A vast majority of the following photos were taken at the NASA- Johnson Space Center. The narrative with each is my own based upon my work at the Center.
This is the Apollo and the delivery rockets. I call it the "stack" as it was assembled at Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral Inside of a very tall building. The building was aptly named, "vertical Assembly Building ( VAB )" Once the Vehicle was assembled and checked out, it was taken to the launch pad in it's upright position by a huge "creeper". The Rockets, service module, Apollo Command Module, and Launch escape tower were over three hundred feet long. It was this configuration that launched all of the Apollo vehicles from earth to outer space.
The realtive size of the first stage, shown here, can be noted by the size of the passers-by. This stage developed sufficient thrust to lift the entire stack from the launch pad. The five rocket engines seen here can be toggled for guidance purposes. When the fuel in this stage was exhausted, explosive bolts seperated it from the stack, and the second stage fired.
This is the second stage. One can see that it also has five engines, albeit somewhat smaller than those on the first stage. This stage continues to give the rest of the stack energy to obtain orbit. The rest of the stack fires in sequence to adjust orbit, and to obtain translunar injection.
Apollo was a direct result of program testing before it. The gemini program gave experience to the Astronauts in extraveicular activity, and gaining experience in station keeping with another space object, and docking. Apollo R&D, in which I was involved, began with the inception of the Gemini program. The test vehicle was dubbed "little Joe."
This is the "little Joe". The things to be tested were environmental measurements, explosive bolt evaluation, high speed photography filming the seperation of the booster from the mock-up apollo command module. Of main concern was the safety of the Astroanuts. A rocket assembly was designed to mount atop the command module, and have sufficient thrust to pull that vehicle high enough to effect a parachute safe landing recovery.
The "launch Escape Tower" is shown here in order to get a better view of how the final launch escape tower looked when connected to the command mocule.