What should NASA have done with the two Saturn V’s left over when the Apollo programme was brought to an end?
I know that Skylab was pieced together out of surplus Apollo hardware. Couldn’t NASA have done something more imaginative with the last two Saturn V’s?
I know that a section of the one of the Saturn V rockets is in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum because you get to stare at the big ring and go ‘oooo. big.’
This may be an urban legend, but there’s anecdotal evidence of a fellow appropriately named “The Rocket Guy” who I believe was a member of the faculty at an eastern university who bought a chunk of space hardware at auction for a fraction of the original cost to US taxpayers. He then donated this item to charity. Before tax laws were changed, he was able to deduct the original cost of the rocket off his taxes pretty much permanently.
I remember being somewhat chagrined as a kid when I saw the wimpy rockets being used for skylab and the like. The Saturn V was definitely big.
What can it be used for?
It can help send me to the moon!
There is a Saturn V on display at Cape Canaveral, on its side next to the Vehicle Assembly Building. And the tour gives you all of 30 seconds (or so it feels) to get off the bus, sprint around it and get back on the damn bus. I was a little chuffed.
OK, Montfort, but is there any particular part of the moon you’d like to see? Aristarchus? Tycho? Farside?
So I guess the other one is at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It stands (actually lies would be closer to the truth) in strark contrast to the Mercury Redstone and “Little Joe” rockets nearby.
Here’s a link with good pics:
http://www1.jump.net/~pkrouse/hardware/jscrp.htm
With regards to the OP, the Saturn V’s were NASA’s last truly heavy lift vehicles. They could be used (obviously) to send a relatively small payload to the moon, or a relatively large payload up to low Earth orbit (LEO). They were not used, I expect, because of the general loss of interest in big-bucks manned missions in the 1970’s. The whole rationale for the Space Shuttle was that, by being reusable, missions would be much cheaper. The Saturns were one-shot deals.
Hmm… I recall reading a story recently that NASA sent some engineers on a mission to the Space Center museum, to cannibalize some parts from a Saturn V that was on display. Apparently the museum was irate because some of their prime displays were raided for parts. I’ll have to hunt around for the story.
If you’re going to the moon Montfort, watch out for those teeny tiny aliens™, or rather more accurately, teeny tiny aliens that look like blurry rocks™.
According to this page http://www.friends-partners.org/mwade/lvfam/saturnv.htm the two leftover flightworthy Saturn V’s are on display at Cape Canaveral as previously mentioned and at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama (where Von Braun’s team was based). The Saturn V in Houston is made up of “static test article” stages. Unless they’ve changed things, you can walk around the Saturn in Huntsville at your leisure. They also have a full size Shuttle on display too, the orbiter was a mock-up used during on-ground testing in the '70s.
I’m sure all NASA really wanted to do with there remaining Saturns was to go to the moon a couple more times. Other than Skylab I don’t believe there was anything else even on the drawing board at the time that needed a rocket that big.
The Saturn V at KSC is now housed in the Apollo Center, a wonderful museum of Apollo-era specific hardware and artifacts. And when you visit, you can linger beside this magnifcent vehicle as long as you wish…
KSC has also begun a “Then and Now” history tour of all the historic manned launch sites. I stood on the spot where Al and Gus left on their Mercury cannonball flights as well as visted (and touched!) the remains of the Apollo 1 launch platform. All very exciting and erie.
Check the thread I linked to, but I don’t really care, as long as it’s not on the far side. I wanna see Earth floating in the sky.
As for specific locales, Hadley Rille sounds pretty cool, based on Apollo mission stories, but I definitely wouldn’t mind Tycho, so I can start digging up the monolith.
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I just saw the Saturn V at Cape Canaveral last month. (I believe there’s another tour that lets you hang out at the exhibit, MrDeath–I ate lunch there!) Here’s the real tragedy:
NASA couldn’t think of ANYTHING to do with their old stuff. The Saturn V, the LEM, the lunar rover (all hanging in this massively huge room)–even the entire mission control room (which they recreated there) was just going to be THROWN OUT. Luckily, the co. brought in to manage the visitors center grabbed up as much as they could before then.
In any event, I guess museum display makes the most sense. They kept them around past the moon prog. to use as emergency vehicles during the Skylab days. After that, with the shuttle gaining new prominence (and all of the mission control stuff, the VAB, service crews, etc., geared up for shuttle work), it wasn’t worth the cost to mount a new mission. Plus, as per the recently mothballed satellite proposed by Al Gore, it costs millions to keep such equipment in storage, and millions more to bring it out of storage and ready it for launch. So even saving it for an unknown future flight (i.e., using it as a heavy lifting vehicle for ISS parts, etc.) likely wouldn’t have been cost-effective. They wrote it off.
I can’t remember which US presidential hopeful remarked that NASA had the parts for several complete Saturn V rockets lying around, but sadly they would never assemble them because there was no manual, and no way to get all the specialists back together to build them (he was eluding to how unorganized governmental operations can be).
Of course, even if there were a manual, NASA wouldn’t have any plans to assemble the venerable giants now, would they? I thought it was a moot point, par for the politician’s course.
I guess things have changed for the better since 1993. Now I officially have to go back.
[ul][li]A goodly percentage of the people who worked on the original Saturn V are dead.[]The blueprints do still exist.[]Hi Opal![]Many of the parts that would be needed to get a Saturn V back into working order are no longer being made.[]If we* really wanted to, we could probably build a smaller, safer rocket with a higher payload rating, for less money than it would cost to launch a Saturn V.But we don’t want to.[/ul][/li]
I’m not trying to apologise for NASA, the more I see of how they work these days the less I’m impressed by them. On the other hand, when the choice is between defending a politician and defending NASA, there’s no contest.
*By ‘we’ I mean, as always, ‘the human race’. I would bet Arianespace could do it in two years.
Isn’t the latest version of the Russian Proton rocket the most powerful rocket ever built? Or is it just the most powerful one currently in use? Or am I just on crack? Let me find a cite.
I think Proton might be the most powerful launch vehicle in use at the moment. The Soviet Energia booster was more powerful. Could you get to the moon with an Energia, using a Proton as an upper stage?
You’re right: Energiya is the most powerful. I was mixing the two up.
Looks like the Energiya could make it to the moon on its own without difficulty, per the link below, which compares various rockets’ lifting capabilities. Energiya 95 tons, Saturn V 100 tons. I can’t imagine that the 5 tons would make much difference, or couldn’t be compensated for w/o too much trouble.
http://www-sn.jsc.nasa.gov/PlanetaryMissions/EXLibrary/DOCS/EIC042.HTML
[quote]
[li]If we* really wanted to, we could probably build a smaller, safer rocket with a higher payload rating, for less money than it would cost to launch a Saturn V.[/li][/quote]
Don’t count on it. The Saturn V is the only rocket in history to have never suffered a catastrophic failure. Maybe we could build a safer rocket… But there’s no evidence that we ever have.