On Nov. 9, 1967, NASA launched its Saturn V moon rocket for the first time, sending the Apollo 4 mission into space without any astronauts aboard. At 363 feet tall, the rocket stood taller than the Statue of Liberty and was the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built at the time, though SpaceX's Starship megarocket has since surpassed it. NASA required such a powerful vehicle to send astronauts to the moon, but the first Saturn V flight was only a test.
The launch produced a loud shockwave that caught nearby observers off guard. The ground shook hard enough to rattle buildings miles away, and the shaking kicked up a huge shower of dust and debris at NASA's new launch center, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission lasted 8 hours 36 minutes, and the rocket carried an uncrewed command module that splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.
Apollo 4 in November 1967 marked a turning point for NASA on its path to landing astronauts on the moon. The agency had bet the moon on the Saturn V, a three-stage heavy-lift rocket designed to fly astronauts in a capsule, along with their lander, to the moon and back. Until the Apollo 4 launch, the rocket had never been fully tested.
NASA also needed a new launch site for its Apollo missions, so it built Launch Complex 39 at what is now called the Kennedy Space Center, a Florida spaceport that has become the home port for orbital human spaceflight in the United States. In 1967, no rockets had ever flown from the site, yet everything went according to plan. Rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said at the time that it was an expert launching all the way through, from lifting off exactly on time to the performance of every single stage.
Just months earlier, on Jan. 27, 1967, the space agency suffered a fatal tragedy when Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died on the launch pad after a fire broke out inside their Apollo command module during a ground test. George Mueller, NASA's then-Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight, said at the time that the maiden voyage of the Saturn V dramatically increased the confidence of people across the nation in the management of the largest research and development undertaking in which the western world has ever engaged.
One year later, another Saturn V rocket launched the first astronauts to the moon with the Apollo 8 mission, and all of the Apollo missions that followed also launched on Saturn V rockets. Just two years after its debut, the Saturn V launched the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon for the first crewed moon landing in July 1969.
