The Saturn V

At least five different rockets were used in the Space Race to get to the Moon. You had the Redstone and Atlas rockets for the Mercury program’s single-man suborbital and orbital flights. You had the Titan which lift the two-seated Gemini capsules into orbit. Then there was the Saturn IB to send the Command Module and Lunar Module into low Earth orbit. And finally, the giant Saturn V to send man to the Moon.

Didn’t note the source on this, but I like this handy metaphor:

Mercury Redstone – a bicycle

Mercury Atlas – a motorcycle

Gemini Titan – a Volkswagen Beetle

Saturn IB – a pickup truck

Saturn V – a Ford F-350 heavy-duty truck

The majestic Saturn V stood 363 feet high, nearly fifty feet taller than the Statue of Liberty from the ground to the torch tip. When fully fueled and with the Apollo spacecraft atop, it weighed in at over six million pounds. Each rocket consisted of over a million separate, individual parts.

The rocket came in three stages: Boeing built the first, North American the second, and McDonnell Douglas the third. There were two types of engines to provide the thrust. Five F-1 engines sat at the bottom of the first stage, five smaller J-2 engines powered the second stage, and a single J-2 provided for the third. All F-1 and J-2 engines were manufactured by the Rocketdyne Division of North American Aviation.

IBM produced the rocket’s guidance system, called the IU, a basketball-sized device containing high-speed computers located just below the spacecraft. The IU monitored, guided, and adjusted, if need be, the rocket’s engines for orbital and velocity precision. Five seconds before liftoff this “brain” began “thinking” for itself – given its freedom to control the flight.

At liftoff, the first stage burned 1,250 gallons of RP-1 kerosene fuel and 2,083 gallons of liquid oxygen every second. The liquid oxygen – kept at cryogenic temperatures – was responsible for the white clouds of condensed water vapor billowing off the rocket’s cold hull just before ignition. Each of the five F-1 engines produced 1.5 million pounds of thrust (for a total of 7.5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff). This is almost 40 times more powerful as the Mercury Redstone that lifted the first American into space just a few scant years earlier.

Temperatures reached 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit and flames shot out at speeds near Mach 4 at the base of the rocket.

As soon as the first stage dropped away, about two-and-a-half minutes into the flight, the five second-stage J-2 rockets ignited. These engines, smaller than the powerful F-1s, burned high-energy liquid hydrogen for about six-and-a-half minutes.

The third stage of the Saturn rocket was powered by a single J-2 engine, and it was lit for only two minutes to carry the spacecraft to the required parking orbit around Earth. After three orbits, while Houston reviewed all the telemetry data and the astronauts checked out the Apollo spacecraft, the J-2 fired up again to accelerate the spacecraft out of Earth orbit and on a path to the Moon at a speed of nearly 24,000 miles per hour.

In trans-lunar space, the astronauts performed a maneuver where the Command Module docks with the Lunar Module. Once this was successfully completed, the third stage was discarded. In early Apollo flights the third stage went into orbit around the Sun. Later flights had it strategically crash into the Moon to measure seismic activity via the sensors left on the lunar surface.

In tests and manned flight, not one single Saturn V ever failed.