Apollo Saturn 501
NASA’s unsuccessful attempts to launch the new moon rocket this past week-end have put me in mind of AS-501, the first flight of the original moon rocket. AS-501, a.k.a. Apollo 4, was the first flight of the Saturn V. In one sense it was months late; in another it launched exactly on time. The first stage arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in September, 1966, more than a year before the flight. Over the next nine months, the upper stages and the Apollo spacecraft arrived and were checked out. The stacking was completed in June, 1967, inside the giant Vehicle Assembly Building. There followed another two months of checkouts before the stack was rolled to Pad 39A in late August. It was a new vehicle and there were lots of surprises and lots of things went wrong and had to be fixed. Everything took longer than it should. Rocco Petrone, the Director of Launch Operations, started planning his schedules in terms of “Saturn V minutes,” whi...