What if we still had Saturn V

wrote:

:
:Eric Chomko wrote:
: Rand Simberg ) wrote:
: : On 10 Jan 2005 10:29:14 -0800, in a place far, far away,
: : made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such
:a
: : way as to indicate that:
:
: : What if the Saturn V was still being built? Where would we be?
: : What number would we need to build each year to be financially
: : reasonable?
:
: : Zero.
:
: Don't mind Rand, he's a nihilist.
:
: Nice article on the Saturn V in today's Washington Post:
: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2005Jan9.html
:
:I suspect Rand is right though. We sometimes bemoan the lack of a
:heavy lifter like the Saturns but there really was no mission for them.

And this is a chicken and egg sort of thing. No one proposes any
missions that could use that much lift because there's no existing
vehicle to perform it.

--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw

Fred J. McCall wrote in
:

wrote:

:What if the Saturn V was still being built? Where would we be?
:What number would we need to build each year to be financially
:reasonable? What sort of missions might it have done in the past 34
:yrs? How would its existence affect shuttle development? How might it
:have been upgraded?

There was in place a plan to put a permanent outpost on the Moon using
Saturn V. Instead missions got scrubbed to save money for Space
Shuttle development and the last two Saturn Vs were allowed to rot.

Those cancellations were motivated by congressional cuts to NASA's budget,
not the space shuttle. In particular, the cancellation of the two lunar
missions occurred in September 1970, sixteen months *before* Nixon even
gave the go-ahead for the space shuttle program.

That might have been worth it if they'd built the Shuttle they
originally planned, but the program was overrunning budget quite
heavily and NASA was afraid the whole works would get cancelled if
they went back yet again for more money.

NASA's initial Phase A/B proposals in 1969-70 were for a $10 billion
shuttle program, but OMB's budget ceiling of $5.5 billion was imposed on
the program *before* it got the go-ahead in 1972. From that point, there
were few cost overruns in the shuttle program.

"NASA ultimately completed shuttle development for only 15 percent more
than its projected cost, a comparatively small overrun for so complex a
program." (CAIB report, p. 23)

So they compromised the
vehicle, deliberately accepting MUCH higher operating costs through
the life of the vehicle, in order to get the initial cost of the
vehicle in budget.

The design was compromised, to be sure, and that did undoubtedly drive up
operational costs to save development costs. But you've got the sequence of
events, and the reasons behind them, all wrong. I suggest a reading of
Jenkins.

--
JRF

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wrote in message
oups.com...
What if the Saturn V was still being built? Where would we be?
What number would we need to build each year to be financially
reasonable? What sort of missions might it have done in the past 34
yrs? How would its existence affect shuttle development? How might it
have been upgraded?

The Saturn-V never made much *financial* sense, so a reasonable number would
be zero. The Saturn-V was a quick-and-dirty approach to beating the
Russians to the Moon, and once that goal was accomplished, and the
scientific results reached the point of diminishing returns, there wasn't
much point to continuing. It was just too expensive for the amount of
scientific results that would be returned by additional flights.

30 years later, expendable HLLV's are still too expensive for any practical
purpose. The expendable HLLV paradigm is dead, and the almost universal
assumption that expendable HLLV's are the only way to do manned lunar and
planetary exploration is the principal reason that none of it has been done
in the last 32 years. It's time to stop beating that dead horse and give it
a decent burial.

"Eric Chomko" wrote in message
...
wrote:

: Eric Chomko wrote:
: Rand Simberg ) wrote:
: : On 10 Jan 2005 10:29:14 -0800, in a place far, far away,
: : made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such
: a
: : way as to indicate that:
:
: : What if the Saturn V was still being built? Where would we be?
: : What number would we need to build each year to be financially
: : reasonable?
:
: : Zero.
:
: Don't mind Rand, he's a nihilist.
:
: Nice article on the Saturn V in today's Washington Post:
: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2005Jan9.html
:

: I suspect Rand is right though. We sometimes bemoan the lack of a
: heavy lifter like the Saturns but there really was no mission for them.

The irony, of course, is that Rand supports the president's return to the
moon but says there is no place for the Saturn V. What, exactly, is
suppose to get us back to the moon?

