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NASA Considers Apollo-Era F1 Engine For Space Launch System
MarkWhittington writes "A company named Dynetics, in partnership with Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, will perform a study contract for NASA to explore whether a modern version of the Saturn V F1 booster (PDF) could be used on the Space Launch System. These would be the basis for a liquid fueled rocket that would enhance the SLS to make it capable of launching 130 metric tons to low Earth orbit, thus making it capable of supporting deep space exploration missions in the 2020s."
Is there any reason we shouldn't recycle designs when it comes to rocket engines? Of course (maybe?) we could use modern tools to help improve efficiency but is there anything to gain by starting from scratch?
I really wish I understood more about rocketry and satellites :/
>Why even study redesigning the F1?
Because it's the largest liquid fueled engine in existence, and it works. Nobody has anything comparable to it, not even the Russians. There's a reason why the Russians use so many smaller engines.
Why design from scratch when you have known working prototypes? Only fools reinvent the wheel. Indeed, going back and redesigning the "shower head" fuel injection plate would be just nuts as it works fabulously.
A lighter, more efficient F-1A would be really, really sweet.
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BMO
Same here. When I was a kid, my bet friend's dad was on the design team. He brought a rolled up, full size drawing of the Saturn V rocket (not just the booster) and laid it out on the athletic field at school. It is also the second loudest device ever created by man. The first being the hydrogen bomb!
I grew up in the San Fernando Valley of "Valley Gurl" legend, but it was also the place the RocketDyne tested their engines. At the northwest end of the valley during the 60s, it would be a quiet summer day and them the silence would be split by a deafening roar coming from the Santa Susanna mountains. If we were up in the hills at one of the local parks, we might even catch a glimpse of a column of smoke. Pretty amazing times. Pretty awesome machine.
Saturn V wasn't used to boost large payloads to LEO with the exception of Skylab. False comparison.
Uh, what do you think an Apollo mission was?
One supposes that it might be economical if it's properly mass produced and not required to be man-rated.
Yes. Now perhaps you can explain where all these 150 ton payloads are that need a mass-produced heavy lifter that will, at least initially, cost billions of dollars per flight?
Hint: they don't exist. There's no budgeted payload for this launcher.
This is what I like about rocket engines. A rocket engine designed for a specific load in the 60s and today would have nearly the same design. A modernized F1 is entirely logical.
There have been plenty of advances since the 60s, especially in the materials sciences,
it's just that no one but NASA would spend the money on R&D.
Even the private space companies of today are building their engines using cast-offs from the NASA programs of old.
They look for parts in a California junkyard called Norton Sales, where used NASA parts go to die.
You're not going to find cheap rocket grade titanium turbopumps anywhere else in the world.
Heck, even NASA has had to go scrounging through that junkyard,
because they've destroyed the blueprints for so many old pieces of equipment,
that the only way to rebuild them is to find an original and reverse engineer it.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
What's left of Rocketdyne still exists, and there's an actual F1 engine in front of their offices on Canoga Avenue, just north of Victory. https://maps.google.com/?ll=34.190997,-118.597948&spn=0.00041,0.000603&t=h&z=21
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I would LOVE to see the F1 back in action. Few things have inspired such awe in me as the launch of a Saturn V rocket and the five tremendous columns of fire atop which it strode.
I've been saying for years that we should simply build an updated Saturn rocket. The primary argument that people threw at me on this was cost: that it would simply cost too much to replace the outdated components in the design. I said that was mush then, and I'll say it now. We (meaning modern countries) continually build updated versions of older designs all the time. It's not that big an obstacle, or that costly either. Not only do we continually update old hardware for current and future use... the B-52 will famously roll along in service for another 25 years, with Boeing sticking new electronics in it... the Russians went one better and simply put their old Tu-95 Bear bombers back into production in the 90's... an aircraft that first flew in 1953. Several Russian rockets are nothing but dressed up old designs, and they work fairly well.
So don't throw the "too costly/too complex" argument at me. Would an updated Saturn would really cost more than the Ares rockets planned for the Constellation program? I really doubt that. We're way too prone to reinvent the wheel on things like these, with an erroneous belief that "new" always equals "better".
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
You're forgetting the F-1A.
The F1 was designed in 1959. The F1A is an improved version, which is what we're really talking about.
And the F1A has these stats:
Rocketdyne Lox/Kerosene rocket engine. 9189.6 kN. Study 1968. Designed for booster applications. Gas generator, pump-fed. Isp=310s.
Thrust (sl): 8,003.800 kN (1,799,326 lbf). Thrust (sl): 816,178 kgf. Engine: 8,098 kg (17,853 lb). Chamber Pressure: 70.00 bar. Area Ratio: 16. Propellant Formulation: Lox/RP-1. Thrust to Weight Ratio: 115.71.
