COVERING a football game or a space shot, TV these days delivers technical excellence, informed commentary and immediacy. So why go to the scene? Were the hundreds of thousands of tourists, the 6,000 or so special guests of NASA and the 1,782 journalists all foolish to take the trouble of being at Cape Kennedy? Just ask one who walked into the Vehicle Assembly Building, where the 363-ft.-tall Saturn 5 rocket was put together, and listen to him insist that no picture had ever prepared him for the experience of looking up at the towering vastness, the esthetic curves of the work platforms, the cathedral-like sense of man's puniness. No camera angle or word comparison can convey the feeling of standing like a blade of grass alongside the impersonal white complexity of the lofty moon rocket itself.
In the darkness of 5 a.m., when the brilliantly floodlit rocket gives off rays of light like a star sapphire, it seems entirely possible that so beautiful a machine might reach the moon. But with sunrise and the reappearance of the normal landscape, doubt intrudes; eventually, at a distance of three miles, the rocket seems to shrink in size and magic until it becomes an act of almost Promethean gall to aim it at the heavens.
At ignition, nothing that TV says or does can re-create the waves of sound that actually buffet the ears, chest and gut of the spectator. The slowness of lift-off contrasts incredibly with the acceleration into flight. The head goes back, hands are raised to block out the sun, tears of relief and perhaps pride fill the eye. The sense of brute power boring an escape hole through the atmosphere is heightened by a sudden realization that one is being left behind. The earth itself seems to be dropping away as fast as the wingless rocket is accomplishing the completely unnatural act of heaving itself upward and bursting through the sky.
This was what the crowds had come to witness. Jules Verne had the vision more than a century ago. When Western man finally launched himself into space, he foresaw, it would be from Florida's midsection. Men with less foresight saw only a forbidding stretch of sand, scrub and fetid marshland that was bypassed even during the land boom of the 1920s. In the 1950s, recalls Space Reporter Al Volker of the Miami News, the space program was so hushed up that the only way to find out that a shot had taken place was to have a Cocoa Beach bartender telephone the news. But in the 1960s the time had come for Verne's idea. With it came a population of 250,000, cinder-block subdivisions, all the effluvia of a boom town and, last week, a million guests in a carnival atmosphere.
Cocoa Beach pays unending tribute to the space age that made it prosper. Motels bear names like Sea Missile, Satellite and Polaris. There is a Celestial Trailer Court and an Astro-Dine Outer Space Eat-In. George's Steak House has rest rooms marked "Astronauts" and "Astronets." The menu suggests: "Lift off with a three-stage martini. Order a steak that soars to an apogee of taste and splash down with coffee."