Origin of Saturn V

In article ,
Gareth Slee wrote:
What was the origin of the name of the Saturn V?

The original Saturn -- in modern terminology, the first stage of the
Saturn I -- was Redstone Arsenal's next big rocket after the Jupiter
IRBM. It actually began as Juno V, last in the line started by the
Juno I (nee Jupiter C) that launched Explorer 1, but was so much larger
than the earlier Junos that a new name was thought appropriate.

But the original Saturn was just a first stage; in fact, it began as a
ground demonstrator of large-rocket technology. What to put on top of it?
There were many proposals, broadly and somewhat sloppily grouped into
three categories: Saturn A concepts used existing missiles as upper
stages, Saturn B used new but fairly conventional upper stages, and
Saturn C used upper stages including exotic ideas like liquid hydrogen.
Within the categories, concepts were numbered, so you got design concepts
with names like Saturn A-2. (Caution: the assignment of names was not
well controlled, and some of those names were applied to a number of
different concepts over time. The Saturn C-3 in particular changed
repeatedly.)

When the wheels were set in motion to transfer the von Braun rocket team
to NASA, NASA put together the Silverstein Committee to look at what the
team should be charged with doing. It ended up recommending dropping the
Saturn A and Saturn B approaches, and building Saturn C-1, C-2, and C-3
concepts using a systematic series of liquid-hydrogen upper stages; the
C-3 might also include an upgraded first stage, with four of the eight
H-1 engines replaced by a single F-1. Later there would be something
big called Nova, which would definitely use F-1s in its first stage but
was otherwise just vague and somewhat varied sketches.

Then NASA got told that it was going to the Moon, and right away. The
Saturn C-1 was already in the works, and it might do for Earth-orbit test
flights. Putting a man on the Moon was clearly going to require the C-3,
at least. The C-3 got bigger, and now there was a C-4 concept that was
still bigger, and then a C-5 showed up too. (Contrary to some accounts,
the numbers were *not* chosen to match the number of F-1s in the first
stage -- most C-3 concepts had two, and the original C-5 briefly had
four. The numbers were just in increasing order of overall size.)

Slowly things settled. The Moon rocket was the C-5, now bigger than many
of the old Nova concepts. Some Earth-orbit testing would be done with the
C-1, and an upgraded C-1B would do the rest and would also help with C-5
development. Once that was reasonably solid, the final stamp of approval
was a change in names, to Saturn I, Saturn IB, and Saturn V. (NASA then
often used Roman numerals for numbering.)
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

On Thu, 13 May 2004 15:14:32 +0100, "Gareth Slee"
wrote:

What was the origin of the name of the Saturn V?

Lo it came to pass at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency
in the days of Von Braun in the late 1950's a large rocket clustered
from Redstone and Jupiter tanks using eight modified Jupiter engines
that haveth a total of 1.5-million pounds of thrust was called Juno.

And Juno begat Juno V (only on the drawing boards).

And Juno (of the drawing boards) begat Saturn C1, and Saturn C1
begat Saturn C2, and Saturn C2 begat Saturn C4, and Saturn
C4 begat Saturn C5, and Saturn C5 begat Nova C5 and Nova C8 and lo
near the last days of JFK, Saturn C5 begat Saturn V.

And Saturn C1 begat Saturn I and Saturn I begat Saturn IB.

Lo these are the generations of Saturn.

;-)

- Rusty Barton

Rusty B wrote:

And Saturn C1 begat Saturn I and Saturn I begat Saturn IB.

Lo these are the generations of Saturn.


And Saturn followed Jupiter, just as in the planets...and it's probably
just as well that WvB didn't design another series of rockets to follow
Saturn. :-)

Pat

On Thu, 13 May 2004 17:33:33 GMT, (Henry Spencer)
wrote:

The original Saturn -- in modern terminology, the first stage of the
Saturn I -- was Redstone Arsenal's next big rocket after the Jupiter
IRBM. It actually began as Juno V, last in the line started by the
Juno I (nee Jupiter C) that launched Explorer 1, but was so much larger
than the earlier Junos that a new name was thought appropriate.

