On Fri, 14 Apr 2000, Technotranscendence wrote:
Regarding the Saturn 5 plans:
> Maybe an FOIA search might uncover something???
I know that I've read something about this but I can't remember
whether it was one of Zubrin's books (Case for Mars?), or
perhaps something out of the Starflight Handbook, or other
papers by Mallove & Matloff et al. But it has been researched
to some degree, the problem is finding out who has the most
recent info. This was the mid-'60's so there have to be a
large number of individuals who actually worked on designing
and building Saturn 5's who are still alive and kicking.
Related to this, given modern day CAD tools and the fact that you
know the Saturn 5 worked, how much of a reduction over the original
effort do you think it would be to take to reproduce the engineering
part of the job? 50% less? 90% less? What fraction of the Apollo
effort went into designing the Saturn 5 and getting it to actually
work?
According to a paper by O'Neill on my desk, in 1975 dollars, the
cost of Apollo was $39 billion, space shuttle development was
$5-8 billion and advanced lift vehicle development was estimated(?)
at $8-25 billion.
> Sad but true in a lot of places, but I still think this would be easier to
> do than making a whole new launch system.
I would have to think though, that scaling up the Arienne 5 or
getting the Energia to be more reliable would be a cheaper approach
than recreating the Saturn 5.
Robert
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