Saturn: A Giant Thrust into Space (1962)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] 300 years before the birth of Christ the men of Alexandria were already making scientific measurements of the stars and planets and always since then there have been those whose imagination turned their eyes and thoughts to the far reaches of space and so today man is positively and truly extending the knowledge and the control of his environment and for the first time is reaching effectively beyond his own terrestrial boundaries for the first time he is studying the sky from the sky project Saturn is a major American contribution to this advancement Saturn is the largest launch vehicle at present under development in the free world this is a rocket with a million and a half pound thrust it will put a 10 ton payload into orbit around our earth to the moon and in a deep space later more powerful version of Saturn will be capable of putting up a payload of two and a half times this amount 25 tons it will be our first major rocket for space exploration and is being developed specifically as part of an overall scientific engineering program Saturn uses the building block principle it is made up of various stages each of which will drop behind in space as its fuel becomes exhausted Saturn can be a two three or four stage rocket depending on the use to which it will be put and the payloads it has to carry a three stage Saturn will be 185 feet high as high as an 18-story building and 22 feet wide at its base here is a scale model alongside the first stage of the real thing although scaled down to 1/10 size it still Dwarfs a man by comparison the two stage Saturn is planned as a kind of utility space truck to put large payloads into orbit around the Earth with it larger space ships could be refueled before moving outward on longer journeys Saturn with additional stages will be used for probes to the moon and the farther planets a four stage Saturn will land precision instruments on the moon although other United States rockets may get to the moon before it Saturn will put up the greatest payloads it can obtain information from several areas on a single moon trip and later return actual samples from the moon's surface most importantly Saturn will send a three-man spacecraft the Apollo around the moon and back to earth with refueling in space it could at last carry man to the moon surface [Music] and so in the various industries and universities under the guidance of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration research is planned techniques developed materials checked out a key word is precision and although the Space Age has but begun already we have accumulated a great wealth of technical and scientific experience basically Saturn is the outgrowth of mechanisms that have been tested and proven the first guidance system to be used in Saturn for example is an improvement on that used in the Jupiter rocket however the guidance system for the Centaur developed in the Atlas sent our program of the space administration appropriately modified may prove much more versatile it is hoped that it will be capable of guiding Saturn on more complex missions the Saturn booster has a cluster of rocket engines so that like a multi-engine plane one engine may cut out without impairing the effectiveness of the launch vehicle and the propellant from the inoperative rocket engine will in some stages automatically be put to the use of those still functioning [Music] there are eight booster engines in the first stage of Saturn six in the second stage and two in the third in trial small test models are constructed to scale and tests made to verify in fact what has been predicted in live the captive conditions measuring instruments registered the various thrust stresses and responses meanwhile full-scale production is going steadily forward project Saturn's technical demands are widespread and its needs critical and so at various industrial plants across the nation the hardware the airframes the guidance systems the instrumentation and the Rockets themselves precisely take their blueprinted shape ready for assembly newly devised parts call for unusual production methods undreamed of sizes call for gargantuan frames and molds for example this furnace needed to treat an upper stage engine is the largest of its kind [Music] following manufacturer and checkout by the contractor each engine for the first stage of Saturn is shipped to Marshall Space Flight Center for further trials [Music] each engine separately undergoes final exhaustive captive test before it is approved [Music] these gleaming metal tanks plus liquid fuel will send man and his instruments through space at an incredible 25,000 miles per hour finally the uppermost stage with its two engines will propel the payload through space this space giant so Swift and responsive on high is too ponderous and bulky one earth bound to be transported in one piece even the separate stages of Saturn require special vehicles to carry them from factory to launching pad oversized trucks and barges come into being already experienced in space technology has the hard-headed engineers talking about cost per pound of payload in orbit as if it were commonplace an example four years ago it cost between 300,000 and 1 million dollars to put one pound of payload into orbit but past investment is paying off now as investment today will pay off in the future today with advanced knowledge an increased production cost has been cut to about $5,000 per pound by truck and barge now the stages will finally arrive at Cape Canaveral [Music] here is the water route saturn will follow cape canaveral only a village in a resort a few years back today it means just one thing to every schoolboy rockets the launch facilities at Cape Canaveral have been constructed to handle both present and future versions of Saturn the erecting gantry over 300 feet high is the tallest movable structure in the world it has direct connection with the block houses from which into which all signals come signals from the electronic tools which tell how the rocket is performing and without which there could be no launch more than 900 separate channels of information are relayed from the rocket through the recording and control equipment in the blockhouse we have come far since the men of Alexandria made their primitive observations of the heavens our space age is just beginning we do not yet know where it will ultimately lead us but we do know that project Saturn will vastly increase our understanding of the universe and our potential to travel into space [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]