[Poohbah]

I really question the nay sayers when it comes to restarting Saturn V production. I mean come-on...out of production washers?

Yes.

Out-of-production LOTS of things.

To give you an idea how bad this can get, an officer on a battleship (IIRC, it was the New Jersey) in the 1980s contacted the manufacturer of the emergency diesel, by looking at the nameplate, finding the company, and tracing the subsequent fictitious-name records.

The company told him "We never built diesels."

They are all probably Mil, NAS, or AN crap anyway...if not the manufactures used their own proprietary stuff..that has approved substitutions.

Congratulations. It's a configuration change, and must be tested all the way through--EACH time. You can't make a wholesale changeout like that.

[PAR35]

Poobah is right. It isn't just that the parts aren't made anymore. In many cases the factory that made the part (or make the equipment that made the part) isn't even there anymore. Companies have merged, spun off, gone bankrupt, and laid off trained employees.

[Dead Dog]

Don't get me wrong, I know it would be a huge expense, but to throw in AN hardware as an issue is a red herring.

All of that stuff is qual tested, most all of the systems have modern (lighter) equivelents. And to say EVERYTHING would need new qual tests isn't quite true. I would guess 90% of off the shelf substitutions could be qualified by similarity analysis to whatever standard the new system was tested to...probably the same Mil-Spec. ALL of this stuff is and was done by SCD.

It would be a major program, but I doubt it would be worse than starting over from scratch.