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S-IC first stage

The S-IC was built by the Boeing Company at the Michoud Assembly Facility, New Orleans, where the Space Shuttle external tanks would later be built by Lockheed Martin. Most of its mass at launch was propellant: RP-1 fuel with liquid oxygen as the oxidizer. The stage was 138 feet (42 m) tall and 33 feet (10 m) in diameter. It provided 7,750,000 lbf (34,500 kN) of thrust at sea level. The S-IC stage had a dry mass of about 303,000 pounds (137,000 kilograms); when fully fueled at launch, it had a total mass of 4,881,000 pounds (2,214,000 kilograms). The S-IC was powered by five Rocketdyne F-1 engines arrayed in a quincunx. The center engine was held in a fixed position, while the four outer engines could be hydraulically turned with gimbals to steer the rocket. In flight, the center engine was turned off about 26 seconds earlier than the outboard engines to limit acceleration. During launch, the S-IC fired its engines for 168 seconds (ignition occurred about 8.9 seconds before liftoff) and at engine cutoff, the vehicle was at an altitude of about 42 miles (67 km), was downrange about 58 miles (93 km), and was moving around 7,500 feet per second (2,300 m/s).

Some sources say that the Saturn V first stage was originally designed to be reusable and land in the water via parachute, however these sources vary and are unreliable. Even if reusability was originally planned, as the sources claim it was dropped for the sake of time and likely complexity and weight. An example of a recently found reusability concept and proposal developed by Boeing (the manufacturer of the first stage) can be found on this discussion at Collect Space: http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum29/HTML/000880.html.Another proposal that was discovered was created by the Brown Engineering company at Huntsville Alabama in 1963, during the initial development of the Saturn V: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1p0uHGX6c36mxtFWQmoFl8ZNipcbgF-jH.

While not put into production, a proposed replacement for the first stage was the AJ-260x. This solid rocket motor would have simplified the design by removing the five-engine configuration and, in turn, reduced launch costs.