 Hey guys, it's Amy, and like most of you, I love the Saturn V rocket. I mean, who wouldn't love this beautiful marvel of engineering? But have you ever stopped to think about how it was assembled? And I don't mean inside the VAB. I mean, how did the pieces of the rocket get to the Kennedy Space Center in the first place? We're talking Saturn V logistics today on Vintage Space. Okay, before we get to the details of the Saturn V traveling to Florida, we have to look at where the pieces were built. As counterintuitive as it might seem, the Saturn V pieces were not actually built where they were assembled and launched from. As we know, the Saturn V is a three-stage rocket. The first stage, called the S1C, was built by Boeing at NASA's Michoud facility in Louisiana. But it was also tested at the Mississippi Test Facility, which is now the Stennis Space Flight Center, and also at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. The second stage of the rocket, called the S2, was built by North American aviation in California. The third stage of the rocket, called the S4B, was built by Douglas Aircraft, also in California. So we have rocket stages being built in Louisiana and California. All of those stages are then tested in Mississippi and in some cases, Alabama, but they all have to end up in Florida. It's in Florida that they are mated and stacked and then mated with a spacecraft, ultimately moved onto a launch pad and then sent on their way to the moon. So how exactly did all this happen? In the case of the S1C, land transportation was out of the question. The stage was just too big and too heavy. And so NASA used barges. Barges were actually able to carry the S1C between Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama through rivers and a few specially constructed waterways. Moving the S2 stage was a little bit more difficult. It too was also way too big to be transported purely by land. And so NASA used barges again for this stage to get it from California to Mississippi. Of course, there isn't exactly a river that goes from California to Mississippi. And so it used the most readily available waterway it had, which was the Panama Canal. Yep, the Saturn V second stage was transported by surface roads to the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station so it could be loaded onto a barge. And then that barge actually went all the way down to the Panama Canal and then back up to Mississippi so the stage could be tested. This was also the original route for the S4B's predecessor stage, the S4. The S4 and the S2 could be transported on the same barge through the Panama Canal up to Mississippi for testing. Once all the stages were in Mississippi, it was a relatively simple task of loading them back onto the barges and sending those barges over to Florida. From there, they were unloaded and put into the vehicle assembly building where they could be stacked and then the rocket rolled onto the launch pad. There was a bit of a problem with the S4 and the S4B stages, however. These stages were the upper stages for both the Saturn 1B and the Saturn V rockets, which meant more of them were needed to fulfill NASA's Apollo goals. The S2, on the other hand, was only used for the Saturn V and there weren't as many launches of this rocket planned as there were for the whole Saturn family. There was some concern that any issue with the Panama Canal could seriously hinder getting rocket stages to Mississippi and then onward to the Cape for NASA to maintain its end of decade lunar landing goal. If anything happened and the rocket stages couldn't pass through the Panama Canal, NASA would have no other way of getting the stages to Mississippi for testing and then to Florida for launch. And because the S4B was really the critical stage because NASA needed more of them, it looked at alternate ways of getting them across the country and that alternate way was air travel. It was deemed a crazy idea at first, but eventually engineers took a Boeing Stratocruiser and turned it into the B-377PG or pregnant Guppy. This aircraft had especially enlarged upper fuselage to allow for the S4 stage to actually fit inside it. It was ungangly and a lot of people were worried that it wouldn't fly, but it actually could fly even loaded down with a full stage. Obviously the stage was not fueled, but still that's a lot of cargo and it was able to fly across the country. And because the S4B stage was so critical, NASA decided to have a backup aircraft built. This was the super Guppy that could take an S4B stage in its cargo. This aircraft was a little bit easier to load down with the rocket stage because the entire thing hinged in front of the wing so the entire nose section could just open up and then take the entire rocket stage inside. Again, it was massive and awkward looking, but it did effectively fly the stage across the country. So all through the 1960s, rocket stages were traveling by barge between Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, and California and Mississippi by way of the Panama Canal, and then ultimately from Mississippi to Florida. It's kind of neat to think that sometimes rocket science really does rely on naval science. If you still have questions about the Saturn V rocket, either how it got around the country or ultimately launched to the moon, let me know in the comment section below and I'll try to answer as many as possible. And of course, if you have ideas and things you'd like to see covered in future episodes, leave those in the comment section as well. 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