Why Can't we Remake the Rocketdyne F1 Engine?

As we advance our technology ever forward you would think that remaking a 50-year old design should be easy but things are not quite as simple as they first seem. When the Space Launch System or the SLS was in development NASA ran the advanced booster competition to find a new booster system and two of the three entries used liquid fuel engines. Liquid fuel boosters would be safer and could be shut down in the event of a problem unlike the solid rocket boosters which cant. However unlike the space shuttle the new boosters would be single-use only and would burn up when they fell back to earth but which liquid fuel engines would be powerful enough there really aren't any massive engines in use today. The boosters could use four same modified RS-25D the engines those left over from a space shuttle program which would also be used the SLS's main core stage but that will be very wasteful of a complex expensive and yet highly efficient engine. Now we've already had an engine capable of doing the job, the mighty Rocketdyne F-1 the huge engines which took men to the moon with the Apollo program but they haven't been built since the 1960s. The F-1 engines were not only extremely powerful but they were also simple which meant they were cheap enough to be disposable so why don't we just remake them. Now there is a common myth which says NASA lost or threw away the blueprints which of course is complete rubbish every design document ever created for the Apollo program is still available but if it was just a case of wheeling out old designs they would have done that years ago. No the problem is not the design but it's for way in which the world has moved on since the engineers first created those F-1 engines back in the 1960s. When a group of present-day rocket engineers looked at how they could recreate the iconic F-1 engines they soon realized just how differently things were done some 50 years ago when there was no computer-aided design just slide rules and trial and error testing. Components were designed, built and then tested and then often modified before being used. Complex engines sub assemblies were welded together from sometimes hundreds of smaller parts with skilled welders taking sometimes a day to complete one complex world. Although they had the original blueprints what they found that was missing was the notes made by the engineers as they effectively handcrafted every engine, each one slightly different with its own quirks and foibles. The original builders of the F-1 engines were highly skilled engineers, welders and fitters they did almost everything by hand because often that was the only way to do it back then and in the rush to meet deadlines they kept many of the tricks that they used to get things to work and go together in their heads or scribbled down on scraps of paper long since lost. Roll on 50 years and all of those skilled people have long since retired and many have passed away taking their skills and knowledge with them. With the advent of modern manufacturing techniques many of those skills are no longer in use and few people today have them so faced with 50-year old blueprints we find we just don't have the people with the skills that can make them in the same way anymore. By detailed examination of the remaining F-1 engines from museums and storage our new engineers did discover enough to create a new F-1B engine should it ever be built. Using modern computer modeling and manufacturing techniques the new engine could not only be more efficient it would be just as powerful as the uprated but unflown F-1A at 1.8 million pounds of thrust but more importantly it would reduce the number of manufactured parts from some 5,600 to just 40 and increase its reliability and decrease costs in the process. Although in the end NASA selected the solid rocket boosters for the SLS, this exercise proved that it's sometimes easier to redesign something from scratch than it is to try and remake the past. So what do you think of remaking the F-1 engines and also this new short video format let me know in the comments and I just like to take time to thank all of our patrons for their ongoing support and thank all of you for watching and please subscribe, rate and share.

Channel: Curious Droid

Views: 3,314,144

Rating: 4.8796377 out of 5

Keywords: rocket engine, f-1 rocket engine, f-1a rocket engine, sls f-1 engines, rocketdyne f1, nasa, apollo, saturn v, biggest rocket engine, sls, space launch system, paul shillito curious droid, curious-droid.com, why cant we remake the f-1 rocket engine, rocketdyne f1 rocket engine, nasa engineers, skilled workers nasa

Id: ovD0aLdRUs0

Length: 5min 3sec (303 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 24 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/KRA2008]

oh so it's like software

[u/psycoee]

Who exactly said we can't remake it? Yeah, you can't just push a button and have an engine pop out. A lot of the know-how is lost and would need to be re-learned. But if you wanted to spend a few tens of billions of dollars (which is what the program cost back then in today's dollars), I'm sure you could do it. The only real difference between then and now is the government contractors have gotten much better at sucking a lot of money out and delivering little or nothing in return. That's how SpaceX can deliver the same product as ULA for 1/10th of the price.

I think the major irony of the Apollo program is that it was aimed to show the superiority of the free-market system over the planned economy of the USSR, but it did so by adopting the Soviet model of centralized, government-managed megaprojects. This cultivated the military-industrial parasites that are now consuming more than half of the discretionary federal budget while delivering little in return with ill-conceived, mismanaged programs like the F-35.

[u/apt_advert_thrwaway1]

BUT WHERE DID HE GET THAT DOPE ASS SHIRT FFS!!!

Don’t ignore me!

[u/mr_rivers1]

So this made a lot of sense to me.

My dad has been a carpenter for nearly 70 years now. He learnt his trade starting about a decade after ww2.

He learnt his trade from a generation who didn't have cars.

He worked for the guildhall on several jobs (we live in england), and one of them was to restore some 300 year old paneling that needed some repairs on it. They took him into the room so he could inspect the panels and left him there for a while.

When they came back, they said they were going to get some expert historians in and heritage workers, to make sure the panels weren't damaged when they took them off the wall.

My dad says 'well i already took them off the wall, inspected them, and put them back'

They got really worried for a while, and my dad got a little bit annoyed about it. He told them to show him where he had worked.

Turns out, the paneling was always designed to come on and off. Nobody in the guildhall had any idea this was the case. He took them off, repaired them, and put them back all in an afternoon.

If he wasn't there, they would have spent days trying to figure out the best way to remove those panels with the least amount of damage. They would have probably ended up going to a specialist workshop, being 'professionally' refurnished, to the cost of thousands of pounds.

My dad did it in an afternoon and charged them 100 quid for it.

If you showed him a design in CAD, he would have zero idea. No fucking way could he be able to do anything involving a computer. You just can't buy experience, and we're losing knowledge built up over generations because of the shift to computing. It's a real tragedy.

[u/bmystry]

So basically different manufacturing methodologies, that's why it can't be remade the same as before.

[u/[deleted]]

Idk if you guys know curiousdroid, but he's a great and thorough presenter and is worthy of many more subscribers

[u/Pixelated_Fudge]

I like the guys alien make up he wears. cool stuff.