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We Built the Saturn V (2017)
- oldpersonintx 2y ago[dead]
- sudobash1 2y agoShould have (2017) I noticed that when it said at the start: > five giant F-1 rocket engines—still the most powerful ever built This is no longer the case. The SpaceX Starship has the Saturn V beat nowdays. (Edit: I suppose the F-1 rocket engines still have the Raptor 2 engines beat, so the article is still correct. The Starship just has more engines than the Saturn V for more thrust)
- nickmcc 2y agoAn individual F1 engine outperforms an individual Raptor 2/3.
- sudobash1 2y agoI just realized that after hitting post. Edited my comment.
- Polizeiposaune 2y agoDepends on the metric. F1 is still the winner in sea level thrust per engine (6770 kN vs 2660kN). Raptor is more efficient (with higher sea level and vacuum specific impulse); it also has a much higher thrust density -- those 2660kN come from a nozzle only 1.3m in diameter, vs the F1's 3.7m diameter. The higher thrust density and smaller size means that you can fit 33 raptors in a ~9m diameter circle and end up with a stage with double the thrust of the ~10m diameter Saturn V.
- anothertroll123 2y ago[flagged]
- pfdietz 2y agoRaptor also has twice the thrust/weight ratio of the F-1.
- mulmen 2y agoThe line you quoted specifically says F-1 engine, not Saturn V rocket.
- GuB-42 2y agoSpaceX Starship is closer to the (failed) N1 Soviet Rocket which should have been the Saturn V competitor. The N1, with its 30 NK-15 engine would have made it more powerful than the Saturn V and its 5 F-1 engine, but less powerful than SpaceX "Super Heavy" with its 33 Raptor engines. Another similarity is that the NK-15 engine and the Raptor are both staged combustion engines, while the F-1 uses the simpler open cycle design. The F-1 is also much more powerful than both the Raptor and NK-15, that's why the Saturn V has only 5 of them. The similarities end there, fortunately.
- Aloha 2y agoThe difference is, we have better QC procedures and modern flight control electronics.
- avmich 2y agoF-1 vs. Raptor question is only for American engines, not the world ones. If by "most powerful" you mean engine thrust.
- nickmcc 2y ago> At more than $100 million each (equivalent to $750 million today), they departed Earth, then fell in pieces into the ocean. Could you imagine the unit cost today, if we kept building Saturn V in an iteratively improving process? Even as an expendable rocket, the efficiencies from mass production and weight savings from miniaturizing avionics would have produced a very capable, affordable machine.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoWe modernized and rationalized the Space Shuttle to make the SLS and each SLS costs > $4B. Building Saturn V's at low volume under the standard cost-plus arrangements that NASA uses with Boeing et al would result in steadily increasing costs.
- khuey 2y ago> We modernized and rationalized the Space Shuttle to make the SLS and each SLS costs > $4B. Except we didn't, because we took absurdly high-end engines (RS-25s) that were designed for reuse and refurbishment and now we drop them in the ocean after every launch.
- BuyMyBitcoins 2y agoAnd because we are using those engines, which lack sufficient thrust at liftoff, we have to use the Solid Rocket Boosters. Those were supposed to be recoverable but the SLS just drops them into the ocean now too.
- Aloha 2y agoAFAIK, we do recover and refurbish them - at least when shuttle was flying.
- Polizeiposaune 2y agoNot any more. SLS drops them in the ocean.
- peepeepoopoo96 2y ago[flagged]
- behnamoh 2y agoUsername checks out...
- sashank_1509 2y agoPlease don’t incite a culture war for no reason, the article has nothing to do with race or gender
- peepeepoopoo96 2y ago[flagged]
- unethical_ban 2y agoI don't worry much about the troll-like statements of account peepoopoo96.
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- yanko 2y ago[flagged]
- jasongill 2y agoHuh? You're saying that we didn't go to the moon (we did) and your proof is that the computers weren't as powerful as you would have expected them to be? We managed to build nuclear weapons before digital computers were even invented. Getting to the moon is harder than getting to the other side of the ocean but both still rely on (effectively) simple math - which could be done on paper or by a calculator albeit painstakingly. Lack of computer power for the AGC is among the weakest arguments that I've heard for why we (supposedly) couldn't have gone to the moon (which we did)
- mmooss 2y ago> Perhaps the most impressive thing about the Saturn V was that the first one ever flown—50 years ago this November and scarcely five years after Kennedy’s edict—worked perfectly. And not one failed. That is quite impressive for an order-of-magnitude improvement in a technology (rocketry), tackling a very challenging and previously untouched problem (flying people to the Moon, landing, and returning), with new solutions, and within seven years. We were having trouble with orbit when it started.
