Posted on 06/02/2024 6:20:42 PM PDT by daniel1212
The Saturn V was, and still is, the largest object to leave the surface of the Earth. At 363 feet in height -- or over 30 stories tall -- the rocket weighed 6.3 million pounds, about the weight of...50 Boeing 747s...
The rocket was the loudest creation made by human hands, except for the cacophony created by nuclear explosions. ...The five rocket engines of the Saturn V's first stage were the most powerful ever built...requiring 7.7 million pounds of force...
To house the Saturn V, NASA built the Vertical Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy Space Center, which remains one of the world's largest buildings, covering almost eight acres. The VAB's four mammoth doors, 456 feet in height, are the largest ever made...
Thirteen went into space. Twelve were used in the Apollo missions, 10 of which carried astronauts and six of which took men to the moon. The last Saturn V to fly was used for the Skylab program in May 1973.
Remarkably, every Saturn V launch was successful. Two missions suffered in-flight problems including engine cutoffs, but these were overcome, resulting in successful outcomes...
The Saturn program's dispersed research, production and testing facilities, spread all over the country, presented a major logistics and quality-control obstacle. Imagine building a piece of a puzzle at various locations and then hoping all the pieces would fit together without a problem. Chances for success seemed dependent on too many variables...
Facing a future of Soviet scientific dominance, America was able to move with a purpose...The scope and magnitude of building and launching the Saturn V rocket is an example of supply chain management at its finest.... harness the energies of 400,000 engineers, scientists, technicians and supply chain professionals...
The Black astronaut program - NASSA
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bq7gkQ7UkzI&pp=ygUPQmxhY2sgYXN0cm9uYXV0
The engines were made by Rocketdyne, then part of Rockwell, more recently Aerojet Rocketdyne which per the internet is owned by L3Harris. Harris, of course, is best known for the development of offset printing presses and the Harris Intertype typesetting machine that competed with Linotype.
Any guess as to how much Chinese content there was?
Upon further review, I was wrong.
I read now that Chrysler was credited with building the S-1B stage; not the engines themselves.
The mid-sixties were 60 years ago, guess I misremembered what I heard attending school in Brevard County. My father, brothers, and brother-in-law worked construction at the VAB and elsewhere on the Cape.
It’s the heaviest object to leave the surface of the Earth, but the Hindenburg had a lot larger volume. The gas bag was over twice as long as the Saturn V is tall.
They were using slide rules and very crude computers.
When Apollo 13 went wrong these same engineers figured out how to get them home from a failure they never anticipated nor even planned for. Their crippled craft was on a trajectory to take them around the moon and back toward earth. They had to calculate everything using the Lunar Excursion Module for thrust to get them on the correct reentry path. Get it wrong and you burn up in the atmosphere or be forever in orbit and dead. The astronauts had to use star shots to correctly orient their crippled craft for each engine burn. They got it right. They were brilliant and the engineers on the ground were brilliant. That was NASA's finest hour.
If I remember correctly, Boeing was the prime contractor for the Saturn V back in their good days.
The operative word is "were." The SpaceX Super Heavy makes 16.7 million lbs of thrust, more than twice the Saturn V.
OK so the guys who built V2s with slave labor built us some nice boosters. Bitch bitch bich. Did you want the rockets or not?
Yes, and many true prayers to the God of heaven,
The Saturn’s first stage - the S-IC - was built by the Boeing Company at the Michoud Assembly Facility, New Orleans, where the Space Shuttle external tanks would later be built by Lockheed Martin. . The S-IC was powered by five Rocketdyne F-1 engines arrayed in a quincunx.
The S-II was built by North American Aviation at Seal Beach, California. Using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, it had five Rocketdyne J-2 engines in a similar arrangement to the S-IC, and also used the four outer engines for control.
he S-IVB stage was built by the Douglas Aircraft Company at Huntington Beach, California. It had one J-2 engine and used the same fuel as the S-II.
