Marshall Space Flight Center and the Saturn Five
Near Huntsville, Alabama
On July first, nineteen sixty, four thousand six hundred and seventy civilian employees and one thousand eight hundred and forty acres of Redstone Arsenal transferred from the United States Army to the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Wernher von Braun, who had led the Army's rocket program, became the first director of the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center. His title had changed. His goal had not.
The assignment from NASA was to build the rocket that would carry human beings to the moon. What emerged from Marshall was the Saturn Five, the largest launch vehicle ever flown. Three hundred and sixty-three feet tall, seven and a half million pounds of thrust at sea level, powered by engines developed here in Huntsville and tested in the marshes of Mississippi. The engineering teams, still heavily composed of German scientists who had arrived under Operation Paperclip alongside American engineers who had come up through the post-Sputnik hiring surge, worked within a management philosophy von Braun called penetration. Every engineer was expected to understand every system, not just their own. Questions went to the source, not up through layers of intermediary.
The first Saturn Five test flight lifted off November ninth, nineteen sixty-seven. It was the birthday of Arthur Rudolph, who managed the program. All three stages fired cleanly. By July of nineteen sixty-nine, the Saturn Five had carried Apollo Eleven to the moon. Over thirteen flights through nineteen seventy-three, the rocket never had a mission-ending failure in flight. Its final mission launched the Skylab space station.
The Saturn Five that stands outside the Space and Rocket Center a few miles from here is a real vehicle, not a replica. It was built to fly. It never did.
