From blastoff to touchdown, a rocket is an awesome sight.
The Saturn 5 rocket that sent astronauts to the Moon weighed more than 6 million pounds. It stood 363 feet high. That’s about as tall as a 30-story building. Its 11 rocket engines sent a spacecraft weighing more than 100,000 pounds to a lunar landing.
In 1930, Robert Goddard started earthlings on the path toward space. The Massachusetts-born scientist was working almost totally alone. Thirty-nine years after Goddard shot off his first rocket, U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong took his first step on the Moon. Since then, rockets have lifted hundreds of spacecraft and satellites into orbit. They’ve carried space shuttles to and from the International Space Station. They’ve sent unmanned spacecraft to Mars and Jupiter. Some of the satellites send us information about Earth’s atmosphere and weather.
