Congratulations were sent all around when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. A huge amount of effort went into the Apollo Program: from the astronauts themselves, to the engineers, to Mission Control commanders in Houston. And yet there was one team working on fishy-sounding airplane who hardly ever get recognition, but without whose efforts the Apollo missions would have been significantly delayed, if they would have gotten off the ground at all.

On this day, August 31, in 1965, the Aero Spacelines Super Guppy, a one-off transport plane cobbled together from a Pan American Airways airliner and an Air Force’s experimental turboprop aircraft, made its first flight.

If ever a plane’s name suited its profile, it had to be with the Super Guppy. The huge, ballooning cargo fuselage was designed to carry oversize but relatively light loads for NASA. The Super Guppy and its smaller predecessor Pregnant Guppy carried Saturn rockets from California where they were manufactured, to Florida where they were assembled and launched with the Apollo spacecraft. With the rockets too big for rail, the only other travel method would have involved a slow boat delivery through the Panama Canal.