Part VI: Step by Step

Few events are as spectacular as that of a Saturn V at liftoff en route to the moon. In fact, the commanding role of the mammoth vehicle has tended to obscure its supporting players, the Saturn I and Saturn IB boosters. Chapter 11 recapitulates some of the milestones of these earlier rockets and describes some of the payloads and visual instrumentation used in early launches to acquire crucial information about the near-Earth environment and the behavior of exotic propellants in the weightlessness of space.

Perhaps the biggest gamble of the Apollo-Saturn program rode on the launch of AS-501, the first Saturn V to lift off from Cape Kennedy. The decision to go "all up" on this launch circumvented the costly and time-consuming process of incremental flight testing of each stage prior to launching a complete vehicle. This mission, followed by troubleshooting the problems of AS-502, the first manned Saturn V launch (AS-503), and the first lunar landing mission (AS-506, or Apollo 11), constitute the highlights of chapter 12.