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And that’s why they weren’t available for the space shuttle, or for now?

The blueprints may have been lost. But components remained after cancellation, including stages of the Saturn 5 rockets. Some are on display at three American space centers: the John F. Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral, Florida; the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas and the United States Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Not everything was "destroyed".

Yeah, just like Hllary delivered 30,000 copies of her emails - printed out. And guaranteed nothing important was missing. So how hard could searching the material be?

Which would mean all we'd have to do, instead of NASA spending a billion dollars to develop the new SLS heavy lifter for the Orion moon capsule, is just send some people out to John F. Kennedy Space Center, Johnson Space Center in Houston and the United States Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama to MEASURE the Saturn 5 rocket engines on display there and simply reproduce them - right?

After all, we KNOW they work, and it's MUCH cheaper to reproduce them than to invent something completely new that just serves to duplicate the same function. And they're sitting right there, waiting to be used!

Yep. I've been to the space center three times to show younger family members what we were as a country. That rocket at the museum was put there after the program was cancelled. It never flew. In my opinion, that is when we turned as a country in a major wrong direction.

I've stood there for hours staring at that rocket. I've counted the military plugs and realized someone had to solder every connection and the QA/QC had to be right every time. I have also been amazed at the thrust chamber, nozzle extension and the thousands of hours that went into the construction.

Slide rules and mylar. I'm just shaking my head and face palming. As evidenced by this thread, we are not the same country we were then.