Between 1967 and 1973, the United States launched the most powerful rocket ever built. And then it stopped.
The Saturn V flew 13 times, launching five Apollo test flights, seven lunar landing missions and America’s first space station, Skylab. More than 50 years after its first flight, the Saturn V remains the most powerful rocket every flown successfully. It also remains a monument to the spirit of the Apollo era, having never been matched or surpassed in the generations since it roared into the sky,
Between leftover stages built for tests and flight, there are just three complete Saturn Vs left in the world, located at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center (USSRC) in Huntsville, Alabama; the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
If you don’t already know (and if you don’t know me, the following is a gross understatement), I’m a four-alarm fan of all things spaceflight. So I considered it a super-nerdy personal pilgrimage to see them all. I realized that goal long ago, with the Huntsville rocket being the last one I saw in person.
These rockets, priceless artifacts of humanity’s first travels beyond the Earth, have been through the ringer. For years after they were put on display, the Saturn Vs were left outside in, well, less than museum grade conditions. They sat outside in Florida (bright sun, high humidity), Texas (bright sun, high humidity) and Alabama (bright sun, high humidity). You see the pattern.
The habit of leaving these irreplaceable icons outside to rust in the rain didn’t end until 2016, when a Saturn V first stage was moved from the parking lot of its assembly facility in Mississippi to the nearby Infinity Science Center, where a restoration project is planned.
Today, the Saturn Vs are safe. In fact, Kennedy Space Center and the USSRC Saturns have been fully restored and are now housed indoors, amid loving tributes to the Apollo program and to the women and men who paved America’s path to the Moon.
The KSC exhibit is by far the most elaborate and interactive. It was most recently updated to add a tribute to the crew of Apollo 1, killed in a launch pad fire on Jan. 27, 1967. The tribute includes a display of the hatches from the actual Apollo 1 spacecraft, artifacts that had been stored away from public view until being unveiled as part of the new exhibit on the 50th anniversary of the fire.
The hatches, still bearing scars from the fire, are a stark reminder of the risks of space exploration. They are the difference between reading about a tragedy and seeing its reality up-close, just inches away.
At JSC, the Saturn V is also now housed indoors, in a much more modest facility built to keep the rocket out of the sun and rain, but not much else. It has a few basic exhibits explaining humanity’s road to the Moon. It’s a “temporary” metal building, built to shelter the rocket during its restoration a decade ago.
(A full gallery of pictures of the Houston Saturn V follows)
The restored rocket sits just inside the aptly named Saturn Lane entrance into Johnson Space Center and is one of the few areas of the space center generally accessible to the public not on a tour. It is also the first rocket I ever laid eyes on, undoubtedly one of the icons that ignited my love for space. My family lived in Houston until I was 12, and we made a few pilgrimages to JSC while we were there.
(A complete gallery of the Houston rocket follows this post)
So when my wife, daughter and me went back to Houston during the summer of 2018, I wanted to see the Saturn V again. After seeing pictures of what had happened during its years outdoors, I was heartened to see what it looks like today. The rocket has been lovingly restored, back to its original markings and colors. The building might be basic, but the artifact inside it what matters. It’s beautiful and remains a tribute to the boundless imagination of the 1960s.
When you come face-to-face with something the size of a locomotive, longer than the Stature of Liberty is tall, and imagine a time when humans regularly climbed atop it for flights to another world, it’s hard not to be jealous of those who lived in a time when that didn’t seem impossible.
I last saw the JSC Saturn V when I was 12. When I came back in 2018, I brought my daughter, who was just two months shy of her 12th birthday on the day we were there.
I am grateful that people with vision had taken care of it – and that the world’s most powerful rocket was still there to show my daughter that “impossible” is really just a state of mind.
