Word: saturns
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Lockheed, it all looked too good to be true-and it was. Saturn, a 16-passenger feeder transport, and the Constitution, a 168-passenger behemoth, proved to be expensive flops. After a disastrous crash, Washington grounded all Constellations, and order cancellations piled on top of rewiring costs. Though Lockheed eventually lost $35 million on commercial sales of the Connie, the plane returned to the air, set speed records for four-engine piston craft that may never be broken, and airlines still fly 455 Constellations in a day when anything that isn't a jet is considered a creep. Again...
...North American dropped to second in sales ($2.01 billion) and third in profits ($45.8 million, behind both Boeing and Lockheed) in 1965. North American's bread and butter is space-NASA's Apollo moon vehicles, Saturn space boosters, Air Force rocket engines and missile-guidance systems. But its fortunes started skidding in 1964 when the Government canceled development of the XB-70 supersonic bomber, into which the company had plunged $1.4 billion. Now the escalation of the Viet Nam war is bringing cutbacks in NASA spending, and North American is not even in the running...
There were an incredible number of parts to that engine--it didn't seem possible that all of them could be depended on to work. But the IB's big brother, the Saturn V, had infinitely more parts and was a brand-new rocket, not a collection of dependable old Redstones...
...building where the Saturn V will be assembled. "You could put the Pentagon and the Chicago Merchandise Mart inside it," said NASA guide Henry Decker, who can tell you every detail of every building on the Cape...
These were yesterday's rockets, except for the Minuteman. Today's--the Saturn IB--we saw being assembled on the launching pad from which it will send off the first Apollo flights, the beginnings of the actual moon program. It was being assembled within a huge gantry. A mechanic, crawling around the first-stage motor, stopped to explain. The engine consisted of eight Redstone motors in a circle around a Jupiter hull that served as a fuel tank...