Information and Insulation
It is this Niagara of information--making the U.S. space program so public that it turns out to be a secret, hidden like the vital piece of paper in Poe's "The Gold Bug" by being displayed in the open--that is the real problem of covering trips to the moon, not N.A.S.A.'s occasional attempts to conceal possible political implications in the award of a large contract or to play down the serious­ness of a rebuke to such a contractor for sloppy work.

But during an Apollo mission, the flood of information is vitally useful. With trifling exceptions, the entire volume of chatter between the astronauts and their controllers on the ground is made available, at first "live" over loudspeakers (or wires into stereo headsets) and then in the form of mimeographed transcripts made available within two hours of the time of the actual transmission.

At least twice a day, the flight controllers for one of three eight-hour shifts in Mission Control meet the press for questions about events during their shift. A reporter can attend such a briefing and ask his own questions; he can listen in from his desk in the nearby newsroom while looking at closed-circuit television; or he can tune in to the briefing over a local FM station which breaks into its running music program with all important Apollo mission transmissions, including briefings. If the re­porter is trying to catch a meal or possibly some sleep, depending on his own deadlines and the sleep-work schedule of the astronauts, he can always fall back on the mimeographed transcript of the briefing.

As a further check on the accuracy of his own ear and also that of the relays of secretaries who make the transcript (there is a tendency for the secretaries to launder the text a bit, despite repeated injunctions from the press), the reporter can either record the transmis­sions himself on his own portable tape recorder or go into N.A.S.A.'s news office and listen to its tape of the proceedings.

All of this means that a reporter covering a moon flight is rather insulated from the quality of the event; and unless he takes care, he may easily fall out of sympathy with the environment and thus allow his copy to go stale. A great deal of time must be spent chained to a work table listening to current transmissions while studying the transcript of past transmissions and brief­ings; going to briefings; and returning to the work table to write stories which are either dictated to the home office over a telephone specially installed at the table for the duration or over nearby pay telephones (often in short supply) or, page by page, over teletypewriter cir­cuits.

After all this, the reporters retire to nearby restaurants and bars in small clannish groups to interview and tease each other according to an elaborate code that is too amorphous to describe.

In such an environment, glimpses of real-live space men, or even of the moon up above, are fleeting.

One means of penetrating a little deeper into things is to use the little telephone on the work table to call up space officials you know and ask them questions. Another is to go see them, either by making a formal request to do so or by direct arrangement. Still another is to take somebody out to dinner at a restaurant well away from the space centers. Better still is to try to arrange interviews with key people at quiet moments when they are not too busy. But most of the time, re­porters with deadlines to meet must be content with a hurried personal question asked immediately after a briefing.

With all this to do, reporters also find themselves in fairly continuous contact with their home offices, which want to know what stories the reporter plans to write, what their leading points are, and why the reporter hasn't included a particularly sensational point already available from the wire services. I think it's fair to say that the people who receive the largest number of phone calls are the reporters from the New York Times, and it is certain that the phone calls are not always ap­preciated.