Status: Study 1968.
Unfuelled mass: 8,098 kg (17,853 lb).
Height: 5.48 m (17.97 ft).
Diameter: 3.61 m (11.84 ft).
Thrust: 9,189.60 kN (2,065,904 lbf).
Specific impulse: 310 s.
Specific impulse sea level: 270 s.
Burn time: 158 s.
First Launch: 1967.
Source: http://www.astronautix.com/engines/f1a.htm
The RD-170 has these stats:
Chambers: 4. Thrust (sl): 7,550.000 kN (1,697,300 lbf). Thrust (sl): 769,876 kgf. Engine: 9,750 kg (21,490 lb). Chamber Pressure: 245.00 bar. Area Ratio: 36.87. Thrust to Weight Ratio: 82.66. Oxidizer to Fuel Ratio: 2.6.
AKA: 11D520.
Status: Development ended 1976.
Unfuelled mass: 9,750 kg (21,490 lb).
Height: 3.78 m (12.40 ft).
Diameter: 4.02 m (13.17 ft).
Thrust: 7,903.00 kN (1,776,665 lbf).
Specific impulse: 337 s.
Specific impulse sea level: 309 s.
Burn time: 150 s.
First Launch: 1981-93.
Number: 12 .
Source: http://www.astronautix.com/engines/rd170.htm
Chest thumping? I think not.
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BMO
So we're getting the Nazis to build this one too?
Back in the early 90s there was a study done on the feasibility of returning the F-1 into production relative to developing a single use version of the SSME (Space shuttle main engine), and back then it would have been cheaper even after you include the start up costs to go with the F-1.
The reason for this is that back when the F-1 was pulled from production a massive effort to secure the institutional knowledge of how to build the engines was undertaken. Thousands of hours of recorded conversions with everyone from the designers to the engineers to the guys on the shop floor on how the engines were built, what problems were encountered, and how the problems were solved.
As a side note, the Soviets kept the Bear in production for most of the 60's, 70's and 80's which is why they were able to keep building them. The B-52 production stopped in the first half of the 60's, and because the forge that was used to make the single-piece main spar wasn't in use any more, it was scrapped.
Now, you could redesign the wing to use a multiple piece main spar like modern airliners, but then you wouldn't have the B-52 any more, you'd have something else.
Von Braun didn't either but instead worked around it, which was possible using several engines instead of relying on continuous output from a single engine. The F-1 bounced around all over the place, but that was known behaviour.
I grew up in Canoga Park and West Hills.... I got to see the Santa Susanna mountains light up when they ran tests when I was a kid in the '60s... then I got lucky:
I worked at Rocketdyne during the 80s... programming 3 and 4 axis Coordinate Measuring Machines, writing data evaluation and utility programs, and Inspection procedures in the "Precision Measuring Room" for the SSME QA organization... there were only about six of us that did that as the technical staff that over saw about 40 Machine Parts Inspectors [A 3 shift operation during the height of SSME]... We touched the hardware for everyone of the shuttle engines... As far as I was concerned workin' at "The Rocket Factory" was my ideal job...
We had a mixed batch of stuff to work with: Zeiss CMMs [applications to drive the machine and write "measuring routines" was written in HPL on 9000 series "calculators"], an Italian CMM made by DEA with a DEC pdp-11 with 16k of 12 bit core [A C64 had more computing power]... [the measuring app was loaded via paper tape and output was either via DECWriter and/or punch tape]. I got to write an app to read data punch tapes on a Model 43 Teletype Paper tape reader and convert them to an ASCII txt file on a IBM-PC XT
In the mid 80's they upgraded the DEA to use an HP computer that ran HP Rocky Mountain Basic... we did not have anything networked-- it was all sneaker net so I had to write an app for that HP to do a matrix coordinate rotation [from raw coordinate system to measured coordinate system] on the recorded measurements and then output them as a text file to a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk. The disk was walked over to the IBM PC-XT which then read the HP sector formatted disk using a commercial app and written to the IBM's "massive" 10 Mb disk. We then either plotted the data or wrote it to a floppy and delivered it to the Stress engineers... As I understand it that app lasted 9 years without a revision [long after I left]. I also wrote a plotter app that drove an 8 pen HP IEEE-488 Bus Plotter
Languages? MS / IBM compiled basic, HPL, early on we had a time-share plotter app written for us in Fortran, Turbo Pascal [which is what I used to write most of the utility apps for PC because it was cheap and fast]. We also delved into HP calculator programs [HP11 and HP-67].
I once got to go up to the Hill for a static firing of a set of Atlas engines [three engine set] at 3/4 of a mile away the engines sonic waves prevented me from catching a breath while the engines were firing...an F-1 has about 10 mtimes the thrust as an Atlas Set.
Oh the stories...The memories...