When a rocket blasts off, it’s an awesome sight.
The Saturn 5 sent astronauts to the Moon. It weighed more than 6 million pounds. It stood 363 feet high. That’s as tall as a 30-story building. Its 11 rocket engines sent a spacecraft weighing more than 100,000 pounds to the Moon.
In 1930, Robert Goddard started earthlings on the path to space. He worked pretty much alone. Thirty-nine years after Goddard shot off his first rocket, U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon. Since then, rockets have lifted hundreds of spacecraft and satellites into orbit. Some of the satellites send us weather information. Rockets power the spacecraft that go to and from the International Space Station. Unmanned spacecraft have gone to Mars and Jupiter. And it’s all thanks to rockets.
