NASA history series - the F-1 engine

Bruce Palmer wrote:

At the bottom of
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/Hi...404/ch11-2.htm
(LIQUID HYDROGEN AS A PROPULSION FUEL, 1945-1959)

it says...
"At the November 1956 meeting of the fuels and propulsion panel of the
USAF Scientific Advisory Board, large rocket engines were considered.
... the minutes do not reveal the panel's reasons for such interest."

Tracking down those reasons, now THAT would be history. You expect USAF
to aim for pie in the sky but they very soon afterward started the F-1
program at Rocketdyne. It'd be really interesting to find out what
those reasons were, assuming they're not classified.


In April 1957, ABMA began studying the Super Jupiter. It needed
1,500,000 lbs thrust; thus the F-1 began. Alternates included 4 E-1
engines and eight H-1 engines. In the end, super Jupiter became the Juno
V... which then became the Saturn which became the Saturn C-1 which
became the Saturn I which became the Saturn Ib.

Super Jupiter was, apparetnly, a Big Ass ICBM, for lobbing either
multiple Big Ass warheads, or putting such into orbit, along with space
stations and the like.

So... the F-1 began life as an EVIL weapon of war...

--
Scott Lowther, Engineer
Remove the obvious (capitalized) anti-spam
gibberish from the reply-to e-mail address

"Bruce Palmer"
Tracking down those reasons, now THAT would be history.

Wild guess.....to launch large quantities of nuclear weapons?

It'd be really interesting to find out

Yeah that really interesting.

In article ,
Bruce Palmer wrote:
Tracking down those reasons, now THAT would be history. You expect USAF
to aim for pie in the sky but they very soon afterward started the F-1
program at Rocketdyne. It'd be really interesting to find out what
those reasons were, assuming they're not classified.

Bear in mind that there might not have *been* a very specific reason. It
was proverbial even then, in the context of jet aircraft, that "engines
take longer than airframes". So if you thought the USAF *might* need big
rockets for something ten years down the road, it made a lot of sense to
put some startup money into a big rocket engine right away. Especially
given that US rocket developers were then averse to major clustering.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

"Scott Lowther" wrote in message
...
So... the F-1 began life as an EVIL weapon of war...

Stuffie? Is that you?

On Wed, 12 May 2004 13:00:32 -0400, "Scott Hedrick"
wrote:


"Scott Lowther" wrote in message
...
So... the F-1 began life as an EVIL weapon of war...

Stuffie? Is that you?

....I was just about to say that myself. Lowther, don't scare us like
that, you twit :-P

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr