Posted on 01/24/2013 5:34:29 PM PST by Islander7
A vintage rocket engine built to blast the first U.S. lunar mission into Earth's orbit more than 40 years ago is again rumbling across the Southern landscape.
The engine, known to NASA engineers as No. F-6049, was supposed to help propel Apollo 11 into orbit in 1969, when NASA sent Neil Armstrong and two other astronauts to the moon for the first time.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
"It is really an excellent booster," he said. "The guys in Apollo had it right."
Saturn V first stage?
I was raised in Huntsville and it was great to hear the test firings as a boy. And 45 years later I’ve returned and it’s great to hear ‘em again.
Now that we’re done wasting our time on Shuttle flights, we can get back to actual space exploration.
At least one guy at NASA understands. I doubt he’s got too much company
Designed and built at a time when NASA was focused on things like space exploration rather than being a shill for the anthropogenic global warming scam.
I’m just wondering if there’s a way to use Earth’s rotation to help leave orbit, without such large booster rockets?
Conceptually speaking, if you could go straight up, while the Earth rotates below, you’d eventually could go into space.
BINGO!
Rockets already use the Earth’s rotation. That is why they preferably launch to the East rather than to the West.
Take a class in Newtonian physics and get back to me.
Is that engine powerful enough for Muslim outreach? /s
Well if you could just stand still you would quickly be in space as the Earth continued in its orbit..
Yes, the first stage had five F-1s, collectively producing seven-and-a-half million pounds of thrust (one stationary and four gimballed). Those F-1s are monsters. Those five engines consumed 15 tons of propellants per second. A marvel of good ol’ American can do. This 360 foot tall rocket weighing as much as a Navy destroyer was propelled from 0 to 5,000 mph in two-and-a-half minutes by those F-1s!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAucpvJAFJM
German engineering!
0bama hates the 'American NASA' (versus the 'Mother Earth NASA') because the American NASA evoked too much patriotic nationalism for America. When's the last time NASA gave us THAT feeling, huh?
Commander Borman is wrong here. As stated previously those thirsty F-1s consumed 15 tons (yes, that’s 30,000 lbs.) of propellants per second.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzCsDVfPQqk
This is great news. I had read that ALL the technical plans for the Apollo project were gone.
POTATO GUN (Not on Feinstein's list?)
They began work on the F1 in the 1950’s and I believe they had done significant work on a 2 million pound thrust version by the time Apollo was scrapped.
First Law of Rocketry - While the engine is running at no time can the pressure in the expansion chamber ever exceed the out pressure of the main fuel pump.
They have one more money pit to shut down, the ISS.
Check this out. Those five F-1s produced 160,000,000 horsepower!
http://www.apollosaturn.com/facts_figs.htm
Amen to that. I was raised in New Orleans, so the Rocketdyne engines tested at the Stennis, Mississippi facility used to rattle my mother's china cabinet. I think they tested an F1 there a few times, but never all five together. Mostly they worked on the second stage engines (and later, the shuttle engines).
God bless the boys with the pocket protectors and slide rules, every last one of 'em.
ROFL!
Motor? Who wrote this?
I believe rocket engines are often referred to as motors.
Otherwise a Bad Thing will happen.
When the rocket goes up
we will win great renown,
"It's an excellent booster,"
said Wernher Von Braun !
Electrically, rail guns and coil guns. The problem here is the rate of acceleration would turn most organisms into pancakes unless employing a VERy long rail/tube. These methods, esp. rail guns, require massive amounts of current, on the order of mega-amperes.
A hybrid of conventional jet turbine engine technology, scram jet, and rocket could get one to space starting from an airport.
Lighter-than-air solutions (balloons/dirigibles) could conceivably play a role. Imagine a lighter-than-air airport at 50,000 feet ASL.
More futuristic modes like macro wave galaxies and teleportation are beyond our 21st century horizons but may someday be feasible.
Yes, there are indeed MANY options besides the "obvious" booster rocket approach; commercialization of space exploration brings the creativity of the free market to bear (in sharp contradistinction to the President's position that "it takes government" to accomplish such feats).
Kudos for your creativity and alacrity to think outside the box.
Motors: solid fuel
Engines: liquid fuel
On the other hand the two terms are used interchangeably, and in common parlance mean the same thing.
What's stopping you from doing that?
That’s why you lauch a rocket from as close to the equator as possible. The Soviets had to build heavier lift rockets than the US, since we could launch from much closer to the equator.
God I miss what this country once was...
I was born and raised in New Orleans. We had a beautiful house on Pearl River on the Mississippi side in Gainesville. We were kind of upset when the government took the land because the house was in the ‘buffer zone’. Of course, the paid us for the land and house then sold the house back to us for $1 but we had to move the house to another lot away from water in Bay St. Louis.
My dad used to talk about seeing concrete mixer trucks lined up for a half-mile or more, waiting to enter the Stennis Space Center when the test stands were under construction. NASA poured so much concrete in there that the locals started to think there were nuclear missile silos up in that swamp.
If we put some wheels on the unused Saturn V rocket and the Apollo 11 engine and took it to the salt tracks. How fast do you reckon we could go?
Glad I got to meet about a half dozen men who walked on the moon and quite a few who flew shuttle missions (and others like Skylab). It’ll be awhile before I get to meet much “new blood” in that arena.
I thought all of them had been destroyed per Nixon’s order.
When you consider that everything else in life has gotten better and more efficient, it just seems out of place to be still using technology that is 60 years old and so inefficient.
Me too. I’ve been reading a book by the late David M. Potter: The Impending Crises: 1848-1861. On page 12 (pb edition) he writes of those early Americans: “Pitting their muscle against the elements, these men were independent, agressively individualistic, and fiercely hostile to external controls. Prizing the opportunity to become unequal in personal achievement and hating the inequality of pretention to status, they cherished an unsleeping distrust of public authority and glorified the virtues of simplicity, frugality, liberty and self-reliance.” Alas, that America is gone. I love that “opportunity to become unequal.” This concept is more attuned to reality. Obama is committed to equality of outcome which is as anti-American as you can get. He and the Dems can’t abide the concept laid down by Samuel Johnson: “How small of all that human hearts endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” Just so. Within limits we are the architects of our own success or failure. But this is no longer the opinion of the majority; hence Obama, the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people.
This is what is done now. Launch sites tend to be near the equator where rotational speed is greatest (about 1,000 miles per hour at the equator) and launches are toward the east to take advantage of the rotation of the Earth.
L.P.
At least there has been some progress. :)
When I was a teenager I remember hearing the Saturn V engine tests from my hometown 50 miles from Huntsville. Those things shook the ground good if you were close. I had the good fortune of seeing a shuttle main engine live test firing in Huntsville a few years back. There is no way to adequately describe that experience with words. I was shell shocked when it was over.
They must have put this one together from various museums.
“I’m just wondering if there’s a way to use Earth’s rotation to help leave orbit, without such large booster rockets?”
They do that now by launching from florida and launching to the east.
“A marvel of good ol’ American can do.”
It was Werner Von Braun, who was probably an ex Nazi.
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