From: Spike (spike66@comcast.net)
Date: Fri Sep 05 2003 - 21:50:42 MDT
From: Robert J. Bradbury
Subject: SPACE: Loss of the Saturn V
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/05/1731237&mode=thread0
tid=134&tid=160&tid=98&tid=99
"When NASA killed Saturn, they killed more than the vehicle...Two of
these launches could have put the entire ISS as it currently is
configured in orbit!"
Welllll, that might be a bit of overstatement. There is
more to the ISS than lifting mass. They have a tremendous
build-on-orbit task that requires astronauts and time. I
suppose they might have been able to park the pieces on orbit
somehow, then send up astronauts by some means.
I have heard that the Saturn 5 blueprints were destroyed -- does anyone
know if this claim is valid or an urban legend?
Robert that is a far more complex question than it appears.
I have heard this for years. I heard it came out of a
a heated discussion at a congressional committee meeting
in the late 1970s when it became clear that the space shuttle
would not be able to carry as much load as was anticipated.
A proposal was made to build more Saturn Vs, at which time
hot-head made the famous accusation that NASA had
intentionally destroyed the documentation in order to push
the shuttle agenda.
I asked a number of people about this and have gotten
various answers, from which I distill the following
explanation. The accusation was an exaggeration. NASA
microfilmed much of the documentation package and archived
some of the ink-on-vellum drawings. This was in the days
before CADAM, so none of it existed in soft copy. This is
not to say that they have a complete drawing package to
this day, however, as it is quite probable that a *complete*
drawing package never existed. This is what I got from
talking to some old-timers at Lockheed:
My former boss went to work in the space program at age 23
with a freshly minted master's degree in structural engineering.
At that time they were just about to launch the first Atlas
(he is old, but still working at LMCO). He is a thin short
guy. The Atlas was a bit over the target weight, not by much.
They handed him a pair of tin snips and told him to climb up
in that stage and cut away anything he was sure wouldn't hurt
the mission to do without. {8^D The second stage of the
mighty Saturn V had a weight problem. He said they did some
of those kinds of tricks again, never actually documenting
or drawing everything that had been cut away or filed off.
My father was a technician for North American Rockwell as
it was called in those days. He told of a certain subsystem
with a troublesome cover on an access port. There was
an old cat working out there who modified the cover by
making a pair of hinges out of a couple pieces of soft leather
that he had fashioned. The bird flew like that. Thereafter,
they used those leather replacement hinges on all the flights,
never actually documenting how to make them or epoxy them in
place, since the guy who knew how to do it had no plans of
moving on to a different career.
There were plenty of undocumented modifications made in
those days of looser quality control than we have today.
Many of the subcontractors were not required to provide
complete documentation of their subsystems. They didn't
offer them for free. They didn't store them for free
either.
NASA relied upon craftsmen to some extent, and these have
now gone on to retirement. If we were going to ressurrect
the Saturn V today, we would find a lot of engineering would
need to be redone, but this would be the case even if all the
documentation had been completed and perfectly archived,
for many of the components are no longer available. Think
in terms of controls, switches, computer memory etc. Where
would you find magnetic core memory today? Where would you
find a standing army of people who understand Fortran well
enough to maintain and operate the software alone? Think
of all the processes that they had back in those days which
used freon.
The way to the future isn't back. We have a lot of high
techy aluminum alloys now that weren't available in the 60s,
as well as composite materials. We could build a biggie
throwaway booster again today, on the scale of the Saturn V,
only better. But there is probably no way to do it as
cheaply as the Russians can. They need the money, so let's
just buy their stuff and concentrate on miniaturization of
payloads, which the US has always been very good at.
I get ridicule whenever I suggest this, but here goes: As for
space stations and human cargo, I really think we need to
get serious about either miniaturizing people or choosing small
people for space missions. Recall that the weight of a pressure
vessel varies as the cube of the linear dimension, so the
potential weight savings from choosing 5 foot tall astronauts
vs 6 foot tall astronauts is (5/6)^3 =.58 assuming everything
can be scaled down by five sixths. I do not see why not,
over 40 percent weight savings and we are still very much
in the range of ordinary sized humans. Shrimpy humans but
still very ordinary sized. I think we can find people
smaller than that if keep in mind that we have a pool of
6E9 people to choose from.
spike
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