ALTHOUGH the basic structure of TIME has never changed, there is great flexibility within the format. Over the years we have added many departments and dropped others as their time passed. Stories range from 20-line shorts to two-page essays, as well as the weekly five-or six-page cover articles. Occasionally, an event is of such extraordinary importance that it demands special treatment. This week, to mark what may well be the most momentous journey since 1492, TIME tells of Apollo 11's odyssey to the moon in a 14-page Special Supplement. It is our second supplement this year. The Jan. 24 issue carried the first, "To Heal a Nation," when Richard Nixon was inaugurated 37th President of the U.S.

TIME'S own Apollo 11 team in New York consisted of Senior Editor Ronald Kriss, Associate Editor Leon Jaroff, Contributing Editor Marshall Burchard, and Researchers Sydnor Vanderschmidt and Gail Lowman. Dogging NASA officials, scientists and astronauts from Houston and Washington to Cape Kennedy were Correspondents David Lee and Donald Neff, both veterans of previous launches. Neff, who spent two years reporting from Saigon, finds that space "is all the things that despairing war is not. The space program is affirmation. It shows that man's spirit is just as daring and questing as in the time of Homer."

A questing spirit is no less important to journalists. In May, Editor Jaroff heard rumors that NASA had quietly changed its quarantine plans for the Apollo 11 astronauts. The May 16 issue of TIME brought out into the open a behind-the-scenes debate on the possible dangers of lunar organisms and helped influence NASA to tighten its quarantine procedures. During Apollo 10, Correspondents Lee and Neff questioned NASA's announcement that ground controllers had tracked the lunar module to a point 9.4 miles above the moon's surface in its lowest pass. The definitive figure should have come from the LM's radar, which must accurately gauge the spacecraft's distance from the moon. Digging further, Lee and Neff found that the lunar module had indeed seen things differently, and reported correctly that the spacecraft entered an orbit with a pericynthion of 8.9 miles.

Four of TIME'S Apollo 11 team are pictured above with famed Space Writer Arthur C. Clarke, who made his own contribution to the supplement. They are standing before a mock-up of LM, the lunar module, part of a new display in the Time & Life Exhibition Center, which includes models of Saturn V, Surveyor, Ranger and Lunar Orbiter, along with an astronaut manikin standing on a simulated piece of the moon.

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