Free Enterprise v. the Moon

Outside New York's Coliseum last week stood a Redstone rocket, white and spare, and tipped with a Mercury capsule exactly like the one that carried Commander Alan Shepard on his suborbital flight. Inside the building glittered the American Rocket Society's "Space Flight Report to the Nation"--an astonishing exhibition of the phony and the competent, the trivial and the magnificent. Some of the objects on exhibit were miracles of deft design and precision workmanship. Others were not working so well. (A computer kept typing petulantly: "I can't see a thing without my glasses.") Still others would probably never work at all. Mused an engineer about a crude device for exploring the moon: "It's wonderful what a kid can do with an Erector set."

Founded in 1930 by twelve enthusiasts, the American Rocket Society never had more than 400 members before the end of World War II. Its meetings had few if any commercial exhibitors. After the war. the society grew faster. Then, in 1957, the year of Sputnik I, it soared like one of its better rockets. By last week, ARS had 19,500 members, and most of the nation's largest corporations (including Bell Telephone, General Motors, and Standard Oil of New Jersey) were expensively represented at its convention. California air plane manufacturers moved on New York en masse, adding traditional West Coast fluff and West Coast flash--including polished feminine models to pose beside polishedmodels of space components.

Imaginative Attack. The technical papers testified to an eagerness to try anything, however difficult or bizarre, that might move the U.S. toward space. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration showed models of satellites already in orbit or soon to soar aloft--beautiful machines with the strange, angular, functional grace of well-designed space craft. North American Aviation, Inc. showed a full-scale model of its giant F-1 rocket engine, which spits out more than 1,500,000 lbs. of thrust and whose tail cone is as large as an Eskimo igloo.

Not all of the jointed robots for exploring the moon (see cuts) were outlandish contraptions; some of them were serious and imaginative attacks on the difficult problem of studying the lunar surface before humans learn how to survive there. RCA showed a six-legged job that walks cautiously on circular rubber feet, a small six-legger that looks like a metal praying mantis, an inflated plastic ball, and a moon rover that creeps like a centipede. Perhaps the best thought out of the tribe was an insectlike machine made by Space-General Corp. Powered by solar batteries, it walks on long, jointed metal legs. By means of a TV camerabit transmits pictures of the lunar landscape to its masters on faraway Earth. Safe at home, scientists can tell the creature where to go, and they can also order it to pick up lunar samples with its jointed, lobsterlike claw.

No Doubts. Most impressive part of the exhibition was the obvious confidence of the free-enterprise spacemen. Their ambitious development programs, slow to start, are now spurting ahead. New technologies are developing fast, some of them still unnamed. U.S. industry is finding better metals for space, better ceramics, better guidance and communication devices. Already, the spacemen point proudly to U.S. satellites keeping watch on the world's weather. Soon they will be relaying TV programs from continent to continent. Soon U.S. industry, with all its chaotic, competing, expensive ingenuity, will move toward the moon and beyond. No one who talked to the gathered spacemen last week could harbor many doubts.

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