How NASA Brought the F-1 Rocket Engine Back To Life

First time accepted submitter Martin S. writes "How NASA Engineers have reverse engineered the F1 engine of a Saturn V launcher, because: 'every scrap of documentation produced during Project Apollo, including the design documents for the Saturn V and the F-1 engines, remains on file. If re-creating the F-1 engine were simply a matter of cribbing from some 1960s blueprints, NASA would have already done so. A typical design document for something like the F-1, though, was produced under intense deadline pressure and lacked even the barest forms of computerized design aids. Such a document simply cannot tell the entire story of the hardware. Each F-1 engine was uniquely built by hand, and each has its own undocumented quirks. In addition, the design process used in the 1960s was necessarily iterative: engineers would design a component, fabricate it, test it, and see how it performed. Then they would modify the design, build the new version, and test it again. This would continue until the design was "good enough."'

Comments

Mentioned this last week

[T.E.D.]

I mentioned this in a comment last week. Manned spaceflight in the USA is essentially a matter of history, not something we know how to do today. If we wanted (for whatever reason) to go back to the moon, we'd bascially have to start over from scratch. It would probably take as at least as long as the original Apollo program, and cost far more.

After the fall of the Roman empire, knowledge of concrete was lost, and for about 500 years Europeans were walking around Roman buildings and upon Roman roads that they had no idea how to recreate. Right now all our Apollo engineers are dead or dying, and the Astronauts will soon follow suit. Soon there will be no living human who has set foot on another world. Then we will know just how those Medieval Europeans felt when we go look at our old Apollo relics in the museums.

Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids?

[Geoffrey.landis]

This flies in the face of at least history. It also flies in the face of the usual mythology that NASA invented the computer. Which is it?

NASA didn't invent the computer. However, in the 1950s computers were room-sized assemblies of hardware. NASA and the Air Force were the only two entities that needed computers that were smaller than that (the Air Force to put in missiles, NASA to put in spacecraft). The Block I Apollo computer was the driver for integrated circuits, and hence the grandfather of all of today's desktop computers (called "microcomputers" back in the old days, when "non-micro" computers meant the Univacs and 1103 and the other big iron of the day.
http://www.computerhistory.org/semiconductor/timeline/1962-Apollo.html

They had no computers, or they invented them?

Both.

It's neither, actually. But by 1963 manufacturing, at least for the money-means-nothing military, was already computerized.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=_1g1b_EeVHw&NR=1
Why do you think it's called "numerically controlled" and not "digital"? It's because the whole concept is so old that the wording has had time to become obsolete.

The comment you're responding to was about computer design tools--CAD--not about numerically-controlled milling machines. And for that matter, the numerically-controlled milling machines of 1963 weren't really what you would call general purpose computers.