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It's interesting how they attribute so much of their success to Apollo program information. So much data must have been created during that program - I wonder

• DanBC 15y ago
  Saturn 5 is lost technology. The build was split up over a bunch of different sub contractors. There's no central repository for plans. Some plans are lost forever; others are in basements or attics of various engineers. There was no single group of engineers who know how to put together a Saturn 5. Yes; it's be cool to see old designs meet new methods. But it's also cool to see what modern materials and chemistry can do.
  • cstross 15y ago
    Also: NASA built a grand total of 18 Saturn V stacks. Then they shut down the production lines. With just 18 vehicles, completed years before the actual flight missions, each and every one of them was a prototype: the rocket engineers working on them had worked on multiple prototype missiles before, and a whole lot of snags and bugs were hand-patched on each vehicle. Even if we could magic up a complete set of designs and build new production lines based on them, we'd have lost a chunk of the hands-on knowledge of how to fix problems with the design (stuff that wasn't recorded by a process that predated ISO9000 and similar QA protocols). Also, people tend to over-estimate the SV stack. As it happened, in its first iteration it was barely capable of the mission -- the LEM came in overweight, and only the fact that the SV out-performed its design specs by a couple of percent made the Block 1 lunar missions possible. (By Block 2 -- Apollo 15-17 -- they'd tweaked enough things that they could fly a heavier LEM with the lunar rover kit and additional supplies.) In contrast, you might find Musk's plans for Falcon Heavy interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy 16,000Kg to translunar injection, 14,000Kg to Mars. It's not up to flying an Apollo mission profile (the LEM weighed 14,700Kg; the CSM stack 30,300Kg) but it's capable of putting a LEM-sized payload into Lunar orbit, and it might be possible to rig up some kind of lunar-orbit rendezvous profile surface mission using 2-3 Falcon Heavy launches.
    • brc 15y ago
      Of the 18 built, how many were fired (and presumably never recovered?) Obviously there is the one in the KSC Saturn building, but are there others lying around? One thing I have noticed about NASA developments - the payload weights never seem to come down. I would have thought we could build a LEM with the same or greater functionality at a lower weight by now.
  • mikeash 15y ago
    Keep in mind that even if you had precisely detailed plans for the entire thing from top to bottom, you still couldn't reasonably build one today, because the plans would be full of parts that are half a century obsolete. Just try sourcing the components for the guidance computer, for example. I think that by the time you figure out how to replace all the obsolete parts with something more modern, it's easier to simply take the lessons learned and design a new rocket from scratch.
• cameldrv 15y ago
  A friend of mine visited the Johnson Space Center with a friend of his who worked there a few years ago and got the behind the scenes tour. Lots of old simulators, test rigs, etc. Then they went into a huge wing of the center that used to be offices, but is now abandoned due to the lower staffing after Apollo ended. The place was strewn with millions of pages of Apollo technical documentation, in total disarray. Years ago, they put all of these documents in binders and stacked them in the abandoned wing. Over time, people needed binders, and took them, leaving stacks of paper. Over the years, the ventilation system cycled on and off, the papers blew around, until now it's just a sea of random paper.
  • FrojoS 15y ago
    Wow. This is so human and so sad.