THE MOON: A NEW WORLD

• Share

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