NASA’s first voyage to the moon was intended to pass through the lock at TVA's Wheeler Dam as its Saturn rocket booster was to be shipped by barge from Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., to Cape Canaveral, Fla., for its first test firing in the fall of 1961. Because the 75 ton rocket was too large to be moved except by water on a special barge, the failure of the lock's north land wall in June shut down the lock and blocked shipment of all cargo, including the Saturn rocket. To keep the test firing on schedule for the Apollo program's mission to send astronauts to the moon, TVA, barge lines, and shippers urgently developed ways to move cargo around the dam by building transshipping facilities at the north and south ends, including barge terminals, pipelines around and over the dam, and concrete bulkheads for heavy freight. The large barge docks allowed the Saturn rocket to be offloaded above the dam and reloaded below it. These docks were completed for the first transhipment of the Saturn rocket in August 1961, and a second rocket was shipped in February 1962. The facilities were also used to tranship a nuclear reactor vessel built upstream and shipped by water to Italy. In April 1962, Wheeler Lock reopened to commercial navigation traffic only 10.5 months after its failure. The docks built for the Saturn rocket are still occasionally used for loading heavy equipment and cargo and have also been repurposed for fishing access, including modifications to assist people with mobility limitations.