On September 12, 1962, President Kennedy spoke at Rice University in Houston about the nation's space effort. At the time, only four Americans had actually been in space, in flights that had lasted a combined total of about ten and half hours:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.

In the last 24 hours we have seen facilities now being created for the greatest and most complex exploration in man's history. We have felt the ground shake and the air shattered by the testing of a Saturn C-1 booster rocket, many times as powerful as the Atlas which launched John Glenn, generating power equivalent to 10,000 automobiles with their accelerators on the floor. We have seen the site where five F-1 rocket engines, each one as powerful as all eight engines of the Saturn combined, will be clustered together to make the advanced Saturn missile, assembled in a new building to be built at Cape Canaveral as tall as a 48 story structure, as wide as a city block, and as long as two lengths of this [football] field.

Even though the last Saturn V flew some thirty years ago, it remains one of mankind's greatest engineering efforts. Built during an era in which computers occupied whole rooms, but had less power than the PC you're reading this on, it was, as Kennedy would go onto to say at Rice, even before the design was finalized, "a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch."

The new DVD, The Mighty Saturns: Saturn V, is part of a series of DVDs focused on the US's space efforts of the 1960s and '70s, created by Spacecraft films and distributed by 20th Century Fox. As I wrote a month ago, when I reviewed their Apollo 11 DVD, this package of three DVDs was assembled by a small organization run by Mark Gray, a 20 year TV veteran, whose father was worked as a NASA contractor. Gray and his team basically pulled together all of the 16mm and 35mm film and video that NASA shot to document the Saturn V, beginning with footage of the rockets under construction, all the way through its last flight, when it hauled the Skylab space station into orbit on May 14th of 1973. (The smaller Saturn IB rocket took its crews up; it would make its last flight in July of 1975, when it launched the American half of the Apollo-Soyuz linkup with cosmonauts from the Soviet Union.