proposal for a partly reusable ,SD CEV+payload delivery

[mrmorris]

I was looking for a particular Apollo factoid about the structure of the CSM and happened to find an interesting one on the Saturn V here. Not worth a new thread, and this is the most recent one where the S-V was mentioned... so it got put here, despite the fact that it's completely unrelated:<br /><br /><i>"There are approximately 2-1/2 million solder joints in the Saturn V launch vehicle. If just 1/32 of an inch too much wire were left on each of these joints and an extra drop of solder was used on each of these joints, the excess weight would be equivalent to the payload of the vehicle. "</i><br /><br />What makes me <b>really</b> go 'Hmmm' is the corollary. If the Saturn-V were built with modern electronics, the number of solder joints would likely be 1/10th or less what was used then. What kind of a payload would that have?

 

[spacefire]

too bad we will never find out because we CAN'T build any more Saturn Vs <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p>http://asteroid-invasion.blogspot.com</p><p>http://www.solvengineer.com/asteroid-invasion.html </p><p> </p> </div>

 

[mrmorris]

Ayup... but it makes me wonder why we have such a problem even <b>matching</b> its performance with modern boosters.

 

[frodo1008]

The Saturn V was 33 feet in diameter for the first and second stages. It was a total of 363 feet high. It weighed in at a little over 3,000 tons. About the same as two WWII navy destroyers. The first stage engines (that were at least as powerful as the most powerful Russian engines ever built) had a thrust of 1.5 million pounds each. This comes out to a total thrust of 7.5 million pouds of some 3,750 tons for the first stage. <br /><br />I remember your telling me that just personal experience isn't enough for knowledge, and to some extent you are indeed correct. But I actually worked on F1 engines, one of my first jobs at Rocketdyne was to clean out the machining burrs on the inside passages of the injector of the F1. An injector that weighed almost a ton alone, and was four feet in diameter! I also got to work on the enormous turbo pumps for such engines. I even got to observe a night firing of a set of of those pumps at the Bravo test area on the hill at Santa Su. Just the turbopumps shook the ground from a safe viewing area that I would say had to be at least some 1,000 feet away. The engineers then burned off the effluent of the pumps straight up into the air, the flame was some 300 feet high, and lighted up the entire west San Fernando Valley! So sometimes personal experience IS at least somewhat enlightening!<br /><br />We could not even test the entire F1 at Santa Su, as we did not have a stand big enough with enough fuel and oxidizer capacity, they built special test stands out at Edwards for that.<br /><br />However, we DID test the entire package of engines for the second stage. This was the circle of five J2 engines, each developing some 200,000 lbs of thrust, or one million pounds of thrust for the entire stage. This was done at the Coco test stand area, where long after I had gone from the hill single SSME engines were tested. I would have truly liked to have seen that. However I did get to witness such a test of the J2 engies (and as I was

 

[john_316]

So Frodo how do you feel about the Inline HLV?<br /><br />I think its the next step to get where we are going...<br /><br />I wont say nuclear upper stage like Nova projects but I can envision Nuclear rocket lofted into orbit by IHLV and assembled there on a Earth Departure Stage.<br /><br />I think this new or should say newer system will make you proud....<br /><br /><img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /><br /><br /><br />