> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Perhaps the most impressive thing about the Saturn V was that the first one ever flownâ50 years ago this November and scarcely five years after Kennedyâs edictâworked 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.
I wouldnât 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.
> five giant F-1 rocket enginesâstill 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)
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.
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.
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.
âBookkeepersâ in this context means âaccountantsâ or more generally âadministratorsâ. The point is that Von Braun didnât just get technical people, he got the administrative support to organize them effectively.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
AFAIK, we do recover and refurbish them - at least when shuttle was flying.
He's talking about the SLS. The shuttle hasn't flown in 13 years.
Not any more. SLS drops them in the ocean.
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
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.
They've given up on refurbishing & refueling the SRB casings for the SLS.
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.
And this lazy, reductive line of thinking is how they got to $4B/launch.
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.
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.
And yet, the SLS does.
Space Shuttle (and now SLS) SRBs always dropped into the ocean for recovery after the fact.
I think itâs 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.
https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
Soyuz followed that path. The result is a pretty dependable, pretty cheap launcher, but nothing too remarkable.
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.
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
...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.
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.
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.
> We seem to be ready to sacrifice people to space at a relatively high cadence.
Compared to what? You're measuring against perfection. That's retarded.
Compared to virtually every other profession, where we don't have death rates of even close to that of astronauts.
Please leave your insults at home when you go on the internet.
Virtually every profession is also more forgiving to failures.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Perhaps the most impressive thing about the Saturn V was that the first one ever flownâ50 years ago this November and scarcely five years after Kennedyâs edictâworked 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.
I wouldnât 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.
Good points. Also, good engineering results in failures that don't have catastrophic outcomes.
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!
Yes, good point.
Should have (2017)
I noticed that when it said at the start:
> five giant F-1 rocket enginesâstill 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)
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.
The difference is, we have better QC procedures and modern flight control electronics.
An individual F1 engine outperforms an individual Raptor 2/3.
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.
Raptor also has twice the thrust/weight ratio of the F-1.
I just realized that after hitting post. Edited my comment.
The line you quoted specifically says F-1 engine, not Saturn V rocket.
F-1 vs. Raptor question is only for American engines, not the world ones. If by "most powerful" you mean engine thrust.
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.
> ââŚby the end of the decade, von Braun got his original wish, and a vast army of engineers, technicians, builders, and bookkeepers...â
Wait, bookkeepers? Is there another referent here Iâm not familiar with?
âBookkeepersâ in this context means âaccountantsâ or more generally âadministratorsâ. The point is that Von Braun didnât just get technical people, he got the administrative support to organize them effectively.
...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
"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
That = should be a â.
Sure.
NASA rocket team â Nazi rocket team
fuel-air mixture â fuel
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} â â
Disney sure did a good job laundering the chief rocket Nazi's background. With the help of a certain paperclip, of course.
Disney had previous experience in that kind of tough laundry.
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.