On Tuesday, February 26, 2013 6:56:30 AM UTC-6, Dean wrote:
On Tuesday, February 26, 2013 5:28:46 AM UTC-5, GordonD wrote:

"David Spain" wrote in message

...

On 2/25/2013 1:50 PM, Jan Philips wrote:

The bottom of this page http://www.astronautix.com/engines/f1.htm says
"first launch 1959". Wasn't this only a static test firing? The
first launch was the Saturn V with Apollo 4, right?

Sounds right to me.

According to 'Stages to Saturn' (the official NASA history of the
development of the Saturn launch vehicles) the first test-firing of an F-1
was March 1959 - it "demonstrated stable combustion for 200 milliseconds."
The Apollo Spacecraft Chronology sets it at 6 March.

200 milliseconds? And what happened then, unstable combustion?

....Here's a test of just how badly Google has let the old DejaNews archives deteriorate just over the past two years: do a search on "F-1" and "Combustable Instability", or just "Instability", and narrow your search between 1998 and 2004 - the former is the earliest I can recall the topic of how they resolved the problem showing up around here, the latter was from a thread involving the resurrection of the F-1 for a possible booster replacement for the then-unnamed Shuttle replacement. In any case, there's been at least 8-10 threads about this over the 15+ years this group has been around, and all of them were pretty thick in the details.