>At dusk on 8 November, the silhouette of AS-501 faded with the setting sun, but as darkness descended over the Atlantic, Apollo 4 reappeared as a shining white pillar swathed in floodlights on Pad 39. The towering vehicle made a dramatic focal point for the pressures that mounted during the night. The count continued through programmed holds, then through a spate of minor difficulties as the clocks ticked away the minutes and seconds to the scheduled launch time, seven o'clock in the morning of 9 November.
>At only one second past the appointed hour, the Saturn V lifted off the pad, its engine exhaust emitting plumes of stabbing red fire, lighting up the low-lying Cape landscape-an exceedingly dramatic scene in the half-light of dawn. The spectacular flames, billowing exhaust clouds, and the rolling thunder of the engines stunned the onlookers. Dr. William Donn, of Columbia University's Lamont Geological Observatory, at Palisades, New York, reported that the only man-made sounds that exceeded the liftoff noise of the Saturn V were nuclear explosions and added that the only natural sound on record that exceeded the noise of the Saturn V engines was the fall of the Great Siberian Meteorite in 1883. Five and a half kilometers away, in the studio trailer of the Columbia Broadcasting System, the commentary of CBS correspondent Walter Cronkite was all but drowned out by the thunder of Saturn's engines, and Cronkite himself was subjected to a shower of debris shaken loose from the walls and ceiling of his broadcasting booth.
