through any of its four doors. Then thereâs the nightmarish crawler, like something from a
Judge Dredd
comic, which transports rockets from the Assembly Building to the gantries at half a mile an hour, running on tanklike tread plates that weigh one ton apiece. This is
not
like anything youâve seen before. Itâs unreal.
And now the bus has stopped and youâre climbing off and into a giant brick hangar and â
fuck, thereâs the Saturn V.
You can reel off figures and statistics all you like, but until youâve stood underneath it, nothing can prepare you for this behemoth, suspended in segments from the ceiling, just astonishing. You try to fit a meaningful portion of it into a photo, but you canât, so you give up. What you think is not âHow could anyone make something this big?â because you know that people have been making big things for millennia. But to make something this big, and intend it to fly â
the audacity of this conceit alone
â and then to make it work, to conceive of this impossible twisty chaos of pipes and cables and weird steel tubers and nozzles as big as the bus we just rode in on,
bigger,
and make them do something predictable and controllable and reliable enough tobet a life on, three lives,
every time
⦠itâs just ⦠the mind reels in the same way that a Victorianâs must have been carried away by one of that eraâs gargantuan steelworks or power stations. Even at thirty-five yearsâ remove, itâs barely credible.
What must it have been like to ride this thing? The geologist Jack Schmitt, the only civilian scientist who flew Apollo, spoke of the difference between sitting on top of one in simulations and during the real deal.
âYou start to hear sounds that youâve never heard before,â he said, then shook his head. âEspecially as you approach thirty seconds, this huge Saturn V starts to come alive, almost like an animal.â
Bill Anders of
Apollo 8,
the first mission to circumnavigate the Moon, also resorted to anthropomorphic imagery, describing the ride as âlike being heaved about; like being a rat in the jaws of a giant terrier.â
And from the ground? A flash of brilliant light, followed by a squall of fire and the heart-stopping, agonizingly slow push to clear the launch tower. The final mission,
Apollo 17,
took off into the night and remade the entire sky as a dancing, fiery cathedral dome and the ocean as an orange-grey sea of flame. People describe a guttural quake that rolled toward you like thunder, with almost everyone who watched referring in one way or another to the intense physicality of the experience. The distinguished and then-Apollosceptic British journalist Hugo Young gasped that âin the bedlam of launch, there were, momentarily, no critics of the space programme.â
I find myself avoiding the numbers, because they seem to flatten and insult Saturn, to tame it to the point where it no longer troubles the imagination. They say that it stood sixty feet taller than the Statue of Liberty and weighed six million pounds at launch, that the first of the three stages had five rocket engines producing 1.5 million pounds of thrust each, but I donât know what any of that means. Among the welter of facts and figures, only two strike me as particularly remarkable. The first is that this rocket was trusted to go to the Moon on only its third flight, where others faced exhaustive test programmes before anyone was allowed to climb aboard; the second that it containedclose to six million parts, meaning that, even with NASAâs astounding 99.9 per cent reliability target, roughly 6,000 things could be expected to go wrong
on a good flight.
Yet the Saturn V never failed, nor looked like failing when it mattered and it doesnât take a genius to understand that something very like genius was at work here. What might not be guessed is that it was a Nazi genius. In the words
Judge Dredd
comic, which transports rockets from the Assembly Building to the gantries at half a mile an hour, running on tanklike tread plates that weigh one ton apiece. This is
not
like anything youâve seen before. Itâs unreal.
And now the bus has stopped and youâre climbing off and into a giant brick hangar and â
fuck, thereâs the Saturn V.
You can reel off figures and statistics all you like, but until youâve stood underneath it, nothing can prepare you for this behemoth, suspended in segments from the ceiling, just astonishing. You try to fit a meaningful portion of it into a photo, but you canât, so you give up. What you think is not âHow could anyone make something this big?â because you know that people have been making big things for millennia. But to make something this big, and intend it to fly â
the audacity of this conceit alone
â and then to make it work, to conceive of this impossible twisty chaos of pipes and cables and weird steel tubers and nozzles as big as the bus we just rode in on,
bigger,
and make them do something predictable and controllable and reliable enough tobet a life on, three lives,
every time
⦠itâs just ⦠the mind reels in the same way that a Victorianâs must have been carried away by one of that eraâs gargantuan steelworks or power stations. Even at thirty-five yearsâ remove, itâs barely credible.
What must it have been like to ride this thing? The geologist Jack Schmitt, the only civilian scientist who flew Apollo, spoke of the difference between sitting on top of one in simulations and during the real deal.
âYou start to hear sounds that youâve never heard before,â he said, then shook his head. âEspecially as you approach thirty seconds, this huge Saturn V starts to come alive, almost like an animal.â
Bill Anders of
Apollo 8,
the first mission to circumnavigate the Moon, also resorted to anthropomorphic imagery, describing the ride as âlike being heaved about; like being a rat in the jaws of a giant terrier.â
And from the ground? A flash of brilliant light, followed by a squall of fire and the heart-stopping, agonizingly slow push to clear the launch tower. The final mission,
Apollo 17,
took off into the night and remade the entire sky as a dancing, fiery cathedral dome and the ocean as an orange-grey sea of flame. People describe a guttural quake that rolled toward you like thunder, with almost everyone who watched referring in one way or another to the intense physicality of the experience. The distinguished and then-Apollosceptic British journalist Hugo Young gasped that âin the bedlam of launch, there were, momentarily, no critics of the space programme.â
I find myself avoiding the numbers, because they seem to flatten and insult Saturn, to tame it to the point where it no longer troubles the imagination. They say that it stood sixty feet taller than the Statue of Liberty and weighed six million pounds at launch, that the first of the three stages had five rocket engines producing 1.5 million pounds of thrust each, but I donât know what any of that means. Among the welter of facts and figures, only two strike me as particularly remarkable. The first is that this rocket was trusted to go to the Moon on only its third flight, where others faced exhaustive test programmes before anyone was allowed to climb aboard; the second that it containedclose to six million parts, meaning that, even with NASAâs astounding 99.9 per cent reliability target, roughly 6,000 things could be expected to go wrong
on a good flight.
Yet the Saturn V never failed, nor looked like failing when it mattered and it doesnât take a genius to understand that something very like genius was at work here. What might not be guessed is that it was a Nazi genius. In the words
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