Curate, connect, and discover
And now we have the Apollo 8 launch. These were the first guys outside the Low Earth Orbit, flying right by the Moon. You can see the stage separation from outside, this time from the better angle and in color. Dem J-2 cluster though...
The S-Ic was running on RP-1 (airplane fuel)/liquid oxygen mixture, thus the orange bright flame. S-II on the other hand used liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen mixture, which means the exhaust (water vapor) is invisible.
Around 1:28 you can see the vapor cone around the front of S-II, which appeared when the rocket was passing through the sound bareer, and disappeared shortly after.
After stage separation you can see that first stage engines are still glowing orange. The center engine however isn’t - is was shut down thirty seconds before (around 2:40) to avoid oscillations.
At the end of the video you can see the interstage separating, which was done to reduce the spacecraft's mass.
And this time a S-Ic S-II separation from the FREAKING APOLLO 11! The same rocket that put men on the Moon! This time from the external perspective (also known as “staying on the ground, NOT GOING TO THE FREAKING MOON!”).
As before, expect fanboying and trivia below.
You can see the first stage (S-Ic) cutoff, as a sudden decrease in the size of the exhaust plume. At that time, only four outboard engines were firing, the center one was shut down as expected, to prevent pogo oscillations (oscillations + rockets != good_things)
The big explosion was just the stage separation. Using explosives to separate huge stacks of explosives. Surprisingly a good idea.
Even though the S-Ic engines were already shut down, they still produced some leftover exhaust, which you can easily see
I think a lot of us know this beautiful video from Apollo 4 unmanned launch.
A lot of nerding, rocket stuff, trivia and technical info below:
Some of you may wonder: “Why am i not seeing the rocket exhaust?” or “When the second stage will fire?”. The answer is: They already are firing, since just after separation. S-II (the second stage), unlike first one is fueled by the liquid oxygen-liquid hydrogen mixture, which is invisible when burning. This is also (in)visible on Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs). What you can see, is the high temperature heating up and burning the the S-Ic and the interstage.
The S-Ic (first stage) and S-II (second stage) separated in a somewhat unusual fashion. Usually an interstage (the part holding stages together) is separated with a lower stage. In Saturn V however the second stage engines occupy so much space, that a “direct” separation could have destroyed S-II engines, so the interstage was separated a few seconds after the first stage to avoid that scenario.
The first, bright fire was a shaped charge (an explsive) used to break split the rocket in two. How else do you think you could separate a thing THAT big, THAT quickly?
The cameras were then dropped from the rocket (as seen at the end of the video) and picked up from the ocean.