Saturn 5 Blueprints Safely in Storage

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

[Dead Dog]

Saturn 5 Blueprints Safely in Storage

A NASA official has denied a claim made by a book author that blueprints for the mighty Saturn 5 rocket used to push Apollo astronauts to the moon were lost.

The denial came in response to a recent story in SPACE.com that reported on a claim John Lewis made in his 1996 book, Mining the Sky, that he went looking for the Saturn 5 blueprints a few years ago and concluded, incredibly, they had been "lost."

Paul Shawcross, from NASA's Office of Inspector General, came to the agency's defense in comments published on CCNet -- a scholarly electronic newsletter covering the threat of asteroids and comets. Shawcross said the Saturn 5 blueprints are held at the Marshall Space Flight Center on microfilm.

"There is no point in even contemplating trying to rebuild the Saturn 5 ... The real problem is the hundreds of thousands of parts that are simply not manufactured any more."

"The Federal Archives in East Point, Georgia, also has 2,900 cubic feet of Saturn documents," he said. "Rocketdyne has in its archives dozens of volumes from its Knowledge Retention Program. This effort was initiated in the late '60s to document every facet of F 1 and J 2 engine production to assist in any future restart."

Shawcross cautioned that rebuilding a Saturn 5 would require more than good blueprints.

"The problem in recreating the Saturn 5 is not finding the drawings, it is finding vendors who can supply mid-1960's vintage hardware," he wrote, "and the fact that the launch pads and vehicle assembly buildings have been converted to space shuttle use, so you have no place to launch from.

"By the time you redesign to accommodate available hardware and re-modify the launch pads, you may as well have started from scratch with a clean sheet design," he wrote.

In years past, rumors have abounded that in the 1970s the White House or Congress had the Saturn 5 plans destroyed "to prevent the technology from falling into the wrong hands".

That seems doubtful -- it would be a formidable terrorist group that decided to build a Saturn 5 to wreak havoc on the world, or build a lunar base. Also, by the1970s, the Soviets apparently had given up on the race to the moon.

Geoffrey Hughes from the Rotary Rocket Company supported Shawcross's view.

"There is no point in even contemplating trying to rebuild the Saturn 5," he said. "Having a complete set of Saturn 5 blueprints would do us no good whatsoever. True, we would still be able to bend the big pieces of metal fairly easily. But they are not the problem.

"The real problem is the hundreds of thousands of other parts, some as apparently insignificant as a bolt or a washer, that are simply not manufactured any more. Everything would have to be redone. So a simple rebuild would be impossible. The only real answer would be to start from scratch and build anew using modern parts and processes. Yet another immense challenge!"

It turns out that NASA is taking on that challenge, but not necessarily to chase asteroids.

Engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center are working on designs for a new giant launch vehicle called Magnum. It would use a curious mix of Russian rocket engines -- derived from the abandoned Soviet Energia rocket program -- and newly developed strap-on, liquid-fueled boosters that would first be tested out on space shuttles.

The Magnum would use the space shuttle launch facilities at Cape Canaveral and could launch 80 tons (81,280 kilograms) of payload into low Earth orbit (LEO). This compares with around 20 tons (20,320 kilograms) for the piloted space shuttle, and for un-piloted vehicles like the U.S.' Titan 4-B and the European Space Agency's Ariane 5. Its lift capacity, however, would be less than the 100 tons (101,600 kilograms) that the Saturn 5 and Energia could manage.

[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.