A second visit to Cape Kennedy came on January 28, 1967, just a month after I joined the Boston Globe after three years' reporting abroad for Science magazine. It was the day after three astronauts had suffered an almost-instant death by suffocation in the cabin of an Apollo spacecraft intended for launch the next month. The atmosphere at Cape Kennedy was incongruous. In brilliant midwinter sunshine, a horde of reporters wan­dered around, searching for insights into what had happened. Many of them, like me, knew so little that they had nothing to contribute to the story. I had no en­gineer friends from whom I could obtain even frag­mentary information. I hated the leaden, grief-filled atmosphere of rumor.

My only function, I decided, could be to resist rumors and remind readers that a huge system for going to the moon had been constructed, that such a system could not be perfect, and that its momentum would be slowed but not stopped by the deaths of three astronauts, Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee. I was helped to make this point when Richard Lyons, then of the New York Daily News and now of the New York Times, showed me an account of remarks made the previous month by Joseph Shea, then Apollo Spacecraft Manager in Houston, in which he noted that some 20,000 failures had showed up during the preparation of the first Apollo spacecraft and that at some point a space engineer, like any other, had to decide when things were good enough.

The weekend thus gave me my first taste of the im­mense difficulty of covering the moon-flight program-- or even of achieving much sense of the quality of what was going on. The program was too huge and too im­portant for me to grasp its many operations easily, or to permit of easy access to important places or people.

This does not mean that the program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is some sort of deep dark secret. To be sure, the agency has hundreds of public relations people, under the overall manage­ment of Julian Scheer, who has the rank of Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs. But it is not the job of these people to keep N.A.S.A.'s name out of the papers. Quite the reverse.

The justifications of N.A.S.A.'s program are unusual-- some would say shaky. It may be that going to the moon is inevitable, but many people argue against the urgency of doing it this decade, or even this century. The existence of a large "constituency" for N.A.S.A. in states like Florida, Louisiana, Texas and California where there are big agency installations or contractors' factories is not sufficient shield. The pathway to con­tinued popular support that has evolved is an outpouring of news releases and briefings and tours that is simply stupefying. There is danger of drowning in the thou­sands of pages of releases and the dozens of hours of briefings.

Such an outpouring is not merely "news management." It could not have continued for a decade unless some­body out there--a sizeable fraction of the people of the world--were interested.