Saturn V

The Saturn V was a rocket built by NASA to send people to the moon. (The V in the name is the Roman numeral five.) The Saturn V was an extremely powerful type of rocket called a Heavy Lift Vehicle. It was the most powerful rocket that had ever flown successfully. The Saturn V was used in the Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s. It was also used to launch the Skylab space station. The Saturn V rocket was 111 meters tall. Fully fuelled for liftoff, the Saturn V weighed 2.8 million kilograms. The rocket generated 34.5 million newton of thrust at launch. It could launch about 130 tons into Earth orbit and about 50 tons to the moon. The Saturn V launch vehicle itself consisted of three stages: First Stage (S-IC), which includes the five F-1 engines, second Stage (S-II), containing five J-2 engines, and third Stage (S-IVB) containing one J-2 engine. The Saturn V was launched 13 times from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with no loss of crew or payload.