The Saturn Rocket and the Pegasus Missions, 1965

The story of the Saturn rocket is the story of rocket development, started in Germany, and lasting through World War-II. The story of the Saturn-V moon rocket starts with the V-2 missile development and continues through the Redstone, Jupiter, and the Saturn-1 rockets. This was the work of the von Braun Team at the Army's Redstone Arsenal, later, Marshall Space flight Center, in Huntsville, AL. The three Saturn-1/Pegasus missions of 1965 provided critical information about the near-Earth micrometeorite environment, and confirmed the feasibility of the lunar missions. The missions also validated flight procedures and hardware. The Apollo test flights involved many of the NASA facilities, including Launch CompleX-37 at Cape Canaveral, Marshall, Goddard, and the Manned Space Center in Houston, as well as the world-wide network of tracking stations and ships. Chrysler Corporation built the Saturn-I boosters, to a NASA design. IBM built the flight computers. Fairchild built the massive Pegasus payload, with its expanding wings covered with sensors. In 1965, three of the Pegasus satellites relayed the vital data to NASA Earth stations concerning the micrometeoroid environment that the Apollo spacecraft and the astronauts would have to face. The Pegasus missions also carried boilerplate Apollo spacecraft for test purposes. The vehicle weighed over 1.1 million pounds at liftoff, and The massive first stage dropped into the Atlantic after its work was done. NASA carefully calculated the probability of the stage hitting the African land mass, and causing casualties. The Pegasus mission were a major engineering and scientific success