How long did the saturn v take to build?

The Saturn V did not begin as a finished design. NASA spent 1961 and 1962 arguing over how to reach the Moon, and the choice of lunar orbit rendezvous in mid-1962 fixed how much mass the rocket had to throw and therefore what it had to be. Contracts followed quickly: Boeing for the S-IC first stage, North American Aviation for the S-II second stage, Douglas Aircraft for the S-IVB third stage, and IBM for the instrument unit, with Marshall Space Flight Center under Wernher von Braun directing the whole. The first vehicle, AS-501, flew as Apollo 4 on 9 November 1967 — an all-up test in which every stage flew live on the first attempt, a decision that saved years over the incremental approach von Braun's team had traditionally favoured.

Once the design was frozen, production was a distributed industrial exercise rather than a single assembly line. Stages were built at Michoud in Louisiana, Seal Beach in California and Huntington Beach, static-fired at Mississippi Test Facility or Santa Susana, then shipped by barge through the Gulf and up the Atlantic coast to Florida. There the stages were stacked vertically inside the Vehicle Assembly Building on a mobile launcher platform and checked out as a complete vehicle. Counting stage fabrication, acceptance firing, transport and stacking, each vehicle moved through a long pipeline, with several in flow at once to sustain the launch cadence of 1968 to 1972.

Thirteen Saturn V vehicles flew, and the programme drew on a workforce across hundreds of contractors. The compression is what impresses: from a configuration decision in 1962 to landing a crew on the Moon in July 1969 is seven years, with the rocket itself flying for the first time less than halfway through.