THE GIANT STEP

NASA the National Aeronautics and Space Administration presents Aeronautics and Space Report this Saturn rocket with the mission designation of Apollo 4 will soon her Lake Runa spacecraft into orbit what you see here is this country's largest space vehicle Saturn 5 similar to the one which will someday carry three astronauts toward the moon the story is one of Apollo Saturn how it was conceived how it has evolved and the significance of this important first flight to understand the evolution of Saturn 5 it is necessary to understand the background leading up to its development for one thing it is the latest in a series of Saturn vehicles nearly three times as big and five times more powerful than its predecessors the director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama has been closely associated with this development dr. Wernher von Braun explained how he and his colleagues at Huntsville began preparing the way for the big rocket our first assignment along those lines resulted in the development of the frosty justice at on 1 this was essentially an attempt of clustering eat engines of the type that we had been using in the Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missile to produce a total thrust of one and a half million pounds this booster in the meantime has not only supported 10 successive and successful launches of the southern one rocket some of them with second stages but still serves us as the first stage of the upgraded southern one which will be used as a tour first expose our Apollo astronauts to orbital flight around the earth and the Apollo spacecraft so the total VIN that we can look back on and big rockets and real big Rockets of the Saturn family are 13 successful launches 10,000 ones and three up three in seven ones to put people on the moon and with enough fuel to enable them to return safely home to earth requires is still larger and more powerful rocket however and this is what we call the Saturn 5 the Saturn 5 will have a thrust of seven and a half million pounds in the first stage in the takeoff weight of this monstrous rocket will be about six million pounds or three thousand tons which is about the weight of allied naval cruiser power that's what it's going to take to put men on the moon lots of power with the five first stage engines gulping a mixture of kerosene and oxygen at over three thousand gallons per second the manufacture and testing leading up to the first flyable Saturn five required numerous special test stands some designed built and tried out just to proof test the engines others tested full stages stages with multiple engines clustered in their tail Apollo Saturn is a complex effort an effort nationwide in scope at one time encompassing the talents of more than 400,000 people in government industry and universities from many plants around the country component parts like pieces of the giant jigsaw puzzle were funneled to the Kennedy Space Center to be fitted together from nasa's michoud assembly facility in New Orleans came the Boeing built for stage floated in by seagoing barge practically to the door of the 52 story Vehicle Assembly Building the second-stage built by the space division of north american aviation in california was shipped by a Panama Canal to the Mississippi test facility for checkout then barged to Kennedy Space Center McDonnell Douglas in California builders of the lighter-weight third stage flew their hardware to Florida by strange-looking planes like these called super Guppies planes with five times the carrying capacity of most present jet transports as they arrived the various components were placed inside the Vehicle Assembly Building it is here that the so called stacking takes place rocket stages placed one upon the other to form a single unit this is the first stage its job will be to boost itself plus the rest of the rocket and Apollo spacecraft to a distance of 40 miles reaching a speed of 6,000 miles per hour this will also be the first use in space of the powerful second stage it's five liquid hydrogen fed engines will deliver 1 million pounds of thrust taking over after the first stage burns out propelling upwards to 108 miles and more than doubling the speed the third stage capable of firing shutting down then reigniting it is the third stage that will orbit the payload and after starting the engine again put the spacecraft into deep space an IBM instrument unit serves as the eyes and ears of Apollo Saturn it houses the rockets guidance and control systems and is mounted on the third-stage stacked three high on top of this is the command module or crew quarters the service module with its primary propulsion engine and the lunar module section housing for the craft that will someday land on the moon at the very top the launch escape system used in case of an emergency previously space vehicle stages were transported to the pad then assembled and tested there while awaiting launch Saturn 5 has changed all this the new method is known as the mobile launch concept again dr. Wernher von Braun we had to develop the facilities from which the rocket was to be launched now this latter job was done by the Kennedy Space Center in Florida the the saturn v launch facility for instance features what is believed to be the largest building in the world as far as volumetric content is concerned it is big enough to assemble four of these southern five Apollo vehicle simultaneously in vertical position and then move them out from this vertical Assembly Building to the launch pad three and a half miles away this moving is done by a caterpillar Tractor it crackling vehicle powered by a 5,000 horsepower diesel engine and electric motors driving the actual tracks this vehicle moves under the launch platform on which the vehicle is initially assembled and just jacks it up and carries it piggyback to the launch pad the launch pad itself is also quite a complex facility it not only provides much electrical gear that is required near the launch facility itself that adjacent to the launch pad are also all the fuel and oxidizer tanks with which the vehicle is loaded prior to launch then of course they are access arms to the various stages is even an access arm through which the astronaut astronauts aboard their spacecraft at the end of this access arm is a full-fledged cleanroom to make sure that no door is carried into the spacecraft all this together as a very complex operation this is the launch control center inside our firing rooms unlike the circular concrete and steel block houses used in the past the firing room is long and rectangular the east end of the room faces pads a and B of launch complex 39 large windows allow the launch crew to see the rocket lift from the pad it is from here that the Saturn 5 will be subjected to automatic checkout dr. von Braun tells why this is significant we have learned the hard way that most rocket failures in the past were caused by inefficiencies or deficiencies rather in equipment in components of the flight hardware that existed there even before the rocket was launched but the launch crew wasn't aware of it it didn't have the visibility to know that there was a sticky relay or maybe a blown fuse in rocket and so we have provided an automatic checkout system where the entire rocket is checked out for the help of a computer in something like 2,000 distinct points where we would like to diagnose the health of the rocket before it takes off the major objectives of the upcoming flight will be to test out the Saturn 5 rocket for the first time monitor the spacecraft systems during an eight hour period and RAM the command module through the Earth's atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour simulating a return from the moon at NASA's manned spacecraft Center Houston Texas mr. Glynn Lunney will direct the flight of Apollo 4 here he outlines the steps of the mission the first and obvious one will be the launch phase from Cape Kennedy there the three stages of the Saturn 5 will light in sequence on their way to inserting the spacecraft into an orbit 100 nautical miles above the earth during the earth orbit period which lasts for about two revolutions or three three hours both vehicles are relatively quiet and there's no real activity going on in the stages at the end of that period however we prepare the third stage of the Saturn 5 for its restart that is the burn which will simulate the burn we will eventually do the inject the spacecraft on the way to the moon this burn period occurs at about three hours over the United States it will be followed by a very small burn with the spacecraft rocket engine the service propulsion engine this burn will be a small only of about 15 seconds duration after that time while we are coasting up to an Apogee of about 10,000 nautical miles above the earth both vehicles again become relatively quiet at the end of that Coast period on the way back down the spacecraft will be prepared again for a large service propulsion engine burn on the order of four and a half minutes this large burn will produce conditions re-entry conditions which are very similar to the conditions we will encounter when we return from the moon the entry phase of this flight is also interesting although we won't monitor it in real-time here from the control center interesting in that it will be a range of about 2,000 miles and the very high entry conditions which I talked about the recovery phase will also be of interest to us because that's the proof of the pudding in the flight and will be conducted in the Pacific about 500 miles northwest of Hawaii the majority of the tests for the upcoming Apollo 4 flight are finished now those who have conceived and built the rocket and spacecraft will go on to produce others but this is the first of the big Saturn 5 if successful it will represent a step forward a giant step toward this country's exploration of the moon this has been an Aeronautics and Space report presented by NASA the National Aeronautics and Space Administration