Space: Crawling Toward the Moon

As spacecraft travel, this was surely the slowest trip on record—nine hours to cover all of 3½ miles. But as it moved from NASA's Vertical Assembly Building to launch pad 39-A at Cape Kennedy last week, the mammoth Saturn 5 rocket, an engineless version of the vehicle that will take the first U.S. astronauts to the moon, crawled through an impressive catalogue of superlatives. This was the largest rocket in the world, emerging from the largest building in the world, to travel on one of the largest self-propelled land vehicles in the...