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"It was quite a monster to ride. It had a total of seven and a half
million pounds of thrust, and the first stage burned four million pounds
of propellant in two minutes. When you rode that monster up, you knew
you had a real tiger by the tail. If felt like a train wreck when you
staged off that first stage to the second stage; it was quite a machine
to ride out!" -Astronaut John Young- In the Shadow of
the Moon
Delicate Audacity
 The Saturn V rocket was the most powerful rocket ever launched. It
was used in the Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s and also to launch
the Skylab space station. It was the workhorse that made one small step and one giant leap possible. It redefined rocketry and changed the way a generation looked at space. It was a stunningly precise piece of powerful machinery that took every ounce of human ingenuity to exist. It was a milestone of rocketry.
The Saturn V was a 363 feet tall, 3 stage, 6.2
million pound monster. It generated 34.5 million newtons of thrust at launch.
It could launch 260,000 lbs into Low Earth Orbit (LOE) and 100,000 lbs into Trans Lunar Injection (TLI).
Developed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
The first Saturn V was launched without a crew. On November 9, 1967, the Apollo 4 mission to test the Saturn V rocket was a success. There would be many more successful missions over the next six years. The final Saturn V launched the space station Skylab into orbit on May 14, 1973. In all there were 13 Saturn V launches, 12 of which were successful and one (Apollo 6) that suffered a partial failure.
This Isn't Rocket Science
"It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of
yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow" - Robert
H. Goddard
Wernher von Braun was the man behind the team that designed the
Saturn V rocket. The Saturn V rocket was based on von Braun's earlier
Aggregate series of rockets developed in Germany in the 1930s and 40s.
The Aggregate series of rockets had borrowed a great deal from American
rocketry pioneer Robert H. Goddard (considered the father of rocketry).
In 1963 von Braun, when speaking of the history of rocketry said of
Goddard "His rockets...may have been rather crude by present day
standards, but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used
in our most modern rockets and space vehicles".
Goddard never
lived to hear those words, dying in 1945 only knowing that his rocketry
dream, ignored in the U.S. for his entire life, had become a weapon in
the hands of the Nazi's. In 1920, Goddard had suggested in a letter to
the Smithsonian the idea of photographing the Moon and planets from
rocket powered fly-by probes. This was picked up by the media at the
time and universally panned. Goddard was ridiculed and
mocked by the general public and the press. A New York Times editorial
wrote, among other things "That
Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and the
countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation
of action and reaction, and of the need to have something better than a
vacuum against which to react-to say that would be absurd. Of course he
only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."
Of course the New York Times and everyone else was wrong, thrust is
indeed possible in a vacuum
and this concept was well understood at the time in academic circles.
Still, the unwarranted criticism forced Goddard to withdraw from public
discussions of rocketry.
As
a consequence, Goddard received very little public support for his
research and development work. Germany became the
leader in rocketry for the next two decades. A short 12 years after his
death the U.S.S.R succeeded in launching the first artificial satellite
into orbit. 12 years after that, a massive rocket incorporating many of
Goddard's ideas would carry men to the moon. One can only imagine the
pride Goddard would have felt, had he lived to see it.
Three Stages
The Saturn V was a three stage rocket. The first stage, the S-1C, was 138 feet tall and had a diameter of 33 feet. It provided 7,500,000 pounds-force (33,400 kN) of thrust using RP-1/LOX propellant. The stage had five Rocketdyne F-1 engines, the center one fixed and the surrounding 4 hydraulically gimballed to control the rocket. The burn time of the stage was 150 seconds. The S-1C was built by Boeing company and designed by the engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC).
The second stage, the S-II, was 82 feet high and 33 feet in diameter. It provided 1,000,000 pounds force (4,400 kN) of thrust using LH2/Lox propellant. The stage had five Rocketdyne J-2 engines in the same configuration as the S-1C stage. The burn time was 367 seconds. It was built by North American Aviation.
The third stage, the S-IVB was 58.4 ft in height and 21.7 ft in diameter. It provided 225,000 pounds force (1,001 kN) of thrust using LH2/LOX propellant. The stage had one Rocketdyne J-2 engine. The stage was capable of two burns, one for 165 seconds to establish LOE and a longer 335 second burn to obtain TLI. As each of the stages burned propellant they became less massive and the rocket's acceleration increased, thus the exponential curves for each stage on the chart.
A Reliable Rocket
The first Saturn V launched with a crew was Apollo 8. On this mission
astronauts orbited the moon but didn't land. Apollo 9 tested the Apollo
moon lander by flying it in Earth orbit without landing. Apollo 10 the
lunar lander was tested in space. Apollo 11 was first mission to land
astronauts on the moon. Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 all successfully
landed astronauts on the moon. Apollo 13 technical problems prevented a
moon landing, but that problem wasn't related to the Saturn V.
In 1973 the last Saturn V was launched, without a crew, to launch the Skylab space station into Earth orbit.
The Skylab mission Saturn V had only two stages. The Apollo missions
had three stages. The first stage lifted the rocket to an altitude of 42
miles. The second stage nearly into space. The third into Earth orbit
and pushed toward the moon. First two stages fell into the ocean. Third
stage either stayed in orbit or hit the moon.
The Saturn V was a multistage liquid-fueled launch vehicle. NASA
launched 13 Saturn Vs from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida with no
loss of crew or payload. It remains the tallest, heaviest, and most
powerful rocket every brought to operational status and holds the record
for the heaviest payload launched and heaviest payload capacity to Low
Earth Orbit .
The Saturn V was designed under the direction of Wernher von Braun
and Arthur Rudolph at the Marshal Space Flight Center in Huntsville,
Alabama with Boeing, North American Aviation, Douglas Aircraft Company,
and IBM as lead contractors. Von Braun's design was based in part on his
work on the A-10, A-11, and A-12 in Germany during World War II.
Epilogue
Wernher von Braun was always quick to acknowledge his debt to Goddard. In 1926 Goddard successfully launched a liquid fueled rocket. In 1963, von Braun remarked "Goddard's
experiments in liquid fuel saved us years of work and enabled us to
perfect the V-2 years before it would have been possible." I'm certain Goddard wasn't thrilled by the fast completion of the V-2, but if he were alive today, he'd have more than the Saturn V to be proud of.
Last week, a private launch vehicle (rocket) company named SpaceX was named as one of two companies awarded by NASA to launch manned missions to the International Space Station. SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, has stated its goal is to make man an interplanetary species and plans to construct rockets capable of traveling to Mars in the next decade. Only ten years ago such plans sounded like science fiction, but recent successes by SpaceX makes Mars a very achievable goal. It will mean a rocket on the scale of the the Saturn V. SpaceX has already utilized many design features from the Saturn V in their smaller rockets. Many of those features originated in Goddard's work almost 100 years ago. Goddard's innovations and vision continues to permeate modern rocketry; undeniable vindication for a man ahead of his time.
To read more about SpaceX and their rockets, please visit my editorial on IHS Engineering360:
SpaceX Innovates as It Aims for Mars
As always, thanks for reading. Look for more articles by me here on CR4 and also on IHS Engineering360. - Roger
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Re: Delicate Audacity: The Saturn V Rocket by Roger Pink
