To send three astronauts and a Moon lander all the way to the Moon, you needed an absolutely enormous rocket. NASA built one specifically: the Saturn V. It was 363 feet tall - taller than the Statue of Liberty including its pedestal, and equivalent to a 36-story building. It weighed about 6.5 million pounds fully fueled.
At launch, Saturn V’s five enormous engines roared with so much thrust that the rocket consumed about 20 tons of fuel every single second. That’s roughly enough fuel to fill an average backyard swimming pool every minute. The first stage burned through all that fuel in just 2.5 minutes, getting the rocket out of the densest part of Earth’s atmosphere.
Saturn V flew 13 times between 1967 and 1973, carrying every Apollo mission to the Moon plus the Skylab space station. None ever failed. To this day, it remains the most powerful rocket that has actually flown - though new generations of rockets, like SpaceX’s Starship, are designed to be even more powerful.
