The Saturn V has been standing on Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center for weeks now, and I keep looking at the photographs.

It’s enormous. Standing there in the Florida sun, this white tower with the black stripes of the United States flag painted on it, the letters “USA” visible from the press site three miles away. The Vehicle Assembly Building is behind it — the building that was constructed specifically to assemble the Saturn V because nothing else in Florida was large enough. The VAB is one of the largest buildings by enclosed volume on Earth.

The photographs show the Saturn V from various angles. From a distance, the scale is wrong; it looks like a model. Up close, when you can see people at the base for scale, it becomes real. 363 feet. Six million pounds of hardware and propellant.

In three days they will light the five F-1 engines at the bottom and the whole thing will rise, and it won’t stop rising until Borman — no, Armstrong. Armstrong. Until Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins are on their way to the Moon.

I’ve been reading the Associated Press dispatches from Cape Canaveral. The countdown is proceeding nominally — that’s the word they use, “nominally,” meaning according to plan. The weather forecasts look acceptable. There is expected to be a half-million people traveling to the area to watch the launch. People sleeping on beaches, in cars, in campgrounds. A crowd the size of a small city, gathered to watch a fire lift three people into the sky.

I wish I were one of them. I can’t afford the trip, and I’d have to find someone to watch the house, and it didn’t come together in time. But I keep thinking about being three miles from that pad when the F-1 engines ignite.

I’m going to watch on television instead. In the living room in Ohio, with Betty and Harold and Edna and whatever else gets pulled along by the gravity of this event. It won’t be the same as being there. But it won’t be nothing.

Three days.