earliest moon landing

Pat Flannery wrote:
Derek Lyons wrote:

Nonsense. If you allow for testing/tweaking time in your
manufacturing schedule and budget, it doesn't matter if you are making
10 motors or 10,000.

Do you think you are going to have more man hours in five big motors and
their plumbing or thirty medium sized ones? More man hours mean more
possibility for mistakes. All of our manned moon landings (Apollos 11, 12,
14, 15, 16, 17) used the same number of F-1 motors as the number of NK-15's
used in one N-1 first stage. If you have forever to make them, you can take time
on each of the motors and check it out...

No, you simply have multiple checkout and assembly pipelines running
in parallel.

but the 14 N-1's the soviets had finished or in construction meant they needed 420
motors for the first stages, and an additional 112 modified NK-15s for the second
stages. That's 532 motors total, and that is a _lot_ to build and inspect.

Not particularly. During WWII air craft engine manufacturers
routinely turned out 10-12 motors a day from a single factory. The
Russians knew about assembly lines Pat.

One thing that indicates the degree of confidence that the Soviets had
in the N-1 was that they wanted a dozen successful unmanned launches
before they were going to put a crew on it.

Right. As compared to every US manned booster, with the exception of
the Saturn V and the Shuttle, which had that many or more. Don't
confuse prudence with a lack of confidence.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL