Stages to Saturn (eBook, PDF)

An important inquiry into the development process and stages of the Saturn launch vehicle that enabled humankind to take some of their first steps towards the stars. Stages to Saturn is a meticulously produced official history in order to tell the globally important story of our quest to step off our planet. Roger Bilstein is one of the world’s premier experts in the history and development of aeronautical invention for the purpose of extraterrestrial travel, he has written widely across this field but Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles is his crowning achievement. In places one can dive into the precision of lab notes and in others there are details about the logistics of bringing the best efforts of a society together. The Saturn rocket came into being as part of the Cold War space race, hoping to put an American man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. The Saturn V Rocket was a game changing evolution of technology, as though the wheel was invented and then a blink of an eye later became a water wheel, then two blinks later a steam engine. Roger Bilstein covers everything from the initial research and underpinnings of the manufacturing process all the way to the exciting stages of tests and its world changing missions. For anyone seeking to understand our infancy among the star this book is indispensable as it walks the reader through the puzzles which needed to be solved. This level of innovation at such amazing speed required bringing the best and the brightest minds of the century together.