Saturn I

American medium-lift orbital rocket

Saturn I was NASA's workhorse for proving out Apollo hardware — ten launches and ten successes between 1961 and 1965, then nine flights of the upgraded Saturn IB, from Apollo 7 to the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission. Its first stage was eight Redstone and Jupiter missile tanks clustered together by Wernher von Braun's team, making it the heaviest rocket America had ever flown when it first lifted off in October 1961.