Saturn V

NASA states the height as 363 feet, which is 110.6 metres, and that is the full stack with the Apollo spacecraft and the escape tower on top. The S-IC first stage is 33 feet across, 10.06 metres, and produced 7.5 million pounds of thrust from five F-1 engines, 33,362 kilonewtons by conversion and 33,360,000 newtons in NASA’s own Historical Data Book. It could put about 118,000 kilograms into Earth orbit and about 43,500 kilograms on a course for the Moon. One NASA education page prints 34.5 million newtons, which does not back-convert to the pounds figure on the same page; the 7.5 million pound number is the one the engineering histories use.

The F-1 nearly stopped the programme. Combustion instability, pressure swings set up by streams of oxygen and kerosene meeting at very high pressure, would burn through a thrust chamber in milliseconds. Sonny Morea called it a disaster. The fix was copper baffles dividing the injector face into compartments, and the way they proved it was not to show the engine ran smoothly but to place a small bomb in the centre of a running F-1 and detonate it, to see whether the engine could recover from instability deliberately induced. Sixty-five F-1 engines flew thirteen Saturn Vs with no instability problems.

The second flight was bad. On 4 April 1968 Apollo 6 went through about thirty seconds of pogo oscillation two minutes in, lost two of the five second stage engines early, and then the third stage refused to restart in orbit. NASA managers reviewed that performance and decided another uncrewed test was not necessary. The next Saturn V carried Borman, Lovell and Anders around the Moon.

Thirteen flew and none was lost. Apollo 8 became the first crewed launch on 21 December 1968 and sent people beyond low Earth orbit for the first time. Apollo 11 lifted off on 16 July 1969. The last one was not an Apollo at all: on 14 May 1973 the final Saturn V left Pad 39A carrying the Skylab space station, and the programme ended with the largest rocket ever operated being used as a delivery van for a workshop.