First Launch of a Saturn V
AS-501, the first launch of the Saturn V, took place on the 9 November 1967 thus starting the unmanned Apollo 4 test flight and America's goal to put a man on the Moon by the end of that decade. It is clear from watching video of the launch, television programmes and reading about the reactions of those who witnessed the lift-off, that no-one was prepared for what happened.
The pressure waves caused by the five F-1 engines at lift-off took 15 seconds to reach the news cabins of NBS and CBS; it shook buildings, part of the CBS cabin's roof caved in, tape recorders at NBC were thrown to the floor, windows were broken. And all this from 3 miles away. Jules Bergman, science editor for ABC news commented to a colleague: 'Frank, there's just never been anything like it...not until you've felt your flesh vibrate ...and your body thunder with the vibration from that rocket going could you sense the excitement'. Its roar could be heard across the state of Florida.
Dr David Baker (ex NASA): 'The power and the noise are indescribable and the all-pervading sense of being overwhelmed is profound, as though the brightness will outdo the Sun. The thunder coming up through the ground is as encroaching as an earthquake". Seismic measuring stations over 1300 miles away recorded the shock wave.
Apollo 11
When Gene Krantz, Flight Director during Gemini and Apollo programmes, Lead Flight Director during Apollo 13 and Flight Director during the the Apollo lunar landing read President John Kennedy's speech to a joint session of Congress on May 25 1961, he 'found it difficult to grasp that our nation had established the lunar target as the prize in the space race".
"To those of us that had watched our rockets keel over, spin out of control, or blow up, the idea of putting a man on the Moon seemed almost too breathtakingly ambitious".
However, when Kennedy affirmed his commitment to the enterprise at his speech at Rice University some sixteen months later and visited Mercury Control at Cape Canaveral with Alan Shepherd and John Glenn he 'made believers out of all of us, even the most skeptical'.
And so, on July 16 1969 at 13:32 GMT in a 'flawless' lift-off from Pad 39A, Apollo 11 departed the Cape. The Saturn V, AS-506 achieved Mach 1 at 13:33:06 and some twelve minutes later, the S-IVB stage placed the astronauts in an initial Earth orbit of 114 by 116 miles.
After one and a half revolutions and two hours forty four minutes into the mission, the S-IVB's single J-2 engine made a second burn of 5 minutes 48 seconds placing Apollo 11 into a translunar orbit,
Columbia separated from the S-IVB and, after transposition and jettisoning the spacecraft-lunar-module adaptor (SLA) panels on the S-IVB, it docked with
Eagle.
Four hours forty minutes into the flight the S-IVB, having served its purpose, was sent into a long solar orbit to clear it from Apollo 11's path, the necessary thrust being achieved by dumping its remaining fuel.
On 17 July at 16:16:58 GMT a midcourse, 1 minute 3 second burn was made to refine Apollo 11's trajectory and Lunar Orbit Insertion was achieved on the 19th July. On the 20th at 20:17:39 GMT Armstrong and Aldrin landed the Lunar Module (LM) at
Tranquility Base, Armstrong's name for the landing site while Mike Collins remained in orbit in
Columbia, the Command and Service Module (CMS). During the descent Armstrong manually piloted
Eagle past an area of boulders, the overloaded computer sounding various alarms.
More of this in the next post.
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| Apollo 11 on its way to the pad |
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| Apollo 11 lifts off for the Moon |
The Vehicle
The Saturn V was a three stage vehicle S-IC, S-II and S-IVB
S-IC - built by Boeing
At 138ft long the S-IC housed two tanks, each about 33ft in diameter one on top of the other with a cylindrical intertank which made room for the domed bulkheads. At the base of the stage was the thrust structure with five F-1 engines which burned a combination of RP-1 (Kerosene) and liquid oxygen (LOX) stored in the upper tank. It was these engines that provided the massive 7.5 million pounds of thrust to get the vehicle into the upper atmosphere.
Thrust Structure and F-1 Engines
The F-1 engine, developed by engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre (MSFC) in Alabama and built by Rocketdyne, is the most powerful single-nozzle liquid-fuelled rocket engine ever built. At 19ft high and 12 ft wide it used LOX and kerosene, the cluster of five engines on the first stage of the Saturn V burning the mixture at a rate of 15 metric tons per second during its two and a half minutes of operation.
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| F-1 Engines being installed at MSFC. The engine in the foreground has no extension nozzle at this stage. |
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| F-1 engine on display at Kennedy Space Centre |
The Model - Revell Apollo Saturn V, 1:144
I started this model in summer while a pulled calf muscle was healing and long before this blog was ready, so I can't show all the parts before assembly. However in this instance not much has been lost since each stage is, essentially, one cylinder on top of another with, bulkheads and engines to be assembled, painted and attached to the structures. A lot of the time was spent puttying and sanding seams because being an old kit, the fit is not perfect.
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| Thrust structure and F-1 engines |
Unfortunately, the engines lack the detail of the 1:96 scale model's engines and lack accuracy. For example, the turbine
and heat exchanger are completely joined to the thrust chamber, rather
than being clear of it before meeting the exhaust manifold - the thick
circular structure about half way up the engine. The thrust chamber is above the manifold and extension nozzle below it. In short, the engines are a poor representation of the real F-1s in several ways so cutting away the join, which I considered doing, would have been a token gesture.
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| Stage S-IC ready for painting |
The strip of masking tape needs to be replaced before the black markings are painted. More of all that later in another post - and much more about the model too.
Technical Information Sources
NASA videos, programmes and the
Flight Manual for the Saturn V
Gene Krantz,
Failure Is Not An Option, Simon and Schuster, 2000
John W Young,
Forever Young, University Press Florida, 2012
W David Woods,
Saturn V, 1967 - 1973 (Apollo 4 to Apollo 17), Haynes 2016
Dr David Baker,
Apollo 13, Haynes
2013
NASA - Apollo 11
I will happily credit the photographs of the F1 engines.
