December 31, 2008 3:26 PM PST
Lift-off of the 363-foot-tall, 6.2-million-pound Saturn V, whose five first-stage engines had a combined thrust of 7.5 million pounds, took place on December 21, 1968.
"They no sooner lift this thing off than I realize that we had missed one major part of the simulation--the sideways vibration of those big, huge 1.5-million-pound-thrust-each engines, gimbaling around, trying to keep this thing straight," Anders said in a recent reminiscence, included in NASA's commemoration of the event. "The center of gravity was way down here, we were up here like a ladybug on the end of your automobile antenna."
Photo by NASA/Johnson Space Center
Caption by Jonathan Skillings