....Henry, IIRC there was more to the Juno name than that. Wasn't there
an issue with funding that required the initial concept pitch to be
delivered with the booster being called Juno V in order to get it past
the beancounters who didn't want a complete new program? This got
discussed on here back when the group was new and troll-free, quite
some years ago.

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

In article ,
says...


Rusty B wrote:

And Saturn C1 begat Saturn I and Saturn I begat Saturn IB.

Lo these are the generations of Saturn.


And Saturn followed Jupiter, just as in the planets...and it's probably
just as well that WvB didn't design another series of rockets to follow
Saturn. :-)

Yeah -- I'm told that the mighty exhaust from Uranus is something very
few people could have survived.

Doug

In article ,
Rusty B wrote:
Lo it came to pass at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency
in the days of Von Braun in the late 1950's a large rocket clustered
from Redstone and Jupiter tanks using eight modified Jupiter engines
that haveth a total of 1.5-million pounds of thrust was called Juno.

Not quite. The original Juno, later called Juno I, originally called
Jupiter C, was the rocket that launched the early Explorers: a stretched
and upgraded Redstone with a cluster of three solid stages on top. The
Juno II was the same solid cluster on top of a Jupiter (under a fairing).
Juno III and Juno IV were paper designs.

The very beginning of the Saturns was Super-Jupiter, which had four E-1
engines. (The F-1 was too far off, and at the time it was to have 1Mlb of
thrust, where Super-Jupiter wanted 1.5Mlb.) Super-Jupiter never left the
drawing boards, and the E-1 never left the test stands, because ARPA
offered some money for a big rocket on condition that it not be tied to a
poorly-developed new engine. Juno V, with eight modified Jupiter engines,
came out of that.

It's noteworthy that von Braun's crew was hoisting the complete prototype
Saturn, nee Juno V, stage into the test stand 18 months after ARPA said
"okay" and sent money. And 18 months after that, the first flight article
shipped to the Cape for launch.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

In article ,
OM om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org wrote:
...Henry, IIRC there was more to the Juno name than that. Wasn't there
an issue with funding that required the initial concept pitch to be
delivered with the booster being called Juno V in order to get it past
the beancounters who didn't want a complete new program?

Could be, although the early funding came from ARPA, which didn't have
beancounters in those early days. Of course, it did have *politics* even
so, and it may have been expedient to avoid labeling the program as new.

Oh, and I left out Super-Jupiter, which was the *original* version with
four E-1 engines. Saturn was the obvious "respectable" name for that, so
the detour to Juno V may well have been politics of some kind.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

On Thu, 13 May 2004 20:08:14 GMT, Doug...
wrote:

And Saturn followed Jupiter, just as in the planets...and it's probably
just as well that WvB didn't design another series of rockets to follow
Saturn. :-)

Yeah -- I'm told that the mighty exhaust from Uranus is something very
few people could have survived.

....But then again, a sea-launched Nova variant would have been
perfectly named Neptune.

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

In article ,
Gareth Slee wrote:
But why "Saturn"?
What was the reason for chosing that particular name?

Next planet after Jupiter, Jupiter being the name of the group's previous
big rocket. Particularly natural because, as I noted in another posting,
there was an obscure precursor of the Juno V called "Super-Jupiter".
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

In article , says...

snip

Thanks for that Henry, very informative.

But why "Saturn"?
What was the reason for chosing that particular name?

I'm not Henry (though I may end up playing him on TV someday, LOL), but
I know from my own reading that Saturn was considered the next logical
"step" name for a larger booster, since they had already developed the
Jupiter. And all rocket and spacecraft names at the time were being
taken from the Greek and Roman pantheon of deities. (Note that the
first American spacecraft was named Mercury, and it was launched on an
Atlas booster... the first WvB series of missiles was named Jupiter, a
variant was named Juno... all Greco/Roman deities.)

Hence, once you've developed a rocket named Jupiter, the next logical
name to use would be Saturn.

I have a hard time differentiating between the Greek and Roman deities,
sometimes, since they were so very similar. I'm pretty certain that the
early boosters, etc., used almost exclusively the Roman names, but I'm
sure that if I make that statement outright, someone here will correct
me...

Doug