 You guys asked for it, so today on Vintage Space, we are doing a very quick run-through of the Saturn family of rockets. The Saturn rocket has its roots in the V2. The ultra-short, simplified version of the story is that Werner von Braun was among 110 German engineers brought into the United States under Operation Overcast and Project Paperclip in the 1940s at the end of the Second World War. Working for the U.S. Army, the men first reassembled and launched recovered V2s in New Mexico before they were sent to the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama to develop larger missiles, the Redstone and the Jupiter. In 1960, Werner von Braun and his team from Redstone, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, was transferred from the U.S. Army to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. They brought with them a rocket called the C-3, a three-stage rocket with a C-1 first stage powered by F-1 engines built by the Air Force, an S-2 second stage, and an S-4 third stage. By the fall of 1961, von Braun had developed the next rocket in the family, the C-4, which featured an upgraded S-4B upper stage. The C-5 came next after he added a fifth F-1 engine to the first stage of the rocket. The C designation was dropped, but the numeric designation stuck when the family of rockets name was changed to Saturn. Saturn simply because after the Jupiter family of rockets, Saturn was the next planet in the solar system, so it was the next family of rockets as well. It was the C-turned Saturn family that launched Apollo. The Saturn-1 was NASA's first heavy-lift vehicle designed to put payloads into low-Earth orbit. Saturn-1s were two-stage rockets with an S-1 first stage and an S-4 upper stage. They were used to launch test versions and boilerplate models of the Apollo spacecraft. The Saturn-1B was another two-stage rocket, but this one replaced the S-4 upper stage with the more powerful S-4B. This rocket was big enough to get the Apollo Command Service Module into orbit, but not the Command Service Module and Lunar Modules together. These rockets launched unmanned tests of Apollo's spacecraft and also launched Apollo 7 on the program's first manned mission and the Apollo half of the Apollo Soyuz test project and all three manned Skylab missions. Finally, we have the iconic Saturn-5, everyone's favorite. The Saturn-5 was a three-stage rocket that used an upgraded S-1C first stage, an S-2 second stage, and the same S-4B third stage that the Saturn-1Bs had used. This was the rocket powerful enough to launch the whole Apollo spacecraft, the Command Service and Lunar Modules, into Earth orbit so the S-4B stage could fire a second time and launch the whole spacecraft all the way to the moon. So what's your favorite of the Saturn family of rockets? Let me know in the comments below and if you have any questions or ideas for future episodes, let me know in the comments below as well. For old timey space updates every single day of the week, be sure to follow me on Twitter as AST Vintage Space. And with new episodes going up every Tuesday and Friday, be sure to subscribe right here so you never miss an episode.