It is the writer who reminds the televiewer that Arm­strong not only said, "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," but also, "Isn't this fun?" and that Aldrin's first description of the moon was, "Mag­nificent desolation."

It is the writer who stays up late at night to watch the $50,000 party that President Nixon threw the Apollo 11 astronauts after they emerged from their multi-million-dollar quarantine quarters in Houston on August 13, and to remind television-sated Easterners who hadn't stayed tuned that astronaut Neil Armstrong, in brief remarks near the end of the dinner around 2 a.m. E.D.T., recalled a sign he had seen during the ticker-tape parade that morning in New York. The sign read, "Through you, we touched the moon."

It is the writer who watches a nationally televised press conference with the astronauts on August 12, in which the astronauts said the moon seemed friendly despite its barrenness; who notes that they had apparently come close to being unable to land because they had nearly exhausted their fuel margins; and who puts two and two together and reports the next day that Armstrong was so determined to land that he might have disregarded a warning from Houston not to touch down.

Armstrong made it clear that fuel margins which seemed small were in fact large in view of the circumstances; and that, if he had lost contact with Houston, he would have pressed on to a landing if the trajectory was safe. Armstrong was quietly making clear that the astronaut in charge of a lunar landing vehicle, the apex of a huge technological pyramid, was not a supine passenger.

The Social Power of Exploration
The writer is the special extension of his readers' sensitivities. In the second row of the darkened auditorium in Houston on July 20, I was sitting next to Walter Sulli­van, the Science Editor of the New York Times. He, like me, had opted to watch the moon-walk uninterrupted, in contrast to many other morning-paper reporters in an immense, echoing press room nearby. They were watch­ing the event out of the corner of one eye in a glaringly-lit room, listening to the moon-talk over stereophonic headphones, and clacking away at typewriters.

As it happens, Sullivan is the author of the best general history of Antarctic exploration (Quest for a Continent New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1957). We were both struck by how closely the barren ground of Tranquillity Base, viewed at the low sun angle of a lunar morning, resembled the blue and white snowscape at the South Pole during Antarctic summer.

Of course the resemblance was superficial, an accident of the medium--black and white television--by which most residents of the world's rich nations could bear wit­ness to an event in a way that had never been possible before in the history of exploration. The astronauts themselves said that their surroundings in the Sea of Tranquillity, fancifully named by a 17th-century Italian astronomer, reminded them of a desert in the American southwest. As they spoke through the little two-way radios fitted into their back-pack life-support units, the astronauts were seeing the tawny colors of the moon's surface, of which they brought back ample evidence in many color photographs.

But if the colors were different, there were many other similarities between the moon, whose exploration has just begun, and Antarctica, whose exploration began only 70 years ago, just before the invention of the air­plane.

Like the moon, Antarctica is a remote waste never in­habited by men until an age of scientific exploration. There is no trade with Antarctica and no military use for an expanse of 5.5 million square miles of ice at the southern extremity of the earth, dominating a hemi­sphere which is nearly all water and in which only 10 per cent of the world's people live. A rocket base makes as little sense in Antarctica as it does on the moon. If one is to have rocket bases at all, there are cheaper places closer to home to put them, places where the guardians of the rockets can live with their families, take correspondence courses and quickly replace the rocket's warheads when a better design comes along.