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Saturn V was the ‘Mightiest Space Vehicle’
by michael shinabery
Twelve years after he came to the United States from post-World War II Germany, Wernher von Braun “proposed” the rocket that would boost man to the Moon, said “A Historical Look at United States Launch Vehicles: 1967-Present” (Anser/March 1988).
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When he first suggested the project in April 1957, the Saturn rocket was conceived. NASA launched four of 32 Saturn flights in April: Apollo XVI on April 16, 1972, XIII on April 11, 1970, and VI on April 4, 1968. On April 25, 1962, a Saturn I lifted off carrying Project High Water I. The payload was “30,000 gallons of ballast water for release in the upper atmosphere … used to study the effects on radio transmission and changes in local weather conditions,” said the Web site science.ksc.nasa.gov. “At an altitude of (94 miles), explosive devices ruptured (tanks) and in just five seconds, ground observers saw the formation of a huge ice cloud estimated to be several (miles) in diameter.”
Saturn’s “primary goal,” said “A Historical Look at United States Launch Vehicles,” was “to develop a launch vehicle capable of sending men to the Moon with the necessary equipment allowing them to return safely.”
According to “Space Travel: A History” (Harper and Row/1985), on Aug. 15, 1958, a year after von Braun’s proposal, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Project Agency “gave its approval for (the) research and development program.” Engineers chose “to cluster a number of Jupiter engines around Redstone and Jupiter propellant tanks … that would use to the fullest extent the experience, hardware, and facilities” the Army Ballistic Missile Agency already utilized. “By October 1959, four Saturn configurations had evolved.”
What these engineers did not have, John Noble Wilford described in “We Reach The Moon” (Bantam/1969), was “experience managing broad, complex projects. No one, of course, had even had to come to grips with a project as comprehensive as Apollo. But there was a new breed of engineers, called ‘systems engineers’ and ‘systems managers,’ who came closest to understanding how to judge the scientific and engineering validity of other men’s concepts and how to schedule the work of thousands of contractors so that all systems meshed into one, and did so on time.”
Michael Neufeld, in “Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. (Knopf/2008), said von Braun was “the consummate manager of the gigantic Saturn booster project,” and that his “genius was organizational leadership.”
NASA launched the first Saturn from Cape Canaveral in October 1961. The mission “recorded more than 500 measurements on a 200-mile trajectory,” said “Space Travel: A History.”
“The first five (Saturn I) launches were used primarily to test the launch vehicle and its many subsystems,” said “A Historical Look at United States Launch Vehicles.” The next two launches “were used to qualify boilerplate models of the three-man Apollo Lunar spacecraft in earth orbit.” The final Saturn I launched in July 1965.
The Saturn IB, first launched in February 1966, “used the same first stage … but employed a larger and more powerful second stage.” The changes “increased launch capacity by almost 50 percent.” Saturn IBs boosted three more unmanned missions, as well as Apollo VII, the first manned Apollo. IBs also carried a crew to Skylab, then launched Americans on July 15, 1975 to “rendezvous with Soyuz 19” during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program.
The first Saturn V, Apollo-Saturn 501, launched the unmanned Apollo 4 on Nov. 9, 1967, said the Web site pao.ksc.nasa.gov According to Neufeld, AS-501’s success was “absolutely critical” because NASA was “still reeling from the (Apollo I) fire” that killed three astronauts. AS-501 performed flawlessly.
“It was astounding how far they had come. Only a decade had passed since the shock of Sputniks 1 and 2,” Neufeld wrote.
The publication “NASA Facts” (Vol. IV, No. 5) called the Saturn V the “mightiest space vehicle.” NASA documentation stated the Saturn V was 363 feet tall. In comparison, Saturn I was 120 feet tall, and Saturn IB, 224 feet. The Statue of Liberty, including the pedestal, is 305 feet tall.
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“Everything about the Saturn 5 was big,” Wilford said. “Its first, or booster, stage was the biggest aluminum cylinder ever machined. Its valves were as big as barrels, its fuel pumps (for feeding engines at the rate of 700 tons of fuel a minute) were bigger than refrigerators, its pipes were big enough for a man to crawl through and its engines were the size of trucks.”
“The Redstone had only 1 percent of the initial thrust of the Saturn V,” Neufeld wrote. “During the launch the first stage’s five engines would burn 200,000 (gallons) of propellants per minute, generating the equivalent of 160 million horsepower. Fortune magazine noted that the vehicle had the orbital payload capacity equivalent to1,500 Sputniks, 9,000 Explorer 1s, or 42 Gemini spacecraft.”
Of the 32 Saturn flights, only Apollo VI failed. “Two of the second-stage engines shut down prematurely and the third stage engine failed to reignite in orbit,” Wilford wrote.
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The Saturn V booster lifts Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins out of Earth’s atmosphere. – NASA /// — CLICK TO ENLARGE
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The Apollo program, as of 1969, had cost $24 billion, he said. In that figure, as of January 1969, were $7.9 billion for Apollo spacecraft, $767 million for the Saturn I, $1.1 billion for Saturn IB, and $6.9 billion for Saturn V. As NASA’s budget in the early 1970s declined under President Richard Nixon, the agency shut down Saturn.
“The dismantling of the Saturn 5 and Apollo spacecraft production lines just as flight to the lunar surface was becoming somewhat routine seemed an incredible decision by the world’s most powerful spacefaring nation,” said “Space Travel: A History.”
Michael Shinabery is an education specialist and Humanities Scholar with the New Mexico Museum of Space History. E-mail him at michael.shinabery @ state.nm.us.
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2013-04-15 01:18:26
Source: http://moonandback.com/2013/04/15/saturn-v-was-the-mightiest-space-vehicle/
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