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.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."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.
Article comments
1 - Tom Johnson
My wife and I just took a vacation to Florida last month and made the trek from Orlando to KSC. Seeing the Saturn V, even laid on its side, is an incredible experience. While the rest of the rockets, including the space shuttle, viewable at KSC are impressive, they seem to lack a bit of the awe I was hoping I'd feel. As a space junkie since I was a kid, I had always imagined these things being just massive. Up close, they're almost fragile-y small. Except for the Saturn V/Apollo vehicle. That was so much bigger than I anticipated. I could have stared at it for hours, absorbing every detail. Of course, that was out of the question - my wife was getting anxious after about 15 minutes of that! I did, however, snap off nearly two rolls of film of everything I could get a good shot of.
This sounds like a great set, and a great way to torture loved ones who don't quite share the same enthusiasm I do . . . ;-)
2 - John Nelson
An incredible achievment...I wish they'd show more actual footage of how it would have really been from 4 miles away-having the sound take 12 seconds to reach you and then suddenly BAM!