We traveled from Michigan to Huntsville, AL last weekend and while there visited the US Space & Rocket Center. What an incredible experience! I was in high school when we first landed on the moon, and while I was proud and inspired at the time, I never really grasped the magnitude of what was accomplished with what by today's standards would be considered pretty primitive technology. As a newbie home machinist, I've developed a great appreciation for what it takes to make even a simple part, let alone the requirements and knowledge involved in making something at the aerospace level, and there was a tremendous amount of the results of those skilled machinists on display.
I've always been an aviation fan, so the first treat was being able to stand nose to nose with an A-12, the earliest version of the SR-71 Blackbird. To think that such a ground breaking plane was developed in the late 50's and early 60's is amazing. That was decades before computers, CAD-CAM, or even calculators, etc. were readily available. That thing was designed with slide rules!!! I doubt that there was very much, if any, CNC machining done on it. It was built with shear skill and experience of the men and women who operated the machines. As I understand it, there were also a lot of new materials and machining techniques developed just to be able to build it.
The experience of standing beneath an erect 330ft. Saturn V rocket and looking up at those 5 massive engines is indescribable and will be with me the rest of my life! It amazes me that we were able to even build something that huge and complex, but to think that we were able to successfully harness all that energy and use it to take incredibly brave men to a target as small and far away as the moon, land there and return to Earth safely, all with 1960's technology is almost incomprehensible. The idea that the astronauts would have the courage to sit at the top of something like 7.5 million pounds of thrust at launch, then travel to the moon and back in a tiny, vulnerable capsule just blows my mind.
They have another Saturn V displayed horizontally in it's separate stages in a massive building, along with a multitude of individual displays showing details of the rocket engines, control systems, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules, you name it. Being able to stand in front of a 19 foot F1 rocket engine with a 12 foot diameter exhaust nozzle is amazing. The turbine driven fuel pumps would deliver over 670 gallons of propellant *per second*! With five engines on the Saturn V, that's a combined total of over 3300 gallons per second!!! 1.5 million pounds of thrust per engine x 5 = 7.5 million pounds of thrust! 0 to 6100mph in 240 seconds! That's just incomprehensible to me. Initially designed in the late 50's and built essentially by hand by highly skilled machinists!
One of the most memorable points for me was being able to talk with a docent for 1/2 hour who is a retired electrical engineer who worked in the space program starting in the early 60's. He described what it was like to experience first hand the first time they test fired all five F1 engines at once. He was able to answer all our questions and explained the Saturn V control system in great detail. A lot of it was analog circuitry connected to rudimentary digital computers that controlled everything with relays! The computers ran about 3600 operations per second. Compare that to the average smart phone today that can run several million per second. The computer you're reading this on is several orders of magnitude more powerful than what controlled the rocket that put us on the moon.
I wish I was a good enough wordsmith to convey the feeling of awe I still feel when I think back on that visit. Most of what I saw there was accomplished in just a couple of decades of inspired and dedicated work and it saddens me to think that we'll probably never see that level of unity, motivation and cooperation between people, corporations, political parties and government agencies in this country ever again. It saddens me even more to think of all the skill and knowledge that is going to be lost because there aren't nearly as many new machinists being trained as we send more and more manufacturing overseas. But that's a whole other soapbox and discussion...
I've always been an aviation fan, so the first treat was being able to stand nose to nose with an A-12, the earliest version of the SR-71 Blackbird. To think that such a ground breaking plane was developed in the late 50's and early 60's is amazing. That was decades before computers, CAD-CAM, or even calculators, etc. were readily available. That thing was designed with slide rules!!! I doubt that there was very much, if any, CNC machining done on it. It was built with shear skill and experience of the men and women who operated the machines. As I understand it, there were also a lot of new materials and machining techniques developed just to be able to build it.
The experience of standing beneath an erect 330ft. Saturn V rocket and looking up at those 5 massive engines is indescribable and will be with me the rest of my life! It amazes me that we were able to even build something that huge and complex, but to think that we were able to successfully harness all that energy and use it to take incredibly brave men to a target as small and far away as the moon, land there and return to Earth safely, all with 1960's technology is almost incomprehensible. The idea that the astronauts would have the courage to sit at the top of something like 7.5 million pounds of thrust at launch, then travel to the moon and back in a tiny, vulnerable capsule just blows my mind.
They have another Saturn V displayed horizontally in it's separate stages in a massive building, along with a multitude of individual displays showing details of the rocket engines, control systems, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules, you name it. Being able to stand in front of a 19 foot F1 rocket engine with a 12 foot diameter exhaust nozzle is amazing. The turbine driven fuel pumps would deliver over 670 gallons of propellant *per second*! With five engines on the Saturn V, that's a combined total of over 3300 gallons per second!!! 1.5 million pounds of thrust per engine x 5 = 7.5 million pounds of thrust! 0 to 6100mph in 240 seconds! That's just incomprehensible to me. Initially designed in the late 50's and built essentially by hand by highly skilled machinists!
One of the most memorable points for me was being able to talk with a docent for 1/2 hour who is a retired electrical engineer who worked in the space program starting in the early 60's. He described what it was like to experience first hand the first time they test fired all five F1 engines at once. He was able to answer all our questions and explained the Saturn V control system in great detail. A lot of it was analog circuitry connected to rudimentary digital computers that controlled everything with relays! The computers ran about 3600 operations per second. Compare that to the average smart phone today that can run several million per second. The computer you're reading this on is several orders of magnitude more powerful than what controlled the rocket that put us on the moon.
I wish I was a good enough wordsmith to convey the feeling of awe I still feel when I think back on that visit. Most of what I saw there was accomplished in just a couple of decades of inspired and dedicated work and it saddens me to think that we'll probably never see that level of unity, motivation and cooperation between people, corporations, political parties and government agencies in this country ever again. It saddens me even more to think of all the skill and knowledge that is going to be lost because there aren't nearly as many new machinists being trained as we send more and more manufacturing overseas. But that's a whole other soapbox and discussion...
