Saturn V

Saturn V:  Apollo 8 was the first manned launch of the Saturn V rocket.

This is the first manned launch of the Saturn V spacecraft, Bill is on top of that rocket with crewmates Frank Borman and Jim Lovell.  The biggest surprise to Bill was the violence of the lateral shaking as those F-1 engines gimballed back and forth to keep the giant rocket pointed in the right direction.	This picture of the Apollo 11 launch of the Saturn V, just as it goes super-sonic, certainly sums up the feeling the Apollo program gave the nation in fulfilling it's basic purpose of demonstrating to Americans and all of the people of the world that our Nation was superior to it's major ideological competitor, the Soviet Union.