Wernher von Braun’s team at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center was expected to build a rocket that worked, not the largest operational rocket of its era. Roughly 9,000 engineers in Huntsville, Alabama, under von Braun, produced the 110.6-meter Saturn V, the only rocket to have carried humans beyond low Earth orbit; it flew 13 times between 1967 and 1973 and never failed.
Von Braun was born on March 23, 1912, in Wirsitz (now Wyrzysk, Poland), and led the V-2 program at Peenemünde, producing the first long-range ballistic missile and the first object to reach space (the 100 km Kármán line, on a test flight on June 20, 1944). He and about 500 other German specialists were brought to the United States in 1945 under Operation Paperclip. He became a U.S. citizen in 1955 and transferred to NASA in 1958.
The Saturn V stood 110.6 m tall and produced 34 meganewtons (7.6 million lbf) of thrust from five F-1 engines in the first stage, the most powerful single-chamber liquid-fueled engine ever flown, designed by Rocketdyne. The S-II second stage was built by North American Aviation; the S-IVB third stage by Douglas. The instrument unit that guided the rocket was built by IBM.
The Saturn V flew 13 times between 1967 and 1973, including 10 crewed Apollo missions and 3 Skylab launches, and never failed. The production line was shut down in 1970 when the Nixon administration canceled Apollos 18, 19, and 20.
For the rest of the Apollo article and the space race overview.