> 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.
> 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.
> 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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
...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
> “…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?
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.
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