More On The Deliberate Destruction Of Saturn 5 Tooling

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New Saturn 5s
« Reply #29 on: Yesterday at 06:19:29 PM »
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My source for the Saturn V information is Jay Windley, a mechanical
engineer and Apollo historian. Jay is as knowledgeable about the
Apollo program as anyone I’ve ever encountered. His main thing is
combating the alleged “moon-landing hoax”, which he does with his Web
site clavius.org and by participating in several Web forums. He is
also a registered member here though he doesn’t post often.

Jay has mentioned the Saturn V thing several times, including this
thread at the Apollohoax forum. Here is one of Jay’s (JayUtah)
quotes:

Quote
There is a conspiracy there, of sorts.

The Saturn V was specifically dumped in favor of the space shuttle.
The Saturn V was seen as mainstream technology, albeit the pinnacle of
it. The shuttle was seen as a departure from convention and therefore
risky. The shuttle contractors were obviously worried about competing
with the Saturn V. So for confidence reasons, as well as budgetary
reasons, the Saturn V program was terminated. And I mean terminated.
The plans were archived and the tooling was ordered dismantled. This
was to send a signal to the shuttle contractors that NASA wouldn't
"secretly" maintain production of the Saturn V. About half of Apollo's
budget was for Saturn V development. This was sold to Congress on the
presumption that it would be the heavy-lift booster family even after
Apollo. So you can imagine how reluctant Congress was to approve "yet
another" entire launch vehicle family just ten years after approving
the Mother of All Rockets.

Sort of like Cortez burning his ships on landing in the New World, in
order to make sure his men were committed to staying and surviving.

On Sat, 20 Aug 2005 14:05:39 -0400, wrote:


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New Saturn 5s
« Reply #29 on: Yesterday at 06:19:29 PM »
Reply with quote
My source for the Saturn V information is Jay Windley, a mechanical
engineer and Apollo historian. Jay is as knowledgeable about the
Apollo program as anyone I’ve ever encountered. His main thing is
combating the alleged “moon-landing hoax”, which he does with his Web
site clavius.org and by participating in several Web forums. He is
also a registered member here though he doesn’t post often.

Jay has mentioned the Saturn V thing several times, including this
thread at the Apollohoax forum. Here is one of Jay’s (JayUtah)
quotes:

Quote
There is a conspiracy there, of sorts.

The Saturn V was specifically dumped in favor of the space shuttle.
The Saturn V was seen as mainstream technology, albeit the pinnacle of
it. The shuttle was seen as a departure from convention and therefore
risky. The shuttle contractors were obviously worried about competing
with the Saturn V. So for confidence reasons, as well as budgetary
reasons, the Saturn V program was terminated. And I mean terminated.
The plans were archived and the tooling was ordered dismantled. This
was to send a signal to the shuttle contractors that NASA wouldn't
"secretly" maintain production of the Saturn V. About half of Apollo's
budget was for Saturn V development. This was sold to Congress on the
presumption that it would be the heavy-lift booster family even after
Apollo. So you can imagine how reluctant Congress was to approve "yet
another" entire launch vehicle family just ten years after approving
the Mother of All Rockets.

In article ,
wrote:
Here is one of Jay’s (JayUtah)quotes: ...
...The shuttle contractors were obviously worried about competing
with the Saturn V...

Now why would that be, exactly? During the short period when the two
coexisted, the shuttle was supposed to replace the Saturn IB, not the
Saturn V -- NASA explicitly planned to operate both, with the shuttle as
the supply ship for large Saturn-V-launched payloads. There wasn't any
reasonable possibility that the two would compete with each other, because
they were in completely different size classes. (Note that the shuttle
concept then was rather smaller than what finally got built.)

So for confidence reasons, as well as budgetary
reasons, the Saturn V program was terminated.

Sure looks to me like the budgetary reasons dominated. NASA did
everything it could to keep the Saturn V alive, but was consistently
unable to get funding for either ongoing production or the missions that
would have used it.

The plans were archived and the tooling was ordered dismantled. This
was to send a signal to the shuttle contractors that NASA wouldn't
"secretly" maintain production of the Saturn V.

Serious hopes for a Saturn V production restart were abandoned (and all
future projects that had been planning to use Saturn Vs were canceled) in
summer 1970, before the shuttle was even an approved program... and those
hopes had been faint since the summer of 1968, before the first shuttle
design studies started.

The tooling was dismantled for a simple and prosaic reason that requires
no sinister hidden motives: storing it, and preserving even minimal
capability to put it back into use, was costing about $6M/yr.

About half of Apollo's
budget was for Saturn V development. This was sold to Congress on the
presumption that it would be the heavy-lift booster family even after
Apollo.

Congress itself closed off that possibility when it capped Saturn V
production at 15. (And James Webb had to fight hard to get even 15.)
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