As we advance our technology ever forward you would think that remaking a
50-year old design should be easy but things are not quite as simple as they
first seem.
When the Space Launch System or the SLS was in development NASA ran the advanced
booster competition to find a new booster system and two of the three
entries used liquid fuel engines. Liquid fuel boosters would be safer and could
be shut down in the event of a problem unlike the solid rocket boosters which
cant. However unlike the space shuttle the new boosters would be single-use
only and would burn up when they fell back to earth but which liquid fuel
engines would be powerful enough there really aren't any massive engines in use
today. The boosters could use four same modified RS-25D the engines those left
over from a space shuttle program which would also be used the SLS's main core
stage but that will be very wasteful of a complex expensive and yet highly
efficient engine. Now we've already had an engine capable of doing the job,
the mighty Rocketdyne F-1 the huge engines which took men to the moon with the
Apollo program but they haven't been built since the 1960s. The F-1 engines
were not only extremely powerful but they were also simple which meant they
were cheap enough to be disposable so why don't we just remake them. Now there
is a common myth which says NASA lost or threw away the blueprints which of
course is complete rubbish every design document ever created for the Apollo
program is still available but if it was just a case of wheeling out old designs
they would have done that years ago. No the problem is not the design but it's
for way in which the world has moved on since the engineers first created those
F-1 engines back in the 1960s. When a group of present-day rocket engineers
looked at how they could recreate the iconic F-1 engines they soon realized
just how differently things were done some 50 years ago when there was no
computer-aided design just slide rules and trial and error testing. Components
were designed, built and then tested and then often modified before being used.
Complex engines sub assemblies were welded together from sometimes hundreds
of smaller parts with skilled welders taking sometimes a day to complete one
complex world. Although they had the original blueprints what they found that
was missing was the notes made by the engineers as they effectively
handcrafted every engine, each one slightly different with its own quirks
and foibles. The original builders of the F-1 engines were highly skilled engineers,
welders and fitters they did almost everything by hand because often that
was the only way to do it back then and in the rush to meet deadlines they kept
many of the tricks that they used to get things to work and go together in their
heads or scribbled down on scraps of paper long since lost. Roll on 50 years
and all of those skilled people have long since retired and many have passed
away taking their skills and knowledge with them. With the advent of modern
manufacturing techniques many of those skills are no longer in use and few
people today have them so faced with 50-year old blueprints we find we just
don't have the people with the skills that can make them in the same way
anymore. By detailed examination of the remaining
F-1 engines from museums and storage our new engineers did discover enough to
create a new F-1B engine should it ever be built. Using modern computer modeling
and manufacturing techniques the new engine could not only be more efficient
it would be just as powerful as the uprated but unflown F-1A at 1.8 million
pounds of thrust but more importantly it would reduce the number of
manufactured parts from some 5,600 to just 40 and increase its reliability and
decrease costs in the process. Although in the end NASA selected the solid
rocket boosters for the SLS, this exercise proved that it's sometimes
easier to redesign something from scratch than it is to try and
remake the past. So what do you think of remaking the F-1 engines and also this
new short video format let me know in the comments and I just
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