Television: The 40th Floor

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At one point. Colonel John Glenn sounds like a fly-now-pay-later salesman pushing a ten-day, round-trip excursion. "You can launch on Tuesday and be home by the end of the following week." he says amiably. What is the destination? The moon, of course. 60 Hours to the Moon, to be shown this Sunday over ABC-TV, is an excellently documented summary of U.S. plans for space exploration, produced by ABC News and built around excerpts from a six-hour interview between Glenn and ABC News Science Editor Jules Bergman. Well worth the attention of viewers of any age, the program was designed especially for teen-agers in the hope of attracting their minds toward the science of space. It therefore wastes no time talking down to adults, is presented in terms more familiar to the young —time-capability, power-limited, lift vectors, rendezvous and docking, ablation shields, paragliders, and so on.

Though he stands on history's highest soap box, Glenn is not a man to pontificate, and the program as a whole follows his lead. It ranges across every relevant topic from aerospace medicine to the U.S.'s unmanned satellite programs. Scientists and astronauts stand up at blackboards and clearly explain just how landings are made on the earth and would be made on the surface of the moon. Deft animation explains the complicated docking procedure: hooking up a manned capsule to an orbiting rocket, providing the added power to complete a lunar voyage.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has given ABC the first really detailed look at mock-ups of the new two-man Gemini capsule, the three-man Apollo capsule that will make the first U.S. moon trip and the nuclear Nerva rocket, so powerful that it will eliminate the rendezvous and docking process altogether and make direct trips beyond the moon.

Dozens of people from Nobel prizewinners to Canaveral secretaries appear during the hour, but Glenn is at the center.

Says he: "We're well aware there are risks involved. There are a lot of things to learn. You just don't glue a bunch of bolts and metal together and go off on a space flight." Nonetheless, beneath everything this absorbing show's guests have to say emerges the staggering fact that they talk about going to the moon as if they planned to push a button and get off on the 40th floor.