Pago Pago in the Pacific, workmen and technicians at Cape Kennedy were busy readying an even more momentous journey into that stark void. While Apollo 10 was still en route to the moon, the Apollo 11 space vehicle was moved out of Cape Kennedy's cavernous assembly building and transported 3 1/4 miles by means of a lumbering, 1/4-m.p.h. "crawler" to launch pad 39A. There, towering 363 ft. above the marshy Florida terrain, the spacecraft stands poised, ready to send two men to the surface of the moon in mid-July--and thereby to do what Apollo 10 came so tantalizingly close to doing last week.

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