Developed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center under the direction of Wernher von Braun, was the largest in a family of liquid propellant rockets that solved the problem of getting to the moon. The three-stage rocket was taller than a 36-story building and was the largest, most powerful rocket ever built. A total of thirty-two Saturns of all types were launched; with not one failing. Thirteen of these were Vs. With a cluster of five powerful engines in each of the first two stages and using high-performance liquid hydrogen fuel for the upper stages, the Saturn V was one of the great feats of the 20th-century engineering.
Inside, the rocket contained three million parts in a labyrinth of fuel lines, pumps, gauges, sensors, circuits and switches – each of which had to function reliably. The first manned Saturn V sent the Apollo 8 astronauts into orbit around the moon in December 1968. After two more missions to test the Lunar Module, in July 1969 a Saturn V launched the crew of Apollo 11 to the first manned landing on the moon.