Famous Projects: Saturn 5 Heavy Lift Vehicle

Talk about a famous project. “We will put a man on the moon in this decade.” Without the Saturn5 rocket it would not have been possible.

The Saturn V was a human-rated expendable rocket used by NASA between 1966 and 1973. The three-stage liquid-fueled launch vehicle was developed to support the Apollo program for human exploration of the Moon, and was later used to launch Skylab, the first American space station. The Saturn V was launched 13 times from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with no loss of crew or payload. The Saturn V remains the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful rocket ever brought to operational status and still holds records for the heaviest payload launched and largest payload capacity to low Earth orbit (LEO) of 310,000 punds.

The largest production model of the Saturn family of rockets, the Saturn V was designed under the direction of Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, with Boeing, North American Aviation, Douglas Aircraft Company, and IBM as the lead contractors. Von Braun's design was based in part on his work on the Aggregate series of rockets, especially the A-10, A-11, and A-12, in Germany during World War II.

To date, the Saturn V remains the only launch vehicle able to transport human beings beyond low Earth orbit. A total of 24 astronauts were launched to the Moon, three of them twice, in the four years spanning December 1968 through December 1972.

The origins of the Saturn V rocket begin bringing Wernher von Braun along with about seven hundred German rocket engineers and technicians to the United States in Operation Paperclip, a program authorized by President Truman in August 1946 with the purpose of harvesting Germany's rocket expertise, to give the US an edge in the Cold War through development of intermediate-range (IRBM) and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM). It was known that America's rival, the Soviet Union, would also try to secure some of the Germans.

Von Braun was put into the rocket design division of the Army due to his prior direct involvement in the creation of the V-2 rocket. Between 1945 and 1958, his work was restricted to conveying the ideas and methods behind the V-2 to the American engineers.[citation needed] Despite Von Braun's many articles on the future of space rocketry, the US Government continued funding Air Force and Navy rocket programs to test their Vanguard missiles in spite of numerous costly failures. It was not until the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik 1 atop an R-7 ICBM capable of carrying a thermonuclear warhead to the US, that the Army and the government started taking serious steps towards putting Americans in space. Finally, they turned to von Braun and his team, who during these years created and experimented with the Jupiter series of rockets. The Juno I was the rocket that launched the first American satellite in January 1958, and part of the last-ditch plan for NACA (the predecessor of NASA) to get its foot in the Space Race. The Jupiter series was one more step in von Braun's journey to the Saturn V, later calling that first series "an infant Saturn"

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