[How the Apollo Spacecraft works: Part 1] (Viewer #1,010,935)
For those who missed it in ’69, this is the next best (and shorter) thing.
Parts 2 and 3 link at the end of their preceding videos. I watched and enjoyed them both.
Gotta say… considering all the things that had to go just exactly right to bring everyone back alive, I am stunned at the miracle of this working perfectly every time but one. And even the one working well enough to prevent funerals.
NASA Is Giving Away an Apollo-era Saturn Rocket
Eric Mack, cnet.com, July 19, 2019
Just in time for the 50th anniversary of NASA’s Apollo 11 astronauts landing on the moon, the space agency has a very big piece of history it’s looking to offload.
The historic Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Alabama played a central role in developing the Saturn rockets that powered the Apollo rocket program, and apparently it had one of the earliest models just lying around after all these years.
According to documents and emails obtained by CNET, MSFC “has excessed a Saturn 1 Block 1 Booster portion of a Saturn rocket stack up.”
The booster is the bottom or first stage of the Saturn I, which was the United States’ first heavy-lift rocket, developed in the early 1960s. It was the more massive fifth version, or Saturn V, that would send Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins on their trip to the moon in 1969.
Presumably, this rocket never flew since the standard practice for all NASA launches prior to the space shuttle program and the later emergence of SpaceX was to allow spent boosters to fall in the ocean.
So this is basically an unused, genuine space rocket being given away to interested schools, universities, museums, or libraries for free. All any interested organization has to do is pay for shipping, which happens to cost a quarter million dollars in this case.
Isn’t this how one of those Star Trek movies started?