We Built the Saturn V (2017)
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
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.
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.
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.
>it would cost $23 million to refurbish a used SRB and $12~70 million to refuel it.
A unconfirmed sources, that worked at NASA claim that Thikol employee explained to him. That reuse cost 3 time more, than a expendable SRB https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=51959.0
https://space.stackexchange.com/a/45894
Basically the SRB had multiple modules and some were more reusable than others, so some got recovered and refurbished a lot more.
RS-25s were the three main engines. They were very expensive, designed for reuse and were recovered with the rest of the orbiter they were bolted on to. Not in the ocean. Then refurbished with a much greater amount of effort and money than initially expected, and eventually reused on a future mission..
But the SLS first stage doesn't fly itself back to Cape Canaveral after 2 weeks like the Shuttle orbiter did. So those now FOUR very expensive "reusable" engines are now chucked into the ocean never to be seen again.
The shuttle's SRB's were fished out, refurbed, refueled, and reflown.
The SLS's SRB's are left to sink to the bottom.
the Saturn Vs were hand-welded but large numbers of welders; we can't even build one today because there is no workforce of skilled welders remaining. And avionics I don't think contributed substantially to the Saturn V's weight.
I think SpaceX's iteratively improved process is what produces the capable affordable machine.
It would be better to develop technology at a smaller scale, being able to iterate more, both in more paths explored per dollar and per year.
In that sense DC-X and the lunar lander challenge were on to something, as was Fastrac. Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Starship then continued from there. (Spaceshipone and hybrids were a dead end.)
The space shuttle had something like 1:70 in practise but was planned for 1:90. Artemis is currently evaluated at 1:70 too, which is deemed a little too high.
We seem to be ready to sacrifice people to space at a relatively high cadence.
Today, NASA as an institution has learned nothing from it. Their heat shield for Orion is defective and they tried to cover it up instead of admitting the problem. They're still proceeding under the assumption that they can simply ignore the hear shield not performing as designed if they use a different reentry profile, which they intend to do without first testing this theory.
I'm not sure our tolerance is as high as you think. Maybe it was in the 1960s, but not now. And who knows what a couple big pyrotechnic accidents would have produced then.
I do agree with you, we're much more willing to tolerate carnage on the ground (or closer to it). More astronauts have died in aircraft accidents than spacecraft accidents.
If people are willing, is it even an issue?
You gotta crack a few eggs to make an omlette.
I won't say they weren't capable or reliable, but what made rockets affordable was the privatization effort that happened after the USA, under the careful stewardship of NASA and those MIC corporations, lost the ability to send astronauts to space for the first time in 50 years, and was humiliatingly forced to rely on Russia for its astronaut launch services, even using Russian rocket engines for launching payloads of important national security and economic importance.
Yes, under government run projects.
The change in direction from the administration around the Obama administration is considered privatization / commercialization of space launch services not because private companies are now involved in building rockets, but because the projects are largely private, and the government mainly bids for services not rocket construction.
To whom are you directing your advice, then? This is like those articles headlined "Donald Trump must resign" -- who is supposed to make that happen? Who with any power over this situation is going to change their mind as a result of that article? Keeping senators and congress happy is literally the point of these programs, no?
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.
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)
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.
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.
The outer space is merciless and it starts on Earth.
That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun.
NASA rocket team ⊃ Nazi rocket team
fuel-air mixture ⊃ fuel
{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.
Wait, bookkeepers? Is there another referent here I’m not familiar with?
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.
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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.