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.

[sonofatpatcher2]

Re: ...a new giant launch vehicle called Magnum. It would use a curious mix of Russian rocket engines...

Did you feel it? That was thousands of dead Cold War Warriors turning over in their graves!

[RightWhale]

Oh, no. Tubes can be replaced, some of them, from Russia and China, but tube sockets, oh! the humanity!

[Charles Martel]

There's an incomplete Stage 1 booster sitting on a trailer at NASA's Michoud Space Center in eastern New Orleans (now the Shuttle's external tank assembly site). Of course, they'll have to grease the wheel bearings before the trailer will budge... :-)

[Dead Dog]

CG is purely analysis. It's just a spread sheet...a big one in this case, but still simple accounting.

Actually, almost everything already is qual tested. Really, they are just talking about QC testing on new vendors production lines. They would have to do that no matter what they built.

[Frank_Discussion]

My earlier comments in mind, I sincerely hope I will be proven wrong in terms of development costs for something new. In manned spaceflight, however, you don't launch until the weight of the paperwork exceeds the weight of the launch vehicle and it sounds to me that a lot of heavy paper already exists. Even if we had to push the validation of the paper into present day standards, it would be cheaper. Even new paperwork has to be validated, so you don't save anything there.

New design or Old, you still have to bend metal, specify custom parts, having the design in hand has to be cheaper than starting with a blank slate.

Don't get me wrong: FULLY reusable is the way to go. We can't just throw material to the heavens forever and expect to really stay in space. However, for expediency, if you need to get something done now, why not use something proven that you can build much sooner. Develop the reusable systems in parallel. Private enterprise is already persuing this parallel path.

Also, let's not de-orbit all those nice F1 engines, reuse them at least a few times. Incrementally "slim down" the big momma with lighter, stronger, and simpler technologies, and increase mass-to-orbit in the process.

[aBootes]

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.

[kingu]

Dropping their production lines off the cliff, as it were, in favor of Shuttle was monumentally stupid.

Actually, what was monumentally stupid was building less than a hundred shuttles. What was more monumentally stupid was dumping any production line without a replacement in place.

But this is the theory that NASA continues to operate under - a highly limited number of vehicles, almost all of them custom designed each time, ignoring the assembly line which this country invented. Jerry Pournell & co. looked at the Saturn 5 plans when they were doing their designs, and shuddered at the concept. The systems just wouldn't work with today's parts -- you're talking designs with resisters that are the size of your hand, vacuum tubes, capacitors that have been scaled down by a factor of a thousand in today's marketplace.

Trust me, if the Saturn 5 plans were possible to use with today's technology, they would have been used already by private individuals. But if you doubt that, pay the costs to have the designs printed and give it a go. I'll lay odds that the first twenty you produce will blow up on the pad.

[Charles Martel]

Just a couple of months ago, I gutted an old console TV. I wanted the cabinet, so chucked the guts.

Durn, If I'd only known.

I've done the same, only to regret it later. Turns out the guys who haunt the "audiophile" web forums often build their own amplifiers and such. Some tubes bring amazing amounts of money from that crowd, as they are in search of "pedigreed" tubes (I'm not making this up). Lots of the newer production vacuum tubes are of Russian or Chinese origin (big surprise there), so American and British tube brands can really be worth $$$.

Time to start scouring the thrift stores and pawnshops again. :-)

[Poohbah]

CG is purely analysis. It's just a spread sheet...a big one in this case, but still simple accounting.

When I did W&B on aircraft that were known quantities--millions of flight hours--we had to do a functional check flight on ANY airframes changes that changed the baseline CG (minus mission equipment), MAC, and LEMAC.

[demlosers]

Really, The F-1s are all we need.

If that's all we need - fine: :)

[r9etb]

I'm with you - substitutes/retools to get the parts we would need is not be that hard. Spending the money to scrub the requirements to get the hardware converted from 1960's tech to 2003 tech would be nigh-insignificant in comparison to ground-up development. It was a watershed of new ideas and was a system built to do a lot, reclaiming it's capability would be outstanding.

