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.
The first disc of the three-disc set is built around an original documentary shot in 2003 (or thereabouts) with a few of the surviving senior NASA engineers who lead the Saturn program. It's very good, fascinating to watch, and does a thorough job of explaining just what a bear of an engineering project this was to accomplish within a single decade.
The Day of Apollo 6
Miraculously, a completed Saturn V was ready to fly for the first time, in an audacious "all up" test of all its stages, each one fully fueled and activated, on November 9th, 1967.
There would be two unmanned tests of the Saturn V before it was first launched with a crew on Apollo 8, the first manned flight to the moon (daringly, without a lunar module. If the events of Apollo 13 occurred on that flight, the astronauts would have perished).
The first unmanned test went flawlessly. The second flight, on April 4 of 1968 threatened to wreck the whole timetable of the Apollo missions, which were etched in stone as far as NASA was concerned, once President Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963. This was Apollo 6, which also flew a mockup of the lunar module. The flight was marred with multiple engine failures, and what engineers call "pogo": rampant vibrations in the spacecraft, but its unmanned Apollo capsule splashed down safely, and NASA announced to the public that all mission objectives had been met. They had been--even though several elements had gone disastrously wrong (and would all be fixed).
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!