Saturn V: The Most Powerful Rocket Of Its Time | The Saturn V Story

Video from the channel The Modern Age about Saturn V, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 52:26. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

A documentary of just over 50 minutes that reconstructs the development of the Saturn V, the launcher that took the Apollo program's astronauts to the Moon. It combines period footage, launch communications and interviews with specialists to follow the vehicle from its conception to its final flight, and it dwells on the technical problems that nearly halted the program.

The story begins with the German V-2, the first ballistic missile, and with Wernher von Braun, who after the war arrived in the United States with his team in September 1945 along with more than a hundred V-2s. It reviews the Soviet successes (Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957, Sputnik 2 with the dog Laika, and Yuri Gagarin's flight), the Vanguard failure in December 1957, the first American satellite on 31 January 1958, and the creation of NASA. Kennedy's commitment to land a man on the Moon before the decade's end led to shelving the gigantic Nova in favor of a three-stage launcher, paved beforehand by the Saturn I and Saturn IB and backed by the Gemini program.

The first stage, 42 m long, carried five F-1 engines totaling 7.5 million pounds of thrust; its combustion instability was solved by installing baffles. The second stage adopted a common bulkhead between the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to save weight, and the third, with a single J-2, had to fire twice. IBM built the instrument unit, and the whole stack measured 110 m with the escape tower. After the fire that killed Grissom, White and Chaffee in January 1967, the Saturn V flew complete for the first time on Apollo 4; on Apollo 6 pogo vibrations broke a fuel line and shut down two second-stage engines. Apollo 8 was its first crewed flight and Apollo 11 took Armstrong to the lunar surface. Its last launch, in 1973, put the first American space station into orbit.