This week in 1966, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center announced it had received the first uprated J-2 engine from Rocketdyne. The J-2 was initially rated at 200,000 pounds of thrust, but a higher thrust was needed for the second and third stages of the Saturn V, beginning with AS-504, the Apollo 9 launch vehicle. A cluster of five J-2 engines was employed on the S-II, or second, stage and a single J-2 was utilized on the S-IVB, or third, stage of the Saturn V rocket. Here, a J-2 engine is being processed at Marshall, where the Saturn V rocket was designed. Now through December 2022, NASA will mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Program that landed a dozen astronauts on the Moon between July 1969 and December 1972, and the first U.S. crewed mission — Apollo 8 — that circumnavigated the Moon in December 1968. The NASA History Program is responsible for generating, disseminating and preserving NASA’s remarkable history and providing a comprehensive understanding of the institutional, cultural, social, political, economic, technological and scientific aspects of NASA’s activities in aeronautics and space. For more pictures like this one and to connect to NASA’s history, visit the Marshall History Program’s webpage. (NASA)