APOLLO PROGRAM SATURN V ROCKET ASSEMBLY FILM "THE FIRST SHORT STEPS" 79984

Video from the channel PeriscopeFilm about Apollo program, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 7:00. Language: English. Video type: Archive footage.

Official NASA film about the first leg of the Saturn V's journey, which is also the slowest: moving its parts from the factories to the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center, across hundreds or thousands of miles by means ranging from a barge to a highly unusual cargo plane. The first stage, nearly half the length of an American football field and weighing about 150 tons unfueled, rolls on sets of wheels pulled by a tractor unit requiring three drivers. It boards a barge to the test center in Mississippi, where its engines are fired on a test stand, and then travels to Florida aboard a NASA cargo ship fitted with stabilizing fins. The second stage, 33 feet in diameter and 82 feet long, travels nearly 4,000 miles by sea from Seal Beach through the Panama Canal. The third stage and the instrument unit, built by IBM and tested at the Marshall Center in Huntsville, fly aboard the Super Guppy, a Boeing Stratocruiser with an oversized cargo hold. The Pregnant Guppy carries the Apollo spacecraft segments.

This is period footage produced by NASA during the Apollo program. It was filmed at the factories and test centers in California, New Orleans, Mississippi and Alabama, and at Kennedy Space Center.

From the start of Saturn V development it was clear that the parts' size ruled out ordinary roads and transport. That's why transportation was planned alongside the rocket itself: reinforced roads, docks, canals and locks were built, and rivers were dredged, because the waterway route was the most economical. Once assembled and tested, the vehicle makes its final overland move, about 3.5 miles, to the launch pad.