[HN Gopher] We Built the Saturn V (2017)
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We Built the Saturn V (2017)
Author : areoform
Score : 127 points
Date : 2024-12-18 00:17 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| sudobash1 wrote:
| Should 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 wrote:
| An individual F1 engine outperforms an individual Raptor 2/3.
| sudobash1 wrote:
| I just realized that after hitting post. Edited my comment.
| Polizeiposaune wrote:
| Depends 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Raptor also has twice the thrust/weight ratio of the F-1.
| mulmen wrote:
| The line you quoted specifically says F-1 engine, not Saturn V
| rocket.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| SpaceX 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 wrote:
| The difference is, we have better QC procedures and modern
| flight control electronics.
| avmich wrote:
| F-1 vs. Raptor question is only for American engines, not the
| world ones. If by "most powerful" you mean engine thrust.
| nickmcc wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| We 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| And 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 wrote:
| AFAIK, we do recover and refurbish them - at least when
| shuttle was flying.
| Polizeiposaune wrote:
| Not any more. SLS drops them in the ocean.
| jasongill wrote:
| So did the Shuttle; all of the Shuttle SRB's were
| recovered (with one obvious exception) and refurbished
| and reused at least in part. It wouldn't make sense for
| either Shuttle or SLS to drop them on the ground
| bpodgursky wrote:
| And yet, the SLS does.
| V99 wrote:
| The two solid rocket booster casings are dropped into the
| ocean and (usually) recovered with both the Shuttle and
| SLS.
|
| 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.
| Polizeiposaune wrote:
| They've given up on refurbishing & refueling the SRB
| casings for the SLS.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Simply having to maintain one or more ships (continuous
| expense, year round, year after year), to fish those
| tubes out of the ocean (once every few years) almost
| certainly ate up any cost savings they could possibly get
| from refurbing the tubes.
| ChadBrogramer69 wrote:
| And this lazy, reductive line of thinking is how they got
| to $4B/launch.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Lmao, do you have any idea how much ships cost? The spent
| SRBs being sunk are the _least_ of SLS 's problems. SRB
| shell refurbishment had dubious economic sense when
| Shuttle was flying several times a year, but for
| something that will fly as few times as SLS it would be
| an absolute farce.
| Polizeiposaune wrote:
| The shuttle did not drop RS-25's in the ocean. The SLS
| does.
|
| The shuttle's SRB's were fished out, refurbed, refueled,
| and reflown.
|
| The SLS's SRB's are left to sink to the bottom.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| He's talking about the SLS. The shuttle hasn't flown in
| 13 years.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Space Shuttle (and now SLS) SRBs always dropped into the
| ocean for recovery after the fact.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I think it's actually a bit more nuanced than that, see:
|
| 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.
| tim333 wrote:
| I found on a forum
|
| >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
| andrew_lettuce wrote:
| https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
| stickfigure wrote:
| ...or possibly one would have failed, killing three astronauts
| and ending the program. It very nearly happened once during 13
| total flights. Not great odds.
| kqr wrote:
| We did kill three astronauts during the Apollo project. It's
| just that space people tend to die closer to the ground.
|
| 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.
| lupusreal wrote:
| The Shuttle program never properly calculated their risk in
| the first place because NASA admins preferred happy
| fiction. Only after Challenger broke up and slammed six
| professional astronauts and a school teacher into the ocean
| were the NASA admins forced to face realistic risk figures
| for the program.
|
| 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.
| edm0nd wrote:
| >We seem to be ready to sacrifice people to space at a
| relatively high cadence.
|
| If people are willing, is it even an issue?
|
| You gotta crack a few eggs to make an omlette.
| lupusreal wrote:
| That's wrong. There is no need to ever fly humans on
| unproven rockets. NASA has historically done it that way
| for non-technical reasons. For instance, the Shuttle
| _could have been_ designed for unmanned operations, but
| that would have pissed off the astronauts by undermining
| their claim to necessity, and that was important to NASA
| at an organizational level because astronauts get NASA
| funding by keeping the public interested. And so they
| designed the Shuttle such that people _must_ be on it.
| Then they started using the Shuttle to simply launch
| commercial satellites. Why would you ever put seven human
| lives on the line to launch a satellite, when you can
| just as well do that without endangering anybody? It was
| completely senseless risk and they thankfully stopped
| doing that after Challenger. Just because you can find
| people willing to go to space for _any_ reason doesn 't
| mean the government should be funding such pointless
| idiocy.
| skirge wrote:
| None because this institution didn't have that objective in
| mind. Rockets were financed by government in "cost plus" mode
| which made no sense in cost saving. "Rocket science" was
| synonym to something complex, created by people who wanted to
| raise costs. SpaceX proved that you can make rockets from same
| material your kitchen pots are made.
| starspangled wrote:
| If it continued to be built as government projects by the same
| old military industrial corporation contractors? Yes I sure can
| imagine the unit cost, but "astronomical" is the word that
| comes to mind, rather than affordable.
|
| 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.
| lupusreal wrote:
| The Saturn Vs were built by private contractors, as were the
| Shuttles. What changed is those contractors got fat and lazy
| off the cost-plus contracts and lost their will to get shit
| done on time. Fixing those contractors is probably
| impossible, those companies are addicted to inefficiency as
| surely as junkies to heroin. Rather they simply need to be
| replaced by new contractors, ideally under fixed-price
| contracts, that _presently_ have a demonstrable ability to
| get shit done. And should they ever lose their edge, they
| need to be cut loose and replaced again. Ruthlessly excising
| inefficient contractors despite their heritage and legacy,
| rather than keeping them around to keep senators happy, is
| how you keep capabilities.
| starspangled wrote:
| > The Saturn Vs were built by private contractors, as were
| the Shuttles.
|
| 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.
| lupusreal wrote:
| SLS is as much a government run project as the Shuttle
| and Saturn V. It's the old way of doing things, and
| that's why it's so wasteful and useless. The
| commercialization of launch services has given us SpaceX
| and Rocketlab, which are both lean and efficient by any
| measure and _easily_ so by the measure of programs NASA
| is more involved in.
| feoren wrote:
| > rather than keeping them around to keep senators happy
|
| 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?
| lupusreal wrote:
| I'm not giving anybody advice.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| It's really hard to take a Saturn V and make it reusable.
| Though there were plans [1]
|
| 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.)
|
| 1: http://www.astronautix.com/w/wingedsaturnv.html
| wat10000 wrote:
| Soyuz followed that path. The result is a pretty dependable,
| pretty cheap launcher, but nothing too remarkable.
| mmooss wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Note 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 wrote:
| Yes, good point.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Good points. Also, good engineering results in failures that
| don't have catastrophic outcomes.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Indeed, 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 wrote:
| ...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
| eesmith wrote:
| That = should be a [?].
| msravi wrote:
| Sure.
|
| NASA rocket team [?] Nazi rocket team
|
| fuel-air mixture [?] fuel
| eesmith wrote:
| Actually, 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 wrote:
| Disney had previous experience in that kind of tough
| laundry.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| _" 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
| kqr wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| _We 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 wrote:
| > "...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 wrote:
| "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.
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