NASA Engineers Test Vintage Engine from Apollo 11 Rocket

Video would be nice.

and?

I heard they had to destroy all the blueprints and everything from the Saturn rockets in order to get funding for the space shuttle. Maybe they are doing some kind of reverse engineering ?

They only tested the gas generator.
A fuel-burning engine which job is it to power the pumps for the rocket engine.
Just that thing is humongous.



Here's one: [link to www.usnews.com]



You heard wrong.

In 1968 (yes, before the first Apollo landing) NASA stopped ordering Saturn Vs, the last of the 15 was finished in 1970.
In 1969 the president was advised on a number of options for the post-Apollo programme
Nixon leaned towards the "develop LEO infrastructure" option.
NASA said that with the proposed funding levels they could not develop and build a space shuttle and at the same time build a space station.
In 1972 Nixon decided to go with the Space Shuttle. (I was a disaster.)
The machinery for manufacturing the Saturn were refurbished to manufacture Space Shuttle parts.
Their operators were retrained.
And Saturn and STS was never an option.

The design documents that weren't superfluous were converted to micro-fiches and archived.
A lot of it is now at the National Archives.


The F-1 is by far the biggest rocket engine ever build.
It was developed in the late 1950s, so pretty much everyone involved is no longer available for questioning.

The current generation of engineers has no familiarity with them.
And there is only so much you can glean from old design documents and technical reports.
NASA is now trying to develop a new heavy-lift launcher (the SLS) that actually would be more powerful than the Saturn V.
So indeed these youngsters are trying to learn from how the old-timers did it.


Last Edited by Halcyon Dayz, FCD on 01/25/2013 04:30 PM

Is this so they can carry on teaching future moon hoax debunkers in the year 2169 the technicalities of how appollo 11 made it to the moon wrapped in Baco foil stuck together with duct tape?

No, I think you might be wrong. I heard first hand from a rocket scientist that I met who worked on the program that congress insisted that the designs be destroyed in order to get the funding for the space shuttle. The documents that are in the national archives are just what is left over and are incomplete.

What kind of mental aberration makes you mistake thermal foil and high-tech adhesive tape (as used on pretty much all pure space craft) for Baco foil (whatever that is) and duct tape?

It wasn't just Apollo 11 that made it to the surface of the Moon so shinely wrapped, btw.
Are you one of those hoaxies so utterly ignorant of Apollo that they don't even know there were 6 landings?



Maybe your friend mistook some of the remarks made by senator Proxmire.
Congress doesn't get to tell thousands of private companies what to do with their intellectual property.

NASA still has own stuff available on its Technical Reports Server. [link to ntrs.nasa.gov]
Tons of very detailed references available all over the internet.


They were never complete, as in all in one place.
Thousands of subcontractors, remember?
Nobody keeps around every scrap of paper. Consider that every single LM came with its own boxcar of documentation.
Once you know a certain product is never going to be manufactured again you throw out the stuff that doesn't contain any actual technological information or in-house expertise.
Otherwise you'd run out of storage space real fast.

The problem with the Apollo collection at the National Archives isn't that it doesn't contain everything NASA ever knew about Apollo, but that it isn't properly indexed.
One of those things Congress keeps dragging its feet about funding over.
The stuff is there, just hard to find.

That about sums it up

Fantastic, I love this stuff - man in space, not war!

Wait, what?

I'm gonna have to read that. The only motors recovered from Apollo 11 would be the RCS quads on the CM. Everything else is non-recoverable; Saturn-V 1st stage went into the ocean, III was crash-landed on the Moon as was the APS, DPS is of course still parked on the Sea of Tranquility, etc.

Ah. I just read it. They fired up an F-1 that had been DX'd about the time of Apollo 11. NOT an actual flown engine.

Naw. By that time the few remaining gullible sheep will be left ignored in a corner along with the flat-Earthers and people who hear aliens talking to them through their tires.