1. Build a 2-stage, VTOL, Shuttle-class RLV.

2. Use the RLV to deploy a refueling depot in LEO.

3. Use the RLV to launch lunar payloads, plus a landing stage, into orbit
where the orbiter and lander stages would be refueled at the propellant
depot. Use the orbiter stage to launch the lander and payload onto a lunar
free-return trajectory, much as the S-IVB stage did with Apollo. The
orbiter stage does a lunar swingby and returns to Earth while the lander
deposits it's payload on the Moon.

4. Repeat no. 3 as required to establish a small manned base with a
prototype LOX propellant plant. Once landers can be refueled with lunar
LOX, they can be returned to LEO with aerobraking and we will have a
fully-reusable transportation system between the surface of the Earth and
the surface of the Moon. Each flight to the Moon will then cost a small
fraction of the cost of an Apollo flight.

5. Use the fully-reusable transportation system to build up the
capabilities of the base to support various advanced scientific activities,
or even tourism.

6. Given sufficient markets, like an extensive program of Mars exploration,
lunar mining could be expanded to produce lunar LOX for export. SPS could
be a very large market for lunar materials like aluminum and silicon.

Steps 1 and 2 would take approx. 10 years. Steps 3 and 4 would take perhaps
5 years. (Had all of that been done *instead of* the Shuttle and ISS - and
it could have - we would have had a base on the Moon by about the mid-80's.
We would be well into step 5 by now.)


Eric

t/Space, o' course.

In all honesty though, I like them overall, but I'm a little skeptical
about the extremely high number of small RLV launches their proposed
moon mission would involve.

Damon Hill wrote:
wrote in news:1105381754.354849.138800
@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:


What if the Saturn V was still being built? Where would we be?
What number would we need to build each year to be financially
reasonable? What sort of missions might it have done in the past 34
yrs? How would its existence affect shuttle development? How might it
have been upgraded?



Saturn went out of production because there were no payloads.
Therefore the logical production number was none.

If you'd said Saturn V produced instead of Shuttle, as in no
Shuttle ever built, then possibly there might have been a tiny
chance of a (very small) production run once every decade.

Might you want to identify Saturn V-class payloads launched during
the past 34 years?
Basically every payload could have been made heavier and therefore
cheaper. Also, one could have sent up satellites in bunches.

Lots of Greetings!
Volker

Delta IV Heavy can get us to the moon, as could a Shuttle Derived HLV,
or Variants of the Atlas, Proton or Arianne.

Ideally, NASA won't make the decision, but will just buy two year
launch programs.

As for the Saturn V, I'm sure if it had been continued, payloads would
have been found. Given such an effective solution, a problem would have
materialised.

Henry Spencer wrote:

How would its existence affect shuttle development?

Any shuttle would be rather smaller and would be geared to be a
station
supply ship rather than an all-purpose flying facility. That *was*,
in
fact, the original plan for the shuttle, back when the station itself
was
expected to be launched by Saturn V.

Sounds like an OSP or Hermes equivelant - or perhaps Pioneer Rocket
Plane concept. It might even have been a success.

Jorge R. Frank wrote:
NASA's initial Phase A/B proposals in 1969-70 were for a $10 billion
shuttle program, but OMB's budget ceiling of $5.5 billion was imposed
on
the program *before* it got the go-ahead in 1972. From that point,
there
were few cost overruns in the shuttle program.

Perhaps, but there were certainly many 'capability underruns'. If you
gave me the money to develop a Ferrari and at the end of the program
I'd produced a rusty three-wheeled pickup with bald tires because it
turned out that my original design would have cost ten times my
original budget, I'm not sure how that would really be considered
substantially different to a large cost overrun.

Mark

wrote in
ups.com:

Jorge R. Frank wrote:
NASA's initial Phase A/B proposals in 1969-70 were for a $10 billion
shuttle program, but OMB's budget ceiling of $5.5 billion was imposed
on
the program *before* it got the go-ahead in 1972. From that point,
there
were few cost overruns in the shuttle program.

Perhaps, but there were certainly many 'capability underruns'. If you
gave me the money to develop a Ferrari and at the end of the program
I'd produced a rusty three-wheeled pickup with bald tires because it
turned out that my original design would have cost ten times my
original budget, I'm not sure how that would really be considered
substantially different to a large cost overrun.

If you're going to make that argument, be sure you compare the as-built
shuttle to the baseline design at go-ahead, not the earlier pie-in-the-sky
designs. Trouble is, many people simply don't distinguish between the two.

Robert F. Thompson's testimony to the CAIB is particularly enlightening
here, if you'd care to read it.

--
JRF

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