The S-IVB burned for almost six minutes, giving the spacecraft a velocity close to the Earth’s escape velocity of 25,053 mph (40,319 km/h). This gave an energy-efficient transfer to lunar orbit, with the Moon helping to capture the spacecraft with a minimum of CSM fuel consumption.[11]
In 1968, Boeing studied another Saturn-V derivative, the Saturn C-5N, which included a nuclear thermal rocket engine for the third stage of the vehicle.[93] The Saturn C-5N would carry a considerably greater payload for interplanetary spaceflight. Work on the nuclear engines, along with all Saturn V ELVs, ended in 1973.[94]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#S-IC_first_stage
The success was (overall) due to the administrators who had cut their teeth in the military, and no tolerance for nonsense. Guys like James Webb (Frank Borman, of Apollo 8 fame, once quipped he thought the Viet Nam war would have turned out quite different with Webb as SecDef instead of McNamara), George Mueller, George Low, Bob Seamans.
Another guy who doesn’t get the credit deserved was Rocco Petrone. Werhner built a good rocket.
The VAB had 4 bays, the idea was an assembly line operation. They planned over 100 Saturn V launches, (which obviously never happened). Von Braun wanted a Mars attempt for the 1984 1986 launch window.
In a lot of ways, Lunar Orbit Rendezvoux while clearly the “best” way to effect a lunar landing before the decade was out, was kind of a dead end overall. The risks involved as the program continued made politicians skittery, and they started cutting everything back as soon as Apollo 11 returned safely, diverting funds to other programs, canceling Apollo 18 and 19.
The Saturn V was primarily constructed of aluminum. It was also made of titanium, polyurethane, cork and asbestos.[54] Blueprints and other plans of the rocket are available on microfilm at the Marshall Space Flight Center.[https://web.archive.org/web/20100818173517/http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/saturn_five_000313.html]
However, it is the unwritten knowledge and experience that engineers etc. attained that is not captured.
Do you have a reliable source or cite that assertion?
Oh, really? I don’t find that sarcasm too cute. In fact, it’s rather ignorant.
List the achievements in the NASA space program which haven’t resulted in destroying the legacy of the brave men who flew those rockets.
It is truly pathetic that US scientists had to rely on 2 German imports - one of them a card-carrying Nazi - to hoist the United States to a world leadership position...
...and even more pathetic that we squandered it all. The Greatest Generation is turning in their graves.
Leftists deserve to suffer TERRIBLY for their ‘achievements’, the latest - that we know of - being 5/30.
Thousands of scientists, and hundreds of tons of documents. Industry and business also hoovered up all kinds of proprietary techniques and processes as part of what was termed “intellectual reparations” or somesuch.
Less well known, Paperclip also imported a lot of chemical and biological warfare scientists, and propaganda specialists, and other super skeevy types. By the early 1950s the spook agencies were doing all sorts of crazy stuff with mind control through hypnosis, hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and BZ, assassinations. MKultra is probably (now) the best well known.
The government imported both hard core Communists and Nazis to the USA and installed them in high places.
What could go wrong?
The unwritten experience you mention is primarily on the part of technicians. The F1 engines were handcrafted more than manufactured, by welders and machinists who used tricks that are simply not relevant today and haven't been practiced for decades.
Also, the American industrial base has simply moved on. Example: core memory, used in the Apollo flight computers, was a manufactured item in the 1950s and 1960s. It is effectively nonexistent today.
Building a Saturn-V today would simply be foolish. Building something functionally equivalent would probably be less expensive and time consuming, absent the DEI crowd.
“They dismantled the places they could build the Saturn 5 and burned the plans... seriously, they no longer exist”
There is a complete Saturn V sitting on its side inside the display building at JSC in Houston. It could be reverse engineered if they wanted to.
I say again to all who are reading this: Go see a live launch. Videos do not even touch the sound and vibrations of the real thing. We watched Apollo 16 launch and it is probably my most vivid childhood memory.
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