How NASA Brought the F-1 Rocket Engine Back To Life 221
First time accepted submitter Martin S. writes "How NASA Engineers have reverse engineered the F1 engine of a Saturn V launcher, because: 'every scrap of documentation produced during Project Apollo, including the design documents for the Saturn V and the F-1 engines, remains on file. If re-creating the F-1 engine were simply a matter of cribbing from some 1960s blueprints, NASA would have already done so.
A typical design document for something like the F-1, though, was produced under intense deadline pressure and lacked even the barest forms of computerized design aids. Such a document simply cannot tell the entire story of the hardware. Each F-1 engine was uniquely built by hand, and each has its own undocumented quirks. In addition, the design process used in the 1960s was necessarily iterative: engineers would design a component, fabricate it, test it, and see how it performed. Then they would modify the design, build the new version, and test it again. This would continue until the design was "good enough."'
Comment removed (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Why?!? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids? (Score:5, Informative)
I have a news flash for you, young man. Numerical solutions, on computers, for the n body problem were being done in the 1950s, S. von Horner being a notable person in the field.
Yes, analytical math can be used to plan orbits, even done today for first passes. my senior year physics project was orbital calculations by both numerical and multi-variate calculus. No reason what I did couldn't be done on say an IBM 701 or 7000 in the 50s...
SPICE [Re:Lacked the barest of computer aids...] (Score:5, Informative)
They had CAD applications, just not what you think as CAD. Anyways, this is interesting, because when do you think CAD applications started? Did the whole thing just pop into existence fully formed, or were there intermediary steps? Just on the electronics side, look at something like SPICE. It didn't pop into existence with a GUI on a personal computer, it started as a punch-card reading batch application on a mainframe.
SPICE dates to 1972. The Saturn V had been designed, built, flown, and out of production for years by the time SPICE was released to the public.
To be fair, SPICE derived from CANCER ("Computer Analysis of Nonlinear Circuits, Excluding Radiation"). But that was also not released to the public ready until the early 70s (the paper describing it was dated 1971: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1050166 [ieee.org] )
Boom, computer aided design.
"Boom," just in time to be ten years too late to be used in the Apollo program.
Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon... (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, many of the hated design processes these days were actually invented by the Apollo program. They were the brainchild of Gen. Sam Phillips, who was brought in to NASA after the spectacular failures of the Pioneer and Surveyor programs. He had learned process management while leading the Air Force's Minuteman ICBM program, and it was he who dragged the NASA engineers, kicking and screaming, into a world where they had to actually document everything they did. He even wrote a memo a year before the Apollo 1 fire predicting the extreme dangers of the seat-of-the-pants approach Apollo had previously been taking.
A perfect counterexample to Apollo's process system was the European Launcher Development Organization's [wikipedia.org] failed Europa rocket. With six nations contributing engineering work to the rocket and no centralized direction, failure was inevitable.
Slide rules, not computers [Re:Lacked the bare...] (Score:5, Informative)
They needed them smaller, but banks and businesses needed them cheaper and more reliable.
Correct. NASA was the driver for small computers, where "small" meant "smaller than a room." Pretty much all other applications-- such as the banks and businesses you mention-- used timeshare on big mainframes. Or, for the early 60s, sent the punch-cards to the mainframe to be entered.
By the way, in 1963 banks mostly didn't use computers. You youngsters are too young to remember when a bank "passbook account" meant a physical object that the teller wrote in by hand.
How can NASA be a "driver" for ICs when they were using generic commercial ICs????
They paid the companies to develop those products in the first place, because they didn't exist until the NASA contracts to develop them. The IC was developed with Air Force and NASA funding, because at the time, those were the two customers for whom integrated circuits were an enabling technology.
The comment you're responding to was about computer design tools--CAD--not about numerically-controlled milling machines."
They designed the parts on computers.
Wrong.
They fabricated the parts as part of a computer-driven process.
Wrong.
Look, learn something about 1963 before posting so confidently about how engineering was done with computers back in the early 60s, OK? Do you even know what a slide-rule was???
Re:iterative dev, no docs, took us to the moon... (Score:5, Informative)
That is wrong.
There are many computer programs still in active use that are more than 10 years old that could benefit from good documentation.
More than once, I've used documentation over 100 years old (obviously not computer-programming related) that proved to be very useful in designing heating, ventilation, and plumbing for an old building.