Science: Reaching for the Moon

(See Cover) On a stony California ridge, a rocket engine wide as a barn door lit the sky like an erupting volcano, while its roar racketed for 45 miles across the Mojave Desert. In a quiet Massachusetts laboratory, scientists carefully tuned a new and incredibly sensitive radio receiver designed to trap signals from far-out space. All over the U.S. last week, the story was the same: thousands of scientists and engineers sweated over strange new jobs−jobs more difficult than any they had ever attempted before. In a frenzy of creativeness they were producing new materials, machines, instruments, methods of measurement and...