The sadness comes from that it's quite misleading. Saturn-V couldn't bring to orbit the satellite of some 100 tons - the mass of Space Shuttle orbiter, which Sp

The sadness comes from that it's quite misleading. Saturn-V couldn't bring to orbit the satellite of some 100 tons - the mass of Space Shuttle orbiter, which Space Shuttlle launch system obviously could. Saturn-V could either send to LEO the Skylab - less than 80 tons - or bring to orbit an Apollo stack, from which a lot of mass was the 3rd stage of Saturn-V with carefully unspent fuel, intended to provide translunar injection; that stack, yes, was way more than 120 tons. So is Saturn-V less powerful to LEO than Space Shuttle? We usually don't do this hairsplitting and leave the crown with the Mighty Saturn. Here we can also see a technically accurate reading, but the problem remains - the author omits an important member of supersonic commercial flights fame - the one with some 55 passenger flights, which is more even than half of Falcon-9 flights and e.g. way more that Spruce Goose flights. I do think that HN readers generally know - and ought to know - better.