IT is supreme adventure for man's spirit as well as his rockets. The stars and the moon have long been symbols of a remote and indifferent universe, a reproach to man's insignificance. Now man for the first time is challenging the planets themselves."

So said TIME in its Jan. 19, 1959 cover story on space exploration. The cover painting that went with it showed a startled moon having its picture taken by a rocket-mounted camera. Five years later, this painting has come true with the spectacular success of Ranger VII (see SCIENCE).

TIME began watching the moon in its third issue, March 17, 1923, with an item reporting on a "somewhat new theory" to the effect that "the satellite was formed by a coalescence of masses coming together by mutual gravitation." This theory is still in good repute. In the intervening decades TIME has followed man's restless reach for the moon, including the simple experiment of a Princeton student who, 35 years before Ranger VII, took lunar pictures by rigging a movie camera to a telescope. Our moon chronicle continued to note many milestones: the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1946, bouncing a radar beam off the moon; the early, unsuccessful lunar probe by the Air Force in 1958; the largely successful Pioneer probe of the same year; the Russian Lunik launchings in 1959, which suggested that the Soviets were beating the U.S. into space.

Then followed some imaginative stunts, such as broadcasting America the Beautiful from California to New Jersey via the moon. But the early 1960s were also marked by many disappointing setbacks for what a 1962 cover story called the "anxious assault on space." And in a 1963 cover on William Pickering, the head of California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and undisputed hero of last week's Ranger triumph, TIME said: "Those were dark days. But each failure became a lecture from space on what to do or not to do the next time."

Although at one point our World section brashly tried to annex the moon as its news territory, the duty of moon watching over the years has, of course, belonged to the Science section and its editor since 1945, Jonathan Norton Leonard. Through his Questar telescope, which he also uses for bird watching, Leonard often observes the moon from his home at Hastings-on-Hudson. Like everyone else, Leonard is excited about the Ranger VII pictures, but sees "a lot of unexplained things in them." As for putting a man on the moon, Leonard doesn't think the U.S. will make it by the hoped-for date of 1970, but may well get there by 1975. At any rate, if he had his choice, Leonard would aim at Mars, which he considers a more interesting place than the moon.

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