Part II: The Saturn Building Blocks

The original impetus for Saturn envisioned a brawny booster to launch Department of Defense payloads. The von Braun team at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) received money from the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency to demonstrate the concept. Furthermore, von Braun’s group eventually became the nucleus of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). These convolutions and the vague outlines of evolving Saturn vehicle technology constitute the themes of chapter 2.

The Saturn program eventually included three basic vehicles: Saturn I, Saturn IB, and Saturn V. Chapter 3 describes the events that led to these three separate rockets, whose configuration evolved out of the choice to go the moon by means of the lunar orbit rendezvous technique. MSFC began development of facilities to develop and test the mammoth boosters. Chapter 3 concludes with a discussion of the design and manufacture of lower-stage boosters for the Saturn I and Saturn IB.