Saturn V - Die Mondrakete - Doku Deutsch 2018 HD

Video from the channel Dokumentation Deutsch about Saturn V, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 51:52. Language: German. Video type: Documentary.

A German-language documentary about the history of the Saturn V, the launch vehicle that carried the first astronauts to the Moon. It opens with Apollo 11 ready for liftoff in July 1969 and goes back to the origins of this technology: Wernher von Braun's V-2, the relocation of his team to the United States after the war, and the stage-by-stage development of the rocket. It combines narration, archival footage, testimonies and mission audio.

The narrative places the program within the Cold War space race: Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, Sputnik 2 with the dog Laika, the failed American launch of December 6, 1957, and the first US satellite on January 31, 1958. After NASA was created in 1958 and the flights of Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard, Kennedy's 1961 speech set the lunar goal. NASA discarded the giant Nova concept in favor of a three-stage rocket and tested the system with the Saturn I and Saturn IB, while the ten crewed Gemini missions tested docking, long flights and spacewalks. Kennedy's assassination in 1963 and the capsule fire in January 1967 are presented as blows that did not stop the project.

The 42-meter first stage burns RP-1 kerosene and liquid oxygen in five F-1 engines, which together exceed 33,000 kilonewtons; the F-1's combustion instability was resolved with baffles. The second stage unified its tanks with an insulating wall between liquid hydrogen at -253 °C and liquid oxygen at -183 °C, and the third uses a single J-2 engine that fires twice. The documentary covers the uncrewed flight of Apollo 4, the pogo effect on Apollo 6 that shut down two second-stage engines, Apollo 7, the lunar orbit of Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve 1968, Apollo 9 and 10, and the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Between 1968 and 1972 the Saturn V carried 24 men toward the Moon, twelve of whom set foot on it; on its final flight, in 1973, it placed the Skylab station into orbit.