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Nova: The Mighty Moon Rocket That (Literally) Never Took Off
Looming over 110 meters, the Saturn V is the most powerful operational launch vehicle in history to date. It is the rocket that ultimately took man to the moon during the Apollo program, but not much is publicly known about its colossal sibling that never made it past the drawing board.
Long before the Saturn V, and long before NASA hatched a sound and solid lunar landing architecture, the idea of the Nova rocket was conceived — a powerful heavy-lift vehicle with the intent of delivering crewed missions directly to the surface of the moon. Its origins can be traced back to the early days of NASA.
Beginnings
Nova was not exactly a single rocket; it was a family of heavy-lifting rockets. NASA began working on the Nova launch vehicle family in 1958, the year in which the space agency was founded. The Soviet achievement of the Sputnik launch, the first artificial satellite, was the driving force that not only led to the founding of NASA, but also set the United States’ lunar dreams in motion to one-up the Soviets. Rocketdyne was developing its F-1 engines on behalf of the US Air Force, and NASA decided upon designing a moon rocket that utilized these powerful new engines. Early designs for Nova and Saturn were proposed in A National Space Launch Vehicle Program, along with the Vega and…
