(5 of 10)
Unmanned exploration of the moon itself is the job of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Mostly because of launch difficulties, none of the JPL's first four Ranger spacecraft has yet sent usable data back from the moon. But the next two are almost finished, and JPL considers them much superior to their predecessors. The job of Ranger 5 will be to land (at 100 m.p.h.) a package of tough instruments on the moon. A temperature-sensing device will report the moon's horribly hot and cold climate over a tiny radio, and a seismometer will feel the ground for moon-quakes or shocks caused by meteor impacts.
Such information, skillfully interpreted, will be valuable for planning manned landings on the moon. More valuable still will be detailed pictures of the moon radioed to earth by Ranger 6 just before it crashes to destruction. Even such fleeting views should tell much more about the moon's mysterious surface than is now known. Another moon explorer under development by JPL and Hughes Aircraft is Surveyor, which will try to make a soft landing on the moon, take closeup pictures and transmit them to earth, besides analyzing samples of moon "soil." Later spacecraft will orbit the moon, photographing its topography in detail while mechanical eyes search for safe landing places for the spacecraft of human explorers. Long before men set foot on the moon, instruments will have made many parts of its surface fairly familiar.
Intricate Monsters. As Holmes and his NASA associates lay plans for invading the moon, they can safely assume that scientific knowledge will have increased enormously before the first flights begin. Their urgent concern now is to prepare launching facilities with which to make those flights. Technical direction of the program will eventually come from the Manned Spacecraft Center, 36 miles southeast of Houston. At present, NASA's 1,600-acre tract of rangeland (formerly part of the J. M. West ranch) looks like a playground for bulldozers. Little actual building has started, but eventually the area will have laboratories, office buildings, and massive test communications and control facilities.
On the Mississippi, at New Orleans, NASA has acquired the great, Government-owned Michoud plant, which made torpedo boats in World War II. There the bulky segments of the C-5 Advanced Saturns will be assembled. They will then be taken by barge (the only way they can be carried) to a thinly inhabited area in nearby Mississippi for static testing. Then they will be floated along the Intracoastal Waterway to Cape Canaveral for final assembly and launching into space.
At Canaveral, once an Air Force principality, NASA has begun to look and act like the majority stockholder. The gantries and pads of the military "Missile Row" are busier than ever, but they are dwarfed by the 310-ft. gantry and 240-ft. umbilical tower of the Saturn C-1 site, which boasts the most elaborate blockhouse in the space business. A second gantry and tower are rising fast, and farther north NASA is buying thousands of acres of beachland, swamp and orange groves for the stupendous equipment needed to launch the great C-5 moon rockets. These intricate monsters, 325 ft. tall, will not be put together on the pads, as is the present practice. The C55 will be assembled on 2,500-ton