From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Sat Sep 06 2003 - 10:53:26 MDT
On Sat, Sep 06, 2003 at 12:20:22AM -0400, Randall Randall wrote:
>
> On Friday, September 5, 2003, at 06:49 PM, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> >I have heard that the Saturn 5 blueprints were destroyed -- does anyone
> >know if this claim is valid or an urban legend?
>
> Well, the blueprints are still available, as Kevin mentioned,
> but the harder problem is that they specify lots of 1960s-era
> hardware for which the designs may not be available, and
> which haven't been made in 30 years.
>
> Of course, these could presumably be reverse engineered from
> the function they are supposed to fill, but the design and
> testing that would require might be more usefully spent on
> a functional equivalent to the Saturn V with modern materials.
There are more, and bigger, problems. "Rebuild the Saturn V"
comes up regularly on sci.space.* -- there are arguments
against it.
Firstly, there's the customization issue (as noted earlier in
this thread). Bluntly, the blueprints don't reflect the final
stacks that flew -- at least, not perfectly.
Then there's instrumentation. Almost all the avionics are long
obsolete to such an extent that they'd have to be redesigned
from scratch.
Then there's the pad. Pad 39A was _special_, and so was the
VAB and the crawlers, and they have all been repurposed for
Shuttle ops. You couldn't convert them back for Saturn V ops
without retiring STS (a bit of a gotcha in the current
climate), and building new ground facilities at a cost of
several gigabucks (the VAB was the world's largest single
room building when it was built, the crawler was the largest
non-railroad ground vehicle, and when they built a second
shuttle pad at Vandenburg AFB in the 80's it cost a few
billion for all the kilotons of concrete and hundreds of
kilometres of pipework).
Then there's the jigs for assembling the plumbing. Maybe
setting up to manufacture F1 and J2 engines wouldn't be too
hard, but those were _big_ cylinders and nobody kept the
assembly jigs. It's not impractical to build new tankage
production from scratch, but it's still a large job.
There are other problems. All the measurements and parameters
are pre-metric, some of the materials aren't available any
more, and so on. But those are trivial compared to the big
roadblocks like the lack of ground facilities and avionics.
Various folks have run the figures, and by the time they get
through with them they calculate that re-starting Saturn V
production would cost as much as taking Shuttle tech and
building an unmanned Big Dumb Booster with a 100 ton
payload to LEO, and would probably cost more per flight.
The real scandal is that BDB and Energiya aren't flying.
Because the kit to build them and the knowledge base to make
it work is a lot more recent than Saturn V.
(I will happily agree that cancelling Saturn production in
1966 was an amazingly stupid and short-sighted move and that
an ongoing Saturn program made a lot more sense than Shuttle.
But now we're here, the question "where do we go tomorrow?"
isn't answered by resurrecting a forty-year-old design.)
-- Charlie (who would *really* have liked to see
a Saturn V fly with his own eyes)
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