Saturn V

The Saturn V was born from President Kennedy''s 1961 challenge to land a man on the Moon before the decade''s end. Under the direction of Wernher von Braun at NASA''s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the rocket grew from concept to flight hardware in just six years -- an engineering timeline that remains almost incomprehensible by modern standards.

The vehicle stood 363 feet tall, taller than the Statue of Liberty, and weighed 6.5 million pounds fully fueled. Its three stages were built by different contractors: Boeing built the S-IC first stage in New Orleans, North American Aviation built the S-II second stage in Seal Beach, California, and Douglas Aircraft built the S-IVB third stage in Huntington Beach. The massive components were transported by barge through the Panama Canal and up the Atlantic coast to Cape Kennedy.

The first stage''s five F-1 engines produced 7.5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. The turbopump on a single F-1 engine generated 55,000 horsepower -- more than a nuclear submarine. Engineers solved the critical problem of combustion instability by deliberately detonating small bombs inside the combustion chamber during tests and studying how the flames recovered. It was engineering by controlled destruction.

Saturn V''s first unmanned test flight, Apollo 4, on November 9, 1967, was so powerful that the vibrations shook the CBS broadcast building three miles away, sending ceiling tiles cascading down onto Walter Cronkite during his live broadcast. Every subsequent flight succeeded. The vehicle launched 24 astronauts toward the Moon across nine lunar missions, placing 12 men on the lunar surface. Its final flight launched the Skylab space station on May 14, 1973.

Three unused Saturn V rockets were sent to museums rather than scrapped, where they remain among the most popular exhibits in American aerospace history. The decision to end production and destroy the tooling has been called one of the greatest mistakes in space policy -- when NASA needed heavy-lift capability again decades later, it had to start essentially from scratch.