- kqr 2y agoNote that most of the things you mention are out of scope of what is here meant by "Saturn V". The stuff it carried did not work perfectly!
- mmooss 2y agoYes, good point.
- wat10000 2y agoI wouldn’t say worked perfectly. It never failed in a catastrophic big-kaboom way, but it had multiple engine failures. One was so bad that it put Apollo 6 in the wrong orbit, and a relight failure kept it from going to the moon as planned. On Apollo 13, an extremely lucky engine failure actually saved the launch, as the rocket was in the process of shaking itself to pieces because of extreme vibrations from that engine.
- mmooss 2y agoGood points. Also, good engineering results in failures that don't have catastrophic outcomes.
- wat10000 2y agoIndeed, the fact that Apollo 13’s center engine was vibrating so violently was bad, but the fact that the structure managed to hold up to it is a testament to the general robustness of the machine.
- msravi 2y ago...where "we" = the nazi party's amazing rocket science team that the US spirited away from Germany after WW2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
- eesmith 2y agoThat = should be a ⊃.
- msravi 2y agoSure. NASA rocket team ⊃ Nazi rocket team fuel-air mixture ⊃ fuel
- eesmith 2y agoActually, I'm wrong. Part of the Nazi rocket team ended up on the Soviet rocket team, not the NASA rocket team, so it should more precisely be: {NASA rocket team} ∩ {Nazi rocket team} ≠ ∅ Disney sure did a good job laundering the chief rocket Nazi's background. With the help of a certain paperclip, of course.
- actionfromafar 2y agoDisney had previous experience in that kind of tough laundry.
- magicalhippo 2y ago"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio
- kqr 2y agoI can recommend the book Digital Apollo to anyone interested. Especially the first parts cover the question of what the role of the human is in the endeavour at large, and during the flight of Saturn V in particular. Rocket designers came from the business of autonomous cruise missiles and argued that the rocket can get itself into space just fine on its own. Astronauts -- being test pilots of aircraft -- wanted to hand-fly rockets off the earth. In the end, this particular debate was won by the missile people because it turns out the navigation and sequencing of events to get a rocket off the planet happens so quickly and under such accelerations that humans cannot, in fact, do it by hand. However, the book ends on an optimistic note regarding the role of humans in spaceflight. We ought not to send humans to space because they do it better than machines. They barely did back then, and they certainly don't now. We do it to broaden the human experience. We do it to enhance what it means to be human. We are Aventurers and conquerors. We use our brains to put our bodies and senses through experiences and into places they were never meant to go. It doesn't matter that computers get better than us at things. We will still do them, because doing them anyway is what makes us human. ---- There are a lot of great books on this for the interested. Aside from Digital Apollo, off the top of my head I can recommend - Go, Flight! from the perspecive of the young flight controllers who orchestrated the missions from scratch. - Sunburst and Luminary from the perspective of some of the first ever software developers working on the computer in the lunar module. - Ignition! from the perspective of the chemists that tried to find stuff that would go fwoooooosh rather than boom or fuitt. High on my to-read list is - Aiming at Targets which I understand is written from the perspective of the higher echelons of NASA.
- varjag 2y agoWe lost a man on the test stand because we had a liquid oxygen leak and the liquid dripped on the flooring of the test stand. The guy came along and saw it. It had built up into like a little icicle and he kicked it and it blew his leg off. He had on rubber shoes, which had some oil or something on them, and oil in contact with cryogenic is just disastrous. The outer space is merciless and it starts on Earth.
- xtiansimon 2y ago> “…by the end of the decade, von Braun got his original wish, and a vast army of engineers, technicians, builders, and bookkeepers...” Wait, bookkeepers? Is there another referent here I’m not familiar with?
- pbronez 2y ago“Bookkeepers” in this context means “accountants” or more generally “administrators”. The point is that Von Braun didn’t just get technical people, he got the administrative support to organize them effectively.