Material editor not functioning properly? or bad step while modeling?

Good morning, afternoon or evening ladies and gentlemen.
As you can see, i'm new to the forum. I hope i may become old to the forum

Yesterday i was being random and i thought a space scene would be nice to design for me to the design in 3DS Max, more like to update those beginner skills of mine. a nice experience detailing. now this ( to most ) should be done in less then one or two hours .

for me , the space scene remains unfinished due to me having problems with the material editor. each time when i start adding new maps to it, it'll only stay at the first map or turn back to the gray sphere whenever i add a new bmp map to it. in the material editor itself it changes, when i render it ... it works perfectly fine. but in the viewports and if i create a preview , the desired effect for this space scene isn't reached ...

[IMG]http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c268/X-Chronic-X/Untitled-1-8.jpg[/IMG]


is this a problem with the material editor or is there a step i missed here? i'd like to know what i or the program did wrong