- Young, Anthony.
The Saturn V F-1 Engine.
Chichester, UK: Springer Praxis, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-387-09629-2.
-
The F-1 rocket engine
which powered the first
(S-IC)
stage of the
Saturn V
booster, which launched all of the Apollo missions to the Moon
and, as a two stage variant, the
Skylab space
station, was one of the singular engineering achievements
of the twentieth century, which this magnificent book chronicles
in exquisite detail. When the U.S. Air Force contracted with
Rocketdyne in 1958 for the preliminary design of a single
chamber engine with between 1 and 1.5 million pounds of thrust,
the largest existing U.S. rocket engine had less than a quarter the
maximum thrust of the proposed new powerplant, and there was no experience
base to provide confidence that problems such as ignition
transients and combustion instability which bedevil liquid
rockets would not prove insuperable when scaling an engine
to such a size. (The Soviets were known to have heavy-lift
boosters, but at the time nobody knew their engine configuration.
In fact, when their details came to be known in the West, they
were discovered to use multiple combustion chambers and/or
clustering of engines precisely to avoid the challenges of
very large engines.)
When the F-1 development began, there was no rocket on the drawing
board intended to use it, nor any mission defined which would
require it. The Air Force had simply established that such an
engine would be adequate to accomplish any military mission
in the foreseeable future. When NASA took over responsibility
for heavy launchers from the Air Force, the F-1 engine became
central to the evolving heavy lifters envisioned for missions
beyond Earth orbit. After Kennedy's decision to mount a manned
lunar landing mission, NASA embarked on a furious effort to define
how such a mission could be accomplished and what hardware would
be required to perform it. The only alternative to heavy lift would
be a large number of launches which assembled the Moon ship
in Earth orbit, which was a daunting prospect at a time when not
only were rockets famously unreliable and difficult to launch on
time, but nobody had ever so much as attempted rendezvous in space,
no less orbital assembly or refuelling operations.
With the eventual choice of
lunar orbit rendezvous
as the mission mode, it became apparent
that it would be possible to perform the lunar landing mission with
a single launch of a booster with 7.5 million pounds of sea level
thrust, which could be obtained from a cluster of five F-1 engines
(which by that time NASA had specified as 1.5 million pounds of
thrust). From the moment the preliminary design of the Saturn V
was defined until Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, the definition,
design, testing, and manufacturing of the F-1 engine was squarely
on the critical path of the Apollo project. If the F-1 did not work,
or was insufficiently reliable to perform in a cluster of five and
launch on time in tight lunar launch windows, or could not have been
manufactured in the quantities required, there would be no
lunar landing. If the schedule of the F-1 slipped, the Apollo project
would slip day-for-day along with its prime mover.
This book recounts the history, rationale, design, development,
testing, refinement, transition to serial production, integration
into test articles and flight hardware, and service history of
this magnificent machine. Sadly, at this remove, some of the key
individuals involved in this project are no longer with us, but
the author tracked down those who remain and discovered
interviews done earlier by other researchers with the departed,
and he stands back and lets them speak, in lengthy quotations,
not just about the engineering and management challenges they
faced and how they were resolved, but what it felt like
to be there, then. You get the palpable sense from these
accounts that despite the tension, schedule and budget
pressure, long hours, and frustration as problem after problem
had to be diagnosed and resolved, these people were having
the time of their lives, and that they knew it
at the time and cherish it even at a half century's remove.
The author has collected more than a hundred contemporary
photographs, many in colour, which complement the text.
A total of sixty-five F-1 engines powered 13 Saturn V flight
vehicles. They performed with 100% reliability.
January 2012 