A NEW WORLD

MAN's eternal quest for the new and the unknown has led him to the highest mountains and the deepest ocean trenches, the most impenetrable jungles and the most forbidding deserts. This week it promises to lead him across the vacuum of space to another world. At Cape Kennedy, a 363-ft. moon rocket stood ready to launch three American astronauts on man's first attempt to set foot on the surface of another celestial body. If the bold attempt is successful, the journey will be remembered as long as the human race endures. It will open a new age of exploration, one that may ultimately reach to the outer limits of the solar system and even to the stars beyond.

Up to the last moment, it was possible that the failure of a single tiny device among the 15 million individual parts of Apollo 11 might cause delay on the pad or more serious consequences in space. Up to the last moment, too, complaints were being voiced about misspent money and misguided motives. But not even the skeptics could ignore or entirely downgrade so transcendent an event--one of those shining moments in history when man rises above himself toward greatness.

Forbidding Enough

Like Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who set out in search of new worlds, the Apollo 11 astronauts face experiences never before encountered by men. They are cool, pragmatic technicians, superbly trained for their flight and thoroughly familiar with their spacecraft. But they will be attempting the first descent to the moon, the first exploration of its surface, the first lift-off back into space. It is not unlikely, then, that beneath their composed exteriors, they share some of the doubts and even fears felt by their predecessors.

Spanish-born Historian and Philosopher Salvador de Madariaga, who has written extensively about the voyages of Columbus, addressed himself at TIME'S request to the deeper meaning of explorations, past and present.

"From the very first days, when man sought to master the unknown by finding out what the valley next to his was like, until today, when the unknown is the solar system, man has had to conquer the fear of the dangers which the unknown conceals not only as they are but as he fancies them," writes De Madariaga. "The companions of Bartholomeu Diaz had to conquer the fear that the ocean at and beyond the equator might boil or drop into a cosmic precipice; the companions of Columbus feared griffins, sirens, men with tails or with their heads screwed to their navels. Our astronauts' imagination is more disciplined by knowledge, but even in our day, when fancy and imagination have been disposed of, what remains is forbidding enough. Yet man is not daunted. These undaunted men are the true creators of history, those thanks to whom history is not a blind chain of facts but a clear-sighted sequence of acts--events that were ideas before they happened. It is from men who act on nature, and do not merely suffer to be acted upon by her, that history flows."

A Better Launching Pad

If there are similarities between the mission of Apollo 11 and other historical ventures of exploration and discovery, there are also vast differences. When Columbus landed in the New World, he had a handful of bewildered Indians for an audience, and Queen Isabella did not get the news until six months afterward. In more recent times, the world did not learn of the arrival of Peary's lonely band at the North Pole in 1909 until five months after the event. Yet when--and if--the first astronaut sets foot on the moon, he will be observed by a worldwide audience numbering hundreds of millions. Even more remarkable, only 1.3 seconds, the time it takes for radio waves to travel between moon and earth, will elapse between the actual event and its appearance on television screens.

The vehicles that will take Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins on their epic journey have been aptly named. The lunar module that will land on the moon's surface has been christened Eagle because, Armstrong said, it is "representative of the flight and the nation's hope." The command module that will carry the astronauts back to earth has been dubbed Columbia, a close approximation of Columbiad, the name that Jules Verne gave to his lunar craft in his 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon. Prophetically, Verne launched Columbiad from a site in Florida and brought it down in the Pacific Ocean, where it was picked up by a U.S. naval vessel.

Ideally, the nationality of the first men to land on an extraterrestrial body should be of negligible importance. But the fact is that it will be seen by many as a specifically American victory in a hard-fought race whose outcome has not always been so clear. After Sputnik, when Soviet space firsts and U.S. space failures were occurring with disheartening regularity, a Soviet official boasted: "The space programs of the United States and the Soviet Union have demonstrated for all the world to see that socialism is a better launching pad than capitalism."

Now, the Soviets seem to be conceding the race to the moon.

Congratulations from Russian officials and astronauts have become progressively more cordial after each new U.S. space victory, and Apollo 8 Astronaut Frank Borman received one of the warmest welcomes ever accorded an American during his triumphant tour of Russia. By no means, however, have the Russians dropped out entirely. Just before the scheduled Apollo 11 shot, the Russians launched an unmanned spaceship toward the moon--in an obvious attempt to win some attention away from the U.S. Actually, some U.S. space officials believe that Moscow has decided to leapfrog the moon and head for the planets.

Out of the Cradle

No matter who takes the lead in space, it seems certain that man will continue to move outward in the universe--driven by the same force that once sent him across untracked wastelands and uncharted seas. In past ages, spices and gold tempted man to explore unknown regions, but they were far from the only lures. There was always something else that drew him, something less tangible--a thirst for adventure, for knowledge, and above all, for mastery of his world. The same impulse now compels him to reach for the moon, the planets and the stars beyond. As the Russian space theoretician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky once wrote: "The earth is the cradle of the mind, but you cannot live in a cradle forever."

To be sure, man has done much to despoil his cradle, and at this anguished moment in U.S. history there is some legitimacy to complaints that the billions of dollars being devoted to space might be better spent on earth. The poor cannot be blamed for being indifferent or even bitter when they watch the shining and vastly expensive rocket travel into the sky on a mission that does not improve their immediate future. The prophets who denounce ugliness and injustice on earth similarly have a case against the space program. But the case is shortsighted. For the ultimate benefits of space exploration, as of the earlier journeys of discovery, lie in what man discovers about himself and how he changes his own life. The discovery of the new world of America totally altered Europe; so the discovery of the new world of space may change modern civilization and provide what De Madariaga calls a new light "so that our supreme aim may become clearer: the intelligent organization of life on the planet."

Sooner rather than later, man will have to take heed of that supreme aim, and begin devoting immense energy and resources to solving the increasingly complex problems he has created on his own planet. This week, however, he can be pardoned if his eye is on the heavens, not the earth.

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