Saturn 5 Blueprints Safely in Storage

space.com ^ | 13 March 2000 | By Michael Paine

[blam]

Okay...welcome back then.

[Windcatcher]

Does anyone know what ever happened to the Russian Energiya?

[orionblamblam]

Launched twice... once with the Polyus "battle station," and once with the Buran shuttle. Soviet Union collapsed, Soviat space program funding collapsed, could no longer afford such a big booster that had no mission. By this point the infrastructure is pretty well trashed. However, for any future Saturn V type boosters, the Russian RD-170 series engines developed for Energia would be a much better choice than updated F-1's... in production and much better performing.

[July 4th]

that's really funny, kind of. :)

[Axenolith]

I know what you mean. It's palatable when your thinking about some unmanned piece of french crap going up in the same style as your favorite old bottle rockets but it's in shakey territory when it's a potential man launcher.

[Dead Dog]

Not only was their stuff empty, but they also had to boost into high inclination orbits due to their latitude.

[Dead Dog]

No commercial market.

[StriperSniper]

maybe someone has an old console TV that could be raided?

Nobody touches my Dumont, unless I get a ride to space. ;-)

[XBob]

26 - "To: snopercod
I also have the complete set of progress photos which document the conversion of ML-1 to MLP-3, used to launch the shuttles. Negatives, too.
If, at any point, you want to recover your storage space, you might try the National Archives or the Manuscript Division (Archives) of the Library of Congress.


26 posted on 01/08/2004 4:50:15 PM CST by aBootes "

There are literlly tons of information from those days which are not recoverable, as the media has decayed or the 'media players' no longer exist. In the late 70's/ early 80s NASA finally made a rule that documents/media had to be stored with 'media players', tape readers, etc, as they no longer even existed, nor the capability to make them, without 'reinventing the wheel'.

[j_tull]

Ever read "The Martian Chronicles"?

Absolutely! I also remember a pretty well done mini-series done in the early 80's. Have to see if it's out on DVD.

[XBob]

32 - "If we truly have a full set of designs and parts lists, this is merely an exercise in checking the dots on i's and the crossing of t's."

Youall (frank and dead) don't have any idea what you are talking about. 15 years ago, one of the hardest parts of my job as parts trouble shooter on the shuttle was to find new manufacturers for parts required on the shuttle, which were no longer manufactured, and for which the original companies were long out of business.

The government small/racial/sexist/disadvantaged business administration directed that many parts be 'bought' from these 'companies', and they didn't exist any more, even then, even for the shuttle. The Saturn 5 would be impossible.

I think the original estimate above for $1 trillion to go back to the moon, is way under estimated.

[XBob]

48 - "good, full size blueprints of the Saturn V or the V2
That would be a lot of paper. "

I knew two guys who were part of the team which spent weeks burning the Saturn5 prints.

[Frank_Discussion]

I work in Logistics and Maintenance, dude. We have to find alternate sources ALL THE TIME. MY POINT is that you will either have to specify parts for a new design or RE-specify for a completed design. It's the same damn thing, except most of the retooled Saturn design is complete.

The only big design hit (and not as big as back in the 1960's) is the re-design of the electronics subsystems, which we would want to upgrade. The next biggest would be the dozen engineers running down the appropriate substitute parts we're talking about. Otherwise, the design of the structure, the jigs, etc. will allow for almost immediate fabrication.

[XBob]

57 - "I'm only 34 years old, so Nova is before my time, but I've read about it. Weren't they worried about the actual force of launch hurting people and structures MILES away? LOL! it would have been grand to watch, I bet!"

Unless the current 'crawlers' can handle the NOVA, we can't build it, as we have no way to get it to the pad, and we don't have the capability to build new crawlers. Marion power shovel went out of business a few years ago, and the technology/capabilites are gone, the people skilled in that are either dead or retired.

[Frank_Discussion]

We don't need a Nova-class, and I'm not advocating using any. A Saturn-class would do the job.

[RightWhale]

we don't have the capability to build new crawlers

Sounds like a business opportunity depending how the critical NASA decisions go.

[XBob]

63 - "When I was a kid I read a book about rockets that said we would never go to the moon because the booster that would be needed would be so large that the sound could kill people 30 miles away."

Well, my house is 20 miles from the pad, and even the shuttle launch shakes the windows if the wind is right, and the SaturnV really shook things.

They built the operations center with glass windows several inches thick because of the potential problem, and it is 3 1/2 miles from the launch pads.

[XBob]

76 - "> scanning from paper to image file is labor-intensive

You have no idea. This is an expense virtually no company is willing to undertake (scanning millions of pages? Sheesh), especially if they have extensive files. And having seen NASA and DTIC documents that they've doen this with... you don't WANT 'em to. The resolution goes straight to hell. They are scanned in B&W, and saved as low-rez PDFs. Many drawings simply disappear."

Boy, are you right there. Many of the shuttle drawings or parts of them have simply 'disappeared' in their conversion to microfische. Just flat gone. Originals, gone. Microfische, empty or illegible or gone.

[RightWhale]

Fiche was not a great technology. Modern scanning is. A world of difference.

[Dead Dog]

Finding the original manufacturer is irrelevent for all intents and purposes. The production lines have been closed. Rocketdyne and the other Sub's would simply go to their favorite vendors to build parts to the SCD.

They didn't exactly right SCD's for off the shelf stuff, that would have made too much sense.

Building the Saturn 5 wouldn't be impossible, getting through NASA Red Tape might be.