NASA Saturn I/IB Launch Vehicles Owner's Workshop Manual 1957-1975 (all variants, all missions) - An insight into the technology, engineering and operational history of NASA's first and last Apollo launch vehicle

by Baker, David

• ISBN13: 9781785216596
• ISBN10: 1785216597
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2021-03-16
• Publisher: Haynes Publishing UK

Summary

The Saturn I and IB series of rockets fulfilled plans developed in the late 1950s to build a rocket which could triple the existing thrust levels of US rockets and equal the lifting capacity of the Soviet Union, launching satellites and spacecraft weighing more than 10 tonnes into Earth orbit and do it by the early 1960s. These rockets emerged from the work carried out by former V-2 technical director Wernher von Braun, working at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama.

Three times more powerful than anything launched by America to that date, with a cluster of eight rocket motors for the first stage, the first Saturn I flew on October 27, 1961, and propelled America into the heavy-lift business. It was the Saturn I, and its successor the Saturn IB, with a more powerful second stage, that did all the preparatory work getting NASA ready to put men on the Moon.

Between 1961 and 1975, the 19 flights of the Saturn I and IB achieved several historic “firsts”, launching the world’s first high-energy liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen upper stages into orbit in 1964, the first unmanned test of suborbital and orbital Apollo spacecraft in 1966, the first unmanned test of the Lunar Module in 1968, the first manned Apollo spacecraft Apollo 7 also in 1968, all three Skylab flights in 1973 and the last Apollo spacecraft flown in support of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975.

Author Biography

Dr. David Baker worked with NASA on the Gemini, Apollo and Shuttle programmes between 1965 and 1990. He has written more than 100 books on space flight, aviation and military technology. In October 2017 he received the American Astronautical Society's Frederick I. Ordway III award "for a sustained excellence in space coverage, through books, articles, as well as engagement in the early US space program." Dr. Baker is the author of the Haynes NASA Space Shuttle Manual, International Space Station Manual, NASA Mars Rovers Manual, Apollo 13 Manual, Soyuz Manual, Rocket Manual and Hubble Space Telescope Manual. David is currently the Editor of Spaceflight, the monthly space news magazine of the British Interplanetary Society, of which he is a Fellow, and he lives in East Sussex.