30 | July• 2019
And around the world, hundreds of
millions more would participate in
the event through radio, television
and press coverage.
“Look,” said von Braun, “that’s what
they’ve come to see. Isn’t she beauti-
ful?” Ahead in the distance, on Pad
39A, transfixed and bathed by brilliant
floodlights that played over its virgin-
al white skin, stood the moon rock-
et – like a mammoth cathedral spire
reaching for the heavens.
AS THE HELICOPTER APPROACHED,
the rocket ship grew in immensi-
ty. Everything about the great bird
boggled the imagination. Its brute
power came from the three great Sat-
urn booster stages, one atop the oth-
er, towering upwards for more than
three-quarters of the ship’s overall
height. At lift-off, the five engines in
the first stage would slam the pad
with 33.8 million Newtons of thrust –
equivalent to 160 million horse power.
In that first blast, lasting two
minutes and 40 seconds, the
five engines would gulp an
incredible 465,661 gallons
[1,762,719 litres] of liquid
oxygen and kerosene – 2914
gallons [11,030 litres] a sec-
ond. The spacecraft itself, in
the uppermost 30 metres of
the gigantic structure, was
an intricate world of its own.
First came the compart-
ment for the lunar module,
the ungainly, bug-like Eagle
that would carry Neil Armstrong and
‘Buzz’ Aldrin down to the moon.
Next on top wasColumbia: the com-
bined service and command mod-
ule, with another great rocket engine
and smaller thrusters on its sides, for
altitude and roll control. In its nose
was the flight deck ofApollo 11, where
the astronauts worked and lived.
Finally, perched on the nose, stood
the launch escape system. If an emer-
gency developed on the pad or in the
first three minutes of flight, the astro-
nauts in the command module could
be blasted off the rocket ship to land
safely by parachute.
The space vehicle had been assem-
bled in a behemoth structure – in
volume the largest building in the
world – with 140-metre-high doors.
From there the skyscraper-tall rocket
had been moved 5.6 kilometres to pad
39A by a titanic, 2700-ton tractor with
a crawling speed of 1.6 km/h. In all,
Apollo 11 had eight million workingFormer US President Lyndon B. Johnson
views the launch ofApol lo 11PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES