We visited the most powerful rocket ever built — and it was even better than we expected
It's not every day that you get to stand next to the prodigious Saturn V rocket — the most powerful rocket ever built and NASA's ride to the moon.
To this day, the Saturn V — a ticket into the history books during the '60s and early '70s — remains the only rocket capable of transporting humans beyond low-Earth orbit, where the International Space Station resides. And it's a monster.
We recently visited the never used, ready-for-flight Saturn V that was destined to transport NASA's Apollo 18 crew to the moon before the US government canceled the mission in 1970.
Words cannot describe the experience of standing next to one of humankind's most impressive engineering feats. But these photos should give you an idea:
Instead of scrapping the Saturn V rocket after Apollo 18 was canceled, NASA preserved it at their Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, shown below. Check out the Saturn V rocket in the lower right.
The Saturn V was designed to fly three astronauts at a time. At launch, it weighed 6.54 million pounds and towered 363 feet tall — about 60 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty.
Today, the Apollo 18 Saturn V is stored in a massive warehouse. A life-sized illustration of the rocket decorates the outside, and for $25, visitors can take a tour across the grounds and take a trip inside!
In total, the Saturn V has three rocket stages and a single spacecraft, which contains a lunar and command module for the astronauts. Here, you're seeing the largest part of the rocket: the first stage. The second stage is barely visible in the back.
The most powerful part of any Saturn V is its five enormous F-1 rockets, located underneath the first stage. Upon liftoff, the engines generated 7.5 million pounds of thrust and burned a total of 500,000 pounds of fuel. For comparison, the two rocket boosters that launched NASA's Space Shuttles into low-Earth orbit produced one-third as much thrust.
After traveling 42 miles skyward (for a Saturn V in flight), the first stage broke off and fell into the Atlantic Ocean. At that point, the second stage, shown here, fired its five J-2 engines to get the vehicle the rest of the way to space.
The five J-2 engines (shown below) burned two-thirds as much fuel as the first stage and produced 1 million pounds of thrust (about one-seventh as much as the first stage).
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