The Moonviewer Lunar Dust

"The Moon Show" at Hayden Gallery. M. I. T., through October 19.

AFTER $24 billion in production costs and a series of poor reviews from liberal critics across the country. The Moon Show rolled into M. I. T. last Sunday a few months ahead of its 1970 deadline. It has three components: a small sample of lunar dust collected by the Apollo 11 astronauts, a series of films on space exploration, and some full-scale mock-ups of space hardware. Wavne V. Anderson, chairman of M. I. T.'s Committee on Visual Arts helped design the show to restore "the tradition of imagination and fancy that nurtured the technological achievement" of man's leap into space. If the visitor can ignore for a moment the debate over federal spending priorities and the space program's other political blemishes, he can actually recapture that old excitement about space flight-the thrill of these first Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn flights almost a decade ago.

The films make the show. On one screen are fragments of science fiction flicks from Buck Rogers to 2001 . Right along side is some impressive NASA footage of the moon landing, the early Apollo missions in earth and lunar orbit, and Saturn V take-offs. Isolated fragments of these films have been shown often, but to watch them in color at once is an awesome experience. The show also offers a fine series of Neil Armstrong's moon photos. This selection is far clearer and more complete than those published in magazines or newspapers.

The full-scale mock-ups of the Apollo 11 command module, the lunar module ascent stage and other space hardware may interest engineers and kiddies, but most county fairs have displayed similar NASA road shows for years.

The lunar sample on display is the show's big letdown. As might be expected, the stuff is displayed dramatically in the center of a dark room, seated atop a black plinth and bathed in a single spot-light. This display conjures up an image of a 21st century altar complete with priceless relic-or a showcase of industrial diamonds at Tiffany's. Unfortunately, the sample contains no more than a few grams of the gray dust, and without a microscope to reveal the amazing green, brown and white colors of the individual glass shards or the weird dumbell and spheroid shapes of the gray glass beads, it looks like so much beach sand.

THAT FLAW in the exhibition is forgiveable since the entire show was assembled in 41/2 weeks-something of a record for a display of this sort. A less forgiveable oversight is the scarcity of background information both political and scientific, accompanying the rocks.

The distribution of the rocks to investigators around the country for instance would make an interesting tale when considered in the context of NASA's shaky relations with the scientific community. Scientists have complained for years that the manned space program was dominated by engineers. To mollify its scientific critics, the agency set up the scientist-astronaut corps two years ago to train young scientists for field work on the moon and for the earth-orbit missions of the Apollo Applications Program. Not one scientist-astronaut has been assigned to the prime or back-up crews of the next 3 Apollo missions, while several test pilot astronauts, among them aging Alan Shepard, have been slated for their second, third or even fourth space flights. Four of the 17 scientists in this program have quit, and so have the director of science at the Manned Spacecraft Center, the chief scientist in the Office of Lunar Explorations and the curator of the Lunar Receiving Laboratory.

Non-scientific criteria used in some NASA decisions have also annoyed some scientists. Take, for example, the compromise choice of cameras used on the Apollo lunar flights. Early unmanned Ranger. Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter craft had taken over 106,000 photographs of the moon, and NASA claimed the Apollo flights would provide photographs 10 times better than these television images. Some cartographers argue that the Hasselblad camera used on Apollo missions has no such capability. It is perfect for propaganda shots in Life magazine and fine for geological work on the moon, but it is too small to provide enough detail for improved mapping. Three NASA advisory groups have recommended that a larger, aerial mapping camera with a 9-inch square negative be adopted at a cost of only a few thousand dollars more, but the agency appears satisfied with what one cartographer called "snapshots taken out the window like a tourist." or at least it has not budgeted additional funds for better mapping gear.

WITH THE big engineering hurdles to manned space flight overcome, this year NASA headquarters was eager to mend its fences with space scientists. So when the moon rocks, the first tangible scientific payoff of the Apollo program, arrived, NASA went overboard. The agency received hundreds of research proposals and eventually narrowed them down to 142 projects. Some NASA consultants wanted to eliminate still more proposals, to avoid the hassle of two or three principle investigators claiming priority for the same discovery. Headquarters overruled them. "They wanted to spread the goodies around the country," said one researcher. "It's damn plain foolishness. Four or five or more experimenters are doing the same work, using the same techniques in some areas. A certain amount of duplication would be scientifically desirable to catch errors, and in most cases, the duplication seems justifiable on these grounds. Beyond that point, however, the distribution of moon rocks can become a form of extraterrestrial pork barrel. Some researchers have equipped entire laboratories with the grant money that accompanies the samples. Several contracts involve over $100,000.

Admittedly, The Moon Show's organizers could not have involved themselves in rock polities, but at least they could have provided a little more information on what is known of the rocks' makeup and history. The fullest description so far appears in the 19 September issue of Science Magazine (the last two pages contain the essentials).

The flicks at the Moon Show are well worth the bus fare down to M. I. T., as are the lunar samples if you have done the reading. At $24 billion, Moon is the most expensive free show in town.