An idea NASA first called dangerous and impractical shaped the Saturn V's Moon missions
In the early 1960s, NASA planned to fly one enormous rocket straight to the lunar surface and back. Meeting up in orbit was dismissed as risky and unworkable. A Langley engineer, John Houbolt, spent 1961 lobbying colleagues to reconsider, and by November 1962 his lunar orbit rendezvous plan had become Apollo's official method.
The choice decided what rocket was needed. Direct ascent would have required a giant called Nova to land a whole three-person spacecraft carrying fuel for the trip home. Wernher von Braun's team first preferred assembling a spacecraft in Earth orbit from two smaller launches. Houbolt's approach instead sent up a mother ship plus a small two-person lander, which would descend, return to lunar orbit, rejoin the main craft and be thrown away. Von Braun came round in June 1962, and administrator James Webb announced the decision on 7 November.
The rocket built for that plan, approved as the C-5 in January 1962 and renamed Saturn V in February 1963, had three stages. Boeing built the kerosene-burning first stage with five F-1 engines, still the most powerful single-chamber liquid-fuel engines ever made. North American Aviation and Douglas built the hydrogen-fuelled upper stages, and IBM helped design the guidance ring. The name itself was a family joke of sorts: the Saturns grew out of von Braun's earlier Jupiter rockets, which he had called an infant Saturn.
NASA also gambled on testing. Rather than proving each stage separately, it flew the first Saturn V all-up, with every stage live, on the Apollo 4 flight in November 1967, cutting the number of test launches needed before crews could ride it. Ground testing had its scares: one second stage ruptured during a deliberate overload test, and another exploded in 1966 when disconnected sensors misled a crew.
Thirteen flew between 1967 and 1973, nine of them carrying 24 astronauts toward the Moon, from Apollo 8 through Apollo 17. No rocket has yet beaten its payload to low orbit, 140,000 kilograms. Its last launch lofted Skylab, a space station fashioned from one of its own third stages.
Source: Saturn V
