Restored Saturn V: Apollo workhorse showcased at NASA Johnson Space Center

William Atkins
Friday, 20 July 2007 23:06

Science - Space

Microsoft Office 365

A $5 million restoration project took two years to complete. In the end, however, the refurnished Saturn rocket is inside a climate-controlled building and out of the high humidity, high salt, high pollution air of the Houston, Texas area.

The Saturn V rocket at the Johnson Space Center, located in Clear Lake City, just on the southern edge of Houston, was partially constructed for the Apollo 18 mission. It consists of the first stage (SA-514) for the cancelled Apollo 18 mission, the second stage (SA-515) for the backup Skylab 1 mission, and the third stage (SA-513) for the Skylab 1 mission, which did not use a third stage.

Two other rockets remain intact, one at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, and the other one at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, in Huntsville, Alabama. Of these rockets, only the one in Texas consists of stages that were intended to be launched.

The Saturn V rockets were three-stage liquid-fueled expendable rockets that were used for the Apollo and Skylab programs. The rockets were launched 13 times between the years of 1967 and 1973. The first Saturn V, SA-501, was used for the launch of Apollo 4, a unmanned flight that lifted off on November 9, 1967. The first manned launch for a Saturn V rocket, SA-503, was Apollo 8, which launched on December 21, 1968, for its mission around the Moon.

In all, for the use of the Saturn V, two test missions were unmanned (Apollo’s 4 and 6), one mission went around the Earth (Apollo 9), and nine missions went to the Moon, with three missions traveling around or in orbit about the Moon (Apollo’s 8, 10, and 13) and six landing on the Moon’s surface (Apollo’s 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17). A rocket that was derived from a Saturn V rocket, the Saturn INT-21, also placed the Skylab space station into space in 1973, the United States’ first space station.

A comprehensive article, including photographs, about the Saturn V restoration process at the Johnson Space Center is found at the CollectSPACE website: http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-030104a.html#091406.

Science journalist William Atkins spent 12 years at NASA's Johnson Space Center, in Clear Lake City, Texas, as a Mission Control Center flight controller for launch, orbit, rendezvous, and de-orbit phases of flight (four years) and as a Design Engineer/Organizational Engineer (eight years), all for the NASA Space Shuttle program.