[AR] Re: Apollo (was Re: SSTO)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 16:36:02 -0500 (EST)
On Mon, 19 Feb 2018, John Dom wrote:
Were multiple Saturn V launches considered inadequate for building the
ISS and why?
NASA's original space-station plans simply *assumed* that Saturn Vs would
be used to launch the station modules, which would have been the full 33ft
diameter of the Saturn V lower stages. (The Shuttle would have been only
the supply ship.) When Congress finally, definitively rejected restarting
Saturn V production -- 29 July 1970 -- a stop-work order went out to the
station designers the same day.
Was Saturn only a Moon rocket?
The Saturn V was meant to be NASA's heavy launcher well into the 1980s,
unless superseded by something even bigger. NASA tried *desperately*,
repeatedly, even after it was clearly hopeless, to get funding to restart
Saturn V production, or at least preserve the tooling and hence the option
of restarting it, or at least preserve the option of launching one of the
two leftover Saturn Vs. None was forthcoming.
Could the [Musk] vertical return strategy have worked for the first two
Saturn stages?
There were a number of proposals for making the first stage reusable,
notably the "Flyback F-1" proposal which added wings, jet engines, and
pilots to produce a fully reusable booster for the Shuttle -- that one
almost got built, but its estimated peak funding was a little too high to
fit within OMB's arbitrary Shuttle spending cap.
Recovering the second stage would have been rather harder. Even on the
Apollo launches, where it didn't quite reach orbit, it burned out a long
way downrange moving at very high speed. And its engines wouldn't work
very well at sea level -- they had high-expansion high-altitude nozzles.
I hesitate to say that it was definitely impossible, but it would have
needed some serious changes.
After Apollo it became NASA 's prime objective to build the Shuttle as
the Saturn V follow-up. The administration threw away their Apollo toy
like kids do with toys they got bored of.
Uh, no, sorry, this is a misconception that has grown up in more recent
times. As above, the Shuttle was originally meant as the Saturn V's
little helper -- a replacement for the Saturn IB, *not* the Saturn V.
The Saturn V died because Congress -- not the Administration -- adamantly
refused to fund continuing it. That was mostly because Congress had also
terminated funding for all the Apollo follow-on programs that were going
to *use* it -- why fund a rocket with no customers? Lyndon Johnson wasn't
happy about it, but he had other priorities, and wasn't prepared to invest
a lot of political capital in trying to halt NASA's decline.
(Another part of the misconception is that it was Nixon who was to blame.
All of the key decisions had already been made when Nixon was elected.
He might have been able to reverse it if he'd tried hard, but he too had
other priorities, and he didn't really care much.)
Also I find hard to swallow Saturn V could not be rebuilt if the will
was there. ... Just unimaginable they did not keep orderly records to
rebuild it.
Sorry, that's part 3 of the misconception. NASA tried very hard to
preserve the knowledge and technology for the Saturn V, within the limits
of available funding. And studies in the Bush Senior era concluded that
it *could* be rebuilt -- it would merely take considerable money and
effort to re-establish the production capabilities, re-qualify the
hardware built by the new production setup, and revise all the KSC
infrastructure that was rebuilt for the Shuttle.
(No, you can't rely on the new stuff being so perfectly identical to the
old stuff that you don't need to re-test it. And that's even if you
restrain the people who want to redesign it all to "improve" it -- see the
J-2X fiasco for what happens if you don't.)
Mind you, that assumed that you could rely on Marshall to do things right.
It's increasingly clear that the bureaucracy-choked ruins of von Braun's
empire are now completely dysfunctional.
Henry
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