Sacramento’s Moon Rockets

By Alan Lawrie, Rebecca Allen and Don Brincka

On July 16, 1969, a Saturn V rocket launched the Apollo spacecraft carrying American astronauts to the surface of the moon, where Neil Armstrong would take his famous first steps and fulfill Pres. John F. Kennedy's goal of a successful lunar landing by the end of the decade. This event marks one of the greatest achievements in human history and is in large part due to the years of rocket testing that took place at the Douglas Aircraft Company's Sacramento testing facility (SACTO). The SACTO facility played one of the most important roles in the success of the Apollo 11 lunar mission and is where the Saturn rocket's S-IVB stage was developed and tested--making this historic accomplishment possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Aug 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781439652602

Alan Lawrie

Alan Lawrie is a satellite propulsion engineer working for Airbus Defence & Space in the United Kingdom. He has 35 years of experience in the space propulsion industry. He has written two books on the Saturn rockets as well as articles in Spaceflight magazine and conference papers on related subjects. He frequently gives public lectures on these subjects. He is a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and lives in the United Kingdom. All author proceeds from the sales of this book will go to the Discovery Museum, Science & Space Center of Sacramento.

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INTRODUCTION

In 1849, gold was discovered in the foothills east of Sacramento, on the American River. Much of this gold was in flake form, so it permeated the rocky soil to a depth of 100 feet. In the early 1900s, a gold mining firm (the Natomas Company) started commercial dredging. In this process, a large barge was floated on a man-made lake. Buckets would bring a slurry of rock, soil, gold, and water to the barge, where it was floated across a large table filled with mercury. The flake gold would amalgamate with the mercury, and the remaining slurry would wash out and be dumped onto the backside of the lake. This resulted in the land being literally turned upside down. Vast areas of land were left unusable for farming or home construction.

In the early 1950s, Aerojet, a spinoff from Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena, California, needed a much larger facility to develop rocket propulsion systems. It selected Sacramento for a number of reasons, particularly the abundance of inexpensive and otherwise unusable land and the availability of the necessary support infrastructure. Aerojet proceeded to purchase about 26,000 acres. A vast manufacturing and test complex was constructed for both solid and liquid propulsion systems. In 1955, the Douglas Aircraft Company was awarded an Air Force contract to design, develop, and deliver the Thor intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM). Douglas needed to construct a test facility for this and negotiated to purchase 2,000 acres from Aerojet, with an option for 2,000 more. In 1955, the construction of the new Douglas Sacramento Test Center (STC)