this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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Well, he's not wrong technically, but the context feels like it's obviously missing. We have no Saturn V vehicles anymore, nor can we build them again. Starship might require that many launches to get to TLI, but with reusability, it probably can. Not to mention that the cost will come down a bit. So it can at least do it soon.
I'm sure others have more coherent and thought out rebuttals.
why can't we build them again? were the blueprints and knowledge lost? deliberately destroyed? genuine question
Because a lot of "Released Engineering Documents" were just engineering notebooks, and each vehicle was different, even the parts that were supposed to be the same. There was a lot of "repair" versus "rework" disposition, and a "Just make it work; it only needs to work once" culture.
Basically, because it was a race against the Russians, and the Russians were winning.
huh, impressive that we did a (relatively) slapdash job of it and still pulled it off. Thanks for clarifying.
It's downright fucking nuts that it all worked and I'm astonished we didn't leave any astronauts on the moon, and Apollo 13 crew made it back.
Apollo 13 is a helluva movie that really exposes how razor-thin everything was.
The production lines are shut down and any custom tooling has had its materials reclaimed to make other things. The institutional knowledge, the little bits that never got written down in the blueprints or manufacturing instructions, it's all gone. The people who worked on that rocket and its components are dead or have been working on something else for the last 50 years. How well would you remember some little tidbit of information that you last needed half a lifetime ago?
Because the nazis America brought in to build them are all dead.
https://slate.com/technology/2023/08/nasa-nazi-history-von-braun.html
Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/984/
Some say our attitude should be one of gratitude, like the widows and orphans of old London Town who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.
Because it is based on obsolete technology. You wouldn't want to build a flight computer with hard-wired (as in literal wires) software, would you? A lot of it would also have to be reverse engineered, to the point where you might as well build a new vehicle.
We can use an FPGA for that
The software was the thing that was in the wires, not I/O.
The wires would be replaced by FLASH memory.
Wouldn't they use a MROM or something instead, because flash memory can be quite volatile in the extreme conditions?
Because tech evolved, we could do better now.
because they were insanely expensive
No but we have SLS, the modern equivalent
SLS is very expensive, but so was Saturn V. If all goes well we should have multiple providers that can provide SLS-like services more cheaply by on-orbit refueling, but until then we should keep SLS in production. It’s here, development is complete, and it works.