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How big is the Saturn V?

111 metres!

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Saturn V

The Saturn V was the rocket NASA used to send astronauts to the Moon. Standing on the launch pad, it was 111 meters (363 feet) tall from bottom to top, about the height of a 36-story building. The V in its name is the Roman numeral five.

Size

NASA gives the Saturn V's height as 363 feet, which is 111 meters. The rocket was built in three stages, stacked one on top of another, with the Apollo spacecraft on top. A stage is a section of a rocket with its own engines and fuel. The first stage alone was 138 feet (42 meters) long.

Fully fueled for launch, the Saturn V weighed 2.8 million kilograms (6.2 million pounds). Its five first-stage engines produced about 34.5 million newtons (7.6 million pounds) of thrust, the force that pushes a rocket upward. The last Saturn V, launched in 1973, had only two stages and carried the Skylab space station instead of a crew.

The Saturn V was stacked upright inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A giant vehicle called the crawler transporter then carried it and its launch platform about 5 kilometers (3 miles) to the pad, at less than 1.6 kilometers per hour (1 mile per hour). Together, the rocket, platform and crawler weighed about 8.2 million kilograms (18 million pounds).

Size comparisons

  • Laid on its side, the Saturn V would be about 1 meter (3 feet) longer than an American football field, which is 360 feet (109.7 meters) long including the end zones.
  • It was about 18 meters (58 feet) taller than the Statue of Liberty, which is 93 meters (305 feet) tall from the ground to the tip of its torch.
  • It was about two-thirds the height of the Washington Monument, 169 meters (555 feet) tall.
  • About 65 people 1.7 meters (5 feet 7 inches) tall, standing on one another's heads, would reach its tip.

Flights to the Moon

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, developed the Saturn V. The first one launched without a crew on November 9, 1967, on the Apollo 4 test flight. Apollo 8 was the first Saturn V to carry astronauts, who orbited the Moon but did not land.

In 1969, a Saturn V launched Apollo 11, the first mission to land astronauts on the Moon. Saturn V rockets also launched the landings of Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17, and Apollo 13, whose landing was called off because of a problem with its spacecraft. NASA launched 13 Saturn V rockets between 1967 and 1973.

How the stages worked

Each stage burned its engines until it ran out of fuel, then separated from the rocket, and the engines of the next stage fired. The first stage lifted the rocket to about 68 kilometers (42 miles) above the ground. The second carried it almost into orbit. The third put the Apollo spacecraft into orbit around Earth and then pushed it toward the Moon.

The first two stages fell into the ocean after they separated. The third stage either stayed in space or hit the Moon.

Sources

Scale of the Universe > Saturn V
Football Field
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The Gateway Arch is the tallest structure in St. Louis. There is an observation area at the very top, and from it, you can see the Mississippi River. You should go visit it sometime in the near future!

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