On the contrary -- the requirements are easy, and have not been lost. In fact, we know a lot more than we did then. The hard part is precisely getting the tooling and hardware to build exact-duplicate Saturn V components. Consider, for example, the computer hardware. All of that stuff would have to be rebuilt, as opposed to buying it off the shelf. To give you an example, one of the hottest tasks at Kennedy Space Center is going around to old computer hardware places and buying up things like 8086 chips. They're not made anymore, but the ground support equipment is based on them. Suppose they couldn't get the 8086's anymore. It would be much cheaper and easier to rebuild the ground support equipment from scratch, than to restart an 8086 production line.

If you extend that problem to virtually every component -- right down to the availability of certain specialty metals -- you'll find that the real cost is in putting all of those components back into production.

Much better to use the design elements where applicable, but basically to redesign using modern ideas and equipment.

The bottom-line reason the Saturn V isn't built anymore is because there's no MARKET for something that big and expensive.

[Frank_Discussion]

"They would have to do [qual testing] no matter what they built."

Dingdingding!! Exactly what I'm talking about - if you have to do man-rating (i.e., testing to death) anyway, why add full-up design costs in when you have a very proven design?

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.

[FReepaholic]

Here's a good look at what we've got now:

Expendable Launch Vehicle Database

[Dead Dog]

Actually, they are called Boeing now. The contractors aren't so much the problem. Aerospace is a small industry, so that data is still around, and the documentations of that industry are somewhat standardized. When Rocketdyne watned a turbo pump impeller built, they wrote the Specification Control Drawing for it, and chose the cheapest vendor to build it (hypothetically).

Those SCD's are the key, IMO, and they exist. The only question is are there vendors that can meet the SCD? For instance, are there forgings that were used that our industry cannot support, ect. I don't believe this to be the case. And if it is, a substitution can be developed.

It really isn't an engineering problem as it is red tape.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I attemped to turn those all over to NASA, but they wouldn't accept them. So I simply took them home for safekeeping.

You did the right thing!

[RightWhale]

Yeah, I know. I packed up a fair amount of the paperwork on a portion of the space program personally. It's probably packed in cosmolene in a giant warehouse somewhere next to the Ark of the Covenant. Most of what you see taking off from the pad is fuel/oxidizer tanks. The motors are the important part and the pacing item. The fuel injector is the critical item of the motor, and I would bet a lot of progress has been made on fuel injectors since then. We should have an uprated F-1 about 18 months after go-ahead. As soon as Boeing can weld the tanks we'll be ready to fly again.

Like, what am I doing sitting here when there are rockets to be built.

[Professional Engineer]

The bottom-line reason the Saturn V isn't built anymore is because there's no MARKET for something that big and expensive.

Oh there's a market. I want one. Now where can I refinance my mortgage at 1,000,000,000% of market value.

[Frank_Discussion]

I agree with almost everthing you said, except:

1. "The systems just wouldn't work with today's parts -- you're talking designs with resisters that are the size of your hand, vacuum tubes, capacitors that have been scaled down by a factor of a thousand in today's marketplace."

Systems can be replaced. The Saturn V was sytemically modular - replace the clunky subsystems with new parts.

2. "Trust me, if the Saturn 5 plans were possible to use with today's technology, they would have been used already by private individuals."

Only impossible because no commercial market exists that will currently support such a large chunk of change. However, I'm looking at it in light of the NASA missions to come, where the big money goes. I want space tourism and private space as much as anyone, but if we as a nation insist on doing huge things and soon, I see this as a money saver.

[Dead Dog]

I was trying to remember, the F-1 was about a 325s engine. The J-2(?) were similar? Without improving the F-1s, we could have the second and third stage pushing over 400s like the SSMEs.

I would guess with a new pseudo Saturn 5 could put 130-150 tons in LEO.

[wjcsux]

Replace the radios in your Cessna 182 and you have to do the same thing.