This week in 1966, the Mississippi Test Facility – today’s NASA Stennis Space Center – successfully captive-fired S-II-T, a test version of the S-II, or second stage of the Saturn V rocket, for 15 seconds. S-II-T employed five J-2 engines, each capable of producing 225,000 pounds of thrust. Here, two technicians are dwarfed by the five J-2 engines as they make final inspections prior to test firing by North American Space Division. The Saturn V rocket was designed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. 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)