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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."
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.
And before people complain about rocket engines not advancing at the same rate as microprocessors, let me note that the cost of a rocket is primarily determined by its complexity, not the cost of fuel or the size of the engines. A simple rocket engine (like the F1) that burns kerosene and oxygen is often cheaper than super advanced rocket engines like those on the Space Shuttle.
The F1 is a perfect example of a big dumb booster. It is cheap, especially so if you mass produce it. The Space Shuttle Main Engines are examples of non-stone age rocket design that uses advanced materials and tries to be reusable. Guess which one is cheaper to operate?
Here's a hint: the Russians like big dumb boosters for a reason.
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!
Yeahbut....we wouldn't be basing the new F-1 type engine on the original F-1, we'd be using the F-1A.
The F-1A has 33 percent more thrust than the F-1.
9,189.60 kN for the F-1A versus 7,887 kN for the RD-171
But here is where the real difference comes in:
Lox/RP-1. Thrust to Weight Ratio: 115.71. for the F-1A
It's 82 for your Russian motor. Thus the advantage of using one combustion chamber compared to using 4.
Modern materials should lighten the F-1A and modern controls should improve efficiency and thrust even more to improve the thrust to weight ratio.
Why the Russians never use large combustion chambers and why you see 4 of them on the RD-171: They never solved the problem of combustion instability beyond a certain size. We did.
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BMO
What's left of the test area is a toxic and radioactive waste site, as well...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory
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Saturn V wasn't used to boost large payloads to LEO
On a lunar mission, the Saturn V would put the Command and Service Module, the Lunar Module, and a booster with enough fuel to put them both on a lunar trajectory, into LEO. That's a pretty damn large payload, the largest payload to LEO of any single vehicle ever produced. The fact that the payload eventually boosted itself the rest of the way to the moon isn't relevant to the vehicle's ability to put mass into LEO.
It is the nature of rocketry that any small mass in a high orbit will tend to get there by going through a period in which it is a large mass in a lower orbit. In a staged rocket, it is useful to think of each stage as its own vehicle, with all of the stages above it as its payload which it is capable of delivering to a certain point.
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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...