Historic Saturn V Rocket Deteriorates in Huntsville, Ala., Sun

Nov. 24–HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — When it was built in the late 1960s, the Saturn V was so formidable it could withstand 7.5 million pounds of thrust — a controlled explosion generating the power of 85 Hoover Dams, enough to propel men and their machines to the moon.

But as one of the last of its kind molders unprotected in the Alabama sun, even the most powerful rocket ever built is no match for the irresistible force of age.

Heat and humidity, rust, mildew, mold, nesting skunks and intrusive raccoons are turning one of the relics of the space age — the most complete Saturn V remaining — into a historic eyesore.

After standing outdoors at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville for more than 30 years, the Saturn V— a designated historic landmark — is deteriorating at an alarming rate.

The cowling around the main engines has peeled away. Weeds and moss grow in clumps on the side of the rocket’s mammoth first stage. Deep cracks have appeared on the exterior of the Apollo command module.

“It’s doing badly and we’re reaching a point where we’re either going to have to renovate it or scrap it,” says aerospace executive Bill Stender, chairman of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center Foundation and the head of a fund-raising effort to rescue the rocket from years of neglect.

“This rocket was built to fly in space,” he says. “It could endure enormous forces for a few minutes of flight, but it was never meant to stand around for years in a harsh climate like this.”

Rescuing it won’t be cheap. Museum officials say it will cost nearly $5 million to refurbish the rocket and move it to a safe location. Back in the 1960s, a new one cost a little over $15 million.

But thanks to a $700,000 grant from the National Park Service’s “Save America’s Treasure” program, and matching funds from the city of Huntsville, the state of Alabama, and several private foundations, the museum already has $1.4 million toward its goal.

The museum hopes the rest of the money will come from the scores of aerospace corporations that participated in the Apollo program and some of the 11 million people who have visited the center since it opened in 1970.

In a pilot fund-raising effort at Huntsville’s New Market School, grade-school students raked leaves and washed cars to raise $1,859.01 toward the restoration.

Even lying on its side in the museum’s “rocket park,” where it shares space with vintage Redstone missiles, Atlas, and Jupiter Cs, the Saturn V is clearly in a class by itself. Prone, it is longer than a football field. Upright, it would stand more than 30 stories high.

No working versions of the Saturn V remain. In all, 13 were built and used for test flights, lunar landings and the launch of Skylab. Most of the hardware making up the three stacked stages of the rocket fell into the Atlantic Ocean after launch. Unlike today’s reusable shuttles, only the three-man Apollo command module returned to Earth.

Today, only three complete Saturn Vs remain. One is at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where a $1.5 million restoration has made it the centerpiece of a $38 million tourist exhibit. A second set of Saturn hardware stands outside the Johnson Space Center in Texas.

Because they were assembled from surplus parts and “dummy” parts, however, the Florida and Texas models have never been accorded the status of National Historic Landmark. Huntsville’s Saturn V is the only one that was used in actual tests — thunderous events that many Huntsville residents will never forget.

“My house was 12 miles from the stand where they fired the engines, but you could hear — and feel — them kick in and go every time they tested them,” recalls Irene Willhite, curator of the space museum.

“The vibrations were so strong that your dishes just kind of floated on your table,” she says. “And of course you didn’t dare have any knickknacks on the shelves because they were going to fall off every time they did a test.”

Once the Saturn V tests were completed, NASA decided that it no longer needed the 6.2 million pounds of used rocket parts. The space agency gave them to the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian loaned them to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, which hauled them to the museum for display — to the very spot where they stand today.

For Huntsville, the Saturn V is a revered symbol of an era that is now older than half the visitors who troop through the museum to gawk at the space program artifacts.

In the late 1940s, when Wernher von Braun and his German rocket scientists arrived to test the first V-2 rockets, Huntsville was famous as the “watercress capital of the world.”

By the time von Braun died in 1977, Americans had gone to the moon six times and Huntsville had become the cradle of the U.S. space program. Many still consider the Saturn V — never marred by a failure in flight — as the epitome of the “can-do” attitude that dominated early space ventures, but faded as the lunar landing program ended.

“The Saturn V Space Vehicle was a unique engineering masterpiece that formed the key link in the chain that enabled Americans to travel to the moon,” explained National Park Service historian Harry Butowsky when he nominated the Huntsville rocket as an historic landmark. “The success of the Saturn V made possible the success of the American space program.”

Curator Willhite says that’s reason enough to make sure that the rocket is preserved as an artifact of human achievement in space.

But author and engineer Frederick Ordway, who worked with Von Braun and other scientists on the Saturn V, believes there is another reason.

“It made possible man’s pioneering trip to, and the exploration of, another world,” he said, explaining why he contributed $50,000 to the restoration effort.

“In the long stretch of history, that may define the 20th century at its best” he says. “Who knows, a thousand years from now, it may be the one event our descendants recall about the United States of America.”

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