Confirmed: F-1 engine salvaged from ocean floor is from Apollo 11 rocket
Back in March, we reported on Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' company Bezos Expeditions, which raised a significant amount of Saturn V F-1 engine components from the floor of the Atlantic ocean. Bezos Expeditions suspected that many of the components they had recovered belonged to not just any Saturn V, but to SA-506—the rocket that carried three men to humankind's first moon landing in July of 1969.
In a blog post this morning, Bezos Expeditions confirmed that careful analysis has revealed a faintly visible serial number stamped on several parts of one of the recovered thrust chambers. That serial number—2044—corresponds with F-1 engine number F-6044, which was installed in the center position as engine #5 in SA-506.
Confirmed: F-1 engine salvaged from ocean floor is from Apollo 11 rocket
Timely discovery coincides with 44th anniversary of first lunar landing tomorrow.
by Lee Hutchinson - July 19 2013, 1:25pm EDT
Space54 Back in March, we reported on Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' company Bezos Expeditions, which raised a significant amount of Saturn V F-1 engine components from the floor of the Atlantic ocean. Bezos Expeditions suspected that many of the components they had recovered belonged to not just any Saturn V, but to SA-506—the rocket that carried three men to humankind's first moon landing in July of 1969.
In a blog post this morning, Bezos Expeditions confirmed that careful analysis has revealed a faintly visible serial number stamped on several parts of one of the recovered thrust chambers. That serial number—2044—corresponds with F-1 engine number F-6044, which was installed in the center position as engine #5 in SA-506.
Bezos ExpeditionsRecovery of anything from three miles beneath the ocean's surface is a significant achievement, of course, but the very rocket engines that flew humans to their first lunar landing are obviously of particular historical importance. Bezos and his company plan to restore the components to construct at least one museum-quality engine for public display.
The F-1 remains a monumental technical achievement, and one that is still being studied today. Each of the Saturn V's first stage F-1 engines gulped one ton of fuel and two tons of oxidizer per second, and they produced a staggering 1.5 million pounds of thrust. At peak thrust, the Saturn V's five F-1 engines together produced the equivalent of 60 gigawatts of energy—roughly equal to the peak electricity demand of the entire United Kingdom.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/07/confirmed-f-1-engine-salvaged-from-ocean-floor-is-from-apollo-11-rocket/
= new reply since forum marked as read
For one, korolev and the other guy - glushko? Didnt get along or work well together, so in essence they were running two parallel programs. And while korolev was a genius on the order of von braun, certainly, he died at an inopportune moment for the russian program.
And the russians never made the technological advances needed beyond their early lead in heavy lifting capability. Gemini was a far more advanced craft than anything they put into orbit until the soyuz came into its own.
That picture Warren put above is the N1 rocket - which they hoped to send to the Moon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_%28rocket%29
4 flights:
February 21, 1969: The rocket exploded at 12,200 m altitude, 69 seconds after liftoff
July 3, 1969: 5-9 seconds after liftoff at 150-200 meters above the pad, a loose bolt was ingested into an oxygen pump, which exploded. [9] After detecting the inoperative fuel pump, the automatic engine control shut off 29 of 30 engines, which caused the rocket to fall. The rocket exploded 23 seconds after shutting off the engines, destroying the rocket and launch tower.[10] The destroyed complex was photographed by American satellites, disclosing that the Soviet Union was building a Moon rocket.[8] The rescue system saved the dummy spacecraft again. After this flight, fuel filters were installed in later models.[8]It also took 18 months to rebuild the launch pad and delayed launches. This is one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions in human history.
June 26, 1971: the vehicle was destroyed 51 seconds after liftoff at 1 km altitude
November 23, 1972: the engines ran for 106.93 seconds after which pogo oscillation of the first stage (a problem also encountered on the US Saturn V second and eighth flights, but ultimately solved) caused engine cutoff at 40 km altitude; a programmed shutdown of some of the engines to prevent over-stressing of the structure led to an explosion of the oxygen pump on engine number 4.[8] The vehicle disintegrated.
And that was after earlier disasters, like:
, who was killed in the explosion. As commanding officer of the Soviet Union's Strategic Rocket Forces, Nedelin was head of the R-16 development program.
On 23 October, the prototype R-16 was installed on launching pad 41 (Russian: ТП-41, техническая позиция 41) awaiting final tests before its firing. The missile was over 30 m long, 3.0 m in diameter and had a launch weight of 141 tons. The rocket was fueled with Devil's Venom — hypergolic UDMH-nitric acid with dinitrogen tetroxide — which was used because of the high boiling temperatures and hence storability of the fuel and oxidizer despite being extremely corrosive and toxic. These risks were accounted for in the safety requirements of the launch procedures, but Nedelin's insistence on performing tests before November 7th (anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution) resulted in extreme schedule pressure, with numerous safety procedures being ignored in order to economize time.
A short circuit in the replaced main sequencer caused the second stage engines, while being tested before launch, to fire inadvertently. This detonated the first-stage fuel tanks directly below, destroying the missile in an enormous explosion. Automatically activated cameras set around the launching pad filmed the explosion. People near the rocket were instantly incinerated; those farther away were burned to death or poisoned by the toxic fuel component vapors. Andrei Sakharov described many details—as soon as the engines were fired, most of the personnel there ran to the perimeter but were trapped inside the security fence and then engulfed in the fireball of burning fuel. The resultant explosion incinerated Nedelin, a top aide, the USSR's top missile guidance designer, and seventy-one other officers and engineers.[2] Missile designer Mikhail Yangel and test range commanding officer survived only because they had left to smoke a cigarette behind a bunker a few hundred yards away.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe
