S-IC

The S-IC was the first stage of the American Saturn V rocket, the stage that lifted the whole vehicle off the pad and through the first 61 km of ascent. Boeing manufactured it, after winning the contract on 15 December 1961 from a general design already settled by engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center, mostly at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. The stage stood 42 m tall and 10 m across, and more than 90 percent of its launch mass was propellant, RP-1 fuel with liquid oxygen as the oxidizer. Five F-1 engines in a quincunx arrangement gave 34,500 kN of thrust at sea level; the centre engine was fixed and the four outer engines were hydraulically gimballed to steer, and they were lit in three staggered steps 300 milliseconds apart to ease the loads on the thrust structure. NASA ordered 15 flight stages for the early Apollo programme and cancelled those past S-IC-15 in October 1967, and several other versions were studied but never flown.