Saturn V rocket is truly a mighty rocket and still the most powerful ever built. The Saturn V grew out of a U.S. military requirement in the late 1950s for a booster big enough to launch massive satellites. The “V” stands for the five giant F-1 rocket engines clustered at the bottom of Saturn V’s first stage, and Rocketdyne provided 33 of the engines. At one point, a four-engine version of the rocket, the Saturn IV, had been considered, but in the complex tradeoffs that led to the final design of NASA’s Moon rocket, the “V” variant won out.
The guiding spirit behind NASA’s moon rocket and the man behind building this massive rocket was Wernher von Braun. He had dreamed as a young engineer in Germany of a rocket able to reach the moon. He was enlisted with the U.S. Army (later NASA) team in Huntsville, Alabama, and he was the man chosen to lead this mighty endeavor.
Who built Saturn V’s three stages?
The Saturn V’s three stages were built and tested by a staff of private contractors and subcontractors at facilities stretching from California to Alabama. Boeing had built the first stage at Michoud outside New Orleans. North American created the Saturn V’s second stage at Seal Beach, California, and the third stage of the rocket was built by Douglas Aircraft [later McDonnell Douglas] at Huntington Beach, California.
The three stages traveled by barge and custom-made aircraft to Cape Kennedy in Florida for assembly at the Vehicle Assembly Building when the pieces were ready. Among the impressive statistics about the Vehicle Assembly Building were its height (525 feet, 30 feet shorter than the Washington Monument) and its capacity (nearly twice as big as the Pentagon).
Thirteen Saturn V rolled out on a massive “crawler” to their launch pads. At more than $100 million each (comparable to $750 million today), they departed Earth, then fell in pieces into the ocean.
Who built the Instrument Unit for Saturn V?
IBM built the Instrument Unit at Huntsville, Alabama. The Saturn V’s Instrument Unit, the “brains,” was responsible for the rocket’s guidance and navigation. The ring-like structure fits between the rocket’s topmost third stage and the Apollo spacecraft.
Every wire in every plug in the Instrument Unit had to join precisely the correct wire, with no electrical interference or change of signal strength. A command signal had to work from the Instrument Unit through the third and second stages and then into the first stage.
And after the different stages had been put together, they had to be checked out as an entity. Plus, once this had been done, you didn’t want to break the electrical connections again. When the Instrument Unit orders “Go right,” you surely don’t want an engine three stages down to go left.
The F-1 rocket engine revealed a problem.
Saturn V’s F-1 rocket engine was completely new because of its size. The engineers had tested small engines, even the J-2 [used on the Saturn second and third stages], which was about half the size or less. And their operations with smaller sizes were never anything like the F-1.
A test with the F-1 thrust chamber revealed a problem with the combustion instability of the oxygen in very large chambers. The engineers had never seen that in smaller chambers because they were confined, and they had no chance of combusting in step form. Because they were carrying men on top of the rocket, the rocket engineers could not stand any combustion instability because it would blow the chamber apart and probably decimate the astronauts that were riding it.
The solution to this problem with the instability was solved by putting hundreds of cameras in the thrust chamber. Their lenses pointed to the combustion zone near the injector. The engineers inserted pyrotechnic “bombs” in cavities outside the chamber, and they blew up the bomb to determine how big of an explosion it would take to cause this instability.
The rocket engineers took months to evaluate the amount of surge they could put into it.
And after about two years, they came up with a design that used dams in the injector face to form cavities, which were small enough to not allow surges. They ran some 50 to 100 tests, with absolutely no instability. They’ve beaten the problem of running a stable, very large thrust chamber with these propellants.
The Kennedy Space Center director, Dr. Kurt Debus
Dr.Kurt Debus and about 100 German colleagues, led by Wernher von Braun, worked first at Fort Bliss, Texas, before relocating to Huntsville, Ala. Their work became the focal point of the Army’s rocket and space projects, and Cape Canaveral became their launch site.
Every time the engineers had an engine problem on a test stand or anywhere, Debus wanted an explanation. The chief engineers would roll up the blueprints, lay them out on Debus’s desk, and explain what they did or didn’t do and what the failure was. That was the technology back then. They had rolled-up blueprints.
“It was a sign of weakness not to be able to work the maximum number of hours.”
The rocket engineers worked hard. There wasn’t any such thing as a 40-hour week, and they basically worked around the clock, seven days a week. So it sort of became a way of their life. JAMES MIZELL, Engineer and Manager, Kennedy stated, “I remember later on in the program, another guy and I counted 75 people out of our offices who had divorced. Seventy-five and that didn’t include just the men; that was the ladies also. The tensions were just so tight.
Furthermore, it was looked upon as a sign of weakness not to be able to work the maximum number of hours and handle the most stressful situations. There was no such thing as saying you couldn’t do something. That was one reason the Apollo program was so successful because the engineers devoted 110 percent of their minds and their ability to the problems that existed.
Do you want to know more about Saturn V? Head over to this article: Why Are The Interstage Rings of Saturn V Corrugated?