This month's museum pick...

Kennedy Space Center

To reach the moon, first build a skyscraper-sized bomb

If you want to go to the moon, first build a 36-story bomb with room for three passengers.

That’s what the United States did during the Apollo Program in the late 1960s when it built the giant three-stage Saturn V rockets that eventually took 12 men to the surface of the moon.

To this day, the Saturn V’s are the biggest, most reliable rockets ever built. None of them, from the smaller prototypes first tested in 1965 to the one that powered the final trip to the moon in 1972, ever exploded, fizzled or failed.

In principle, they were pretty simple: Massive quantities of liquid oxygen and hydrogen were pumped under great force into a combustion chamber and then ignited. The resulting stream of white-hot gasses, directed through giant nozzles to produce a flaming 500-foot-long tail, was literally a controlled explosion. The 150 million horsepower a 363-foot-tall Saturn V produced would have been like tethering together the combined power of 3 million old Volkswagen Beetles. Atop Saturn’s fire, the U.S. could push 100 tons in low orbit around the earth. From there, the Apollo space capsule and its lunar excursion module (LEM) would break out of that orbit and continue to the moon.

(There had once been talk of an even more powerful rocket, Nova, which would have produced four times the power of a Saturn. But planners, fearing the destruction if such a behemoth rocket blew up on the launching pad, wisely settled on the smaller Saturn V.)

After the Apollo program was allowed to die and U.S. withdrew from moon exploration, the remaining Saturns were scrapped or sold to museums. (Fortunately the blueprints for how to build these massive, reliable machines were put on microfilm and stored at the Marshal Space Flight center in Alabama.) Today, only three complete Saturns remain. The best maintained and displayed Saturn is at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex at Cape Canaveral, FL. The rocket, split into its three stages and suspended on its side in a long protective museum building, overwhelms with its size and purpose. Five huge nozzles extend from the bottom of the first stage, each designed to belch out the power of one of Saturn V’s five bundled engines. Each of those engines in turn produced five times the power of the rocket booster that lifted astronaut John Glenn into earth orbit in 1962.

The folks who designed the Kennedy Space Center wisely made this awe-inspiring view of the Saturn the crescendo in a well-conceived tour that takes visitors past some of the most famous spots in U.S. space history. Visitors on comfortable buses pass by the 525-foot-high assembly building, with its 400-foot-high doors, the tallest big building on earth. They can catch a glimpse of the pad where the Space Shuttle is launched and ride by the gigantic tractor used to move the completed shuttle from the assembly building to the launch pad on immense treads at a stately one mile per hour.

When the bus reaches the Saturn exhibit, visitors are first taken to the Firing Room Theater, a restoration of the original launch room for the moon rockets. Watching authentic video footage from those launches, visitors can relive the roar and rain of smoke and ice particles that the lift-off of these monster rockets produced. Then, with echoes of that monumental event still in mind, visitors see the large doors at the far end of the theater fling open and invite them to walk out under the mighty engines that once made a noise heard all the way to the moon.

 — Patrick Totty