Giorno: 7 settembre 2014

projecthabu:

     The Saturn V booster is a machine, now iconic, seemingly derived from a science fiction novel. Its size and power are hard to describe. Author Douglas Brinkley, in the book “Cronkite”, summed things up nicely. “The towering Saturn V was 111 meters (363 feet) tall, about the height of a thirty-six story building and 18 meters (60 feet) taller than the Statue of Liberty. Fully fueled for liftoff, the Saturn V weighed the equivalent of four hundred elephants. Its five large engines produced 160 million horsepower and 7.6 million pounds of thrust, generating more horsepower than eighty-five Hoover Dams.”

     This photo set focuses on the S-IC first stage of our Moon rocket. This simple, powerful design was the first link in a fragile daisy chain that brought men to the moon nine times, never faltering. If one of five F-1 engines has failed in the first thirty seconds of flight, the rocket would have been doomed to fall back to earth, and the astronaut’s lives would suddenly become reliant on the launch abort system to carry them away from what would have been the equivalent of a half-kiloton nuclear blast; not a position anyone would like to be in. This never happened. The Saturn V never killed anybody.

     The booster shown in the photos, serial number 14, was meant to propel the Apollo 18 or 19 Moon missions. During the Apollo flights, the public lost interest, NASA lost funding in congress, and these 18 and 19 missions were cancelled. Our S-IC #14 found a new home on display at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, instead of joining the other 13 spent boosters at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, where they will rest until eternity.

     If it weren’t for Walter Cronkite’s enthusiasm in presenting the space race to the American people, I believe that more Apollo Moon missions may have been cancelled, and fewer spent boosters would be resting on the ocean floor. Cronkite said, after the Apollo 11 mission completion, “It was a wonderful story of achievement, and everybody at Cocoa Beach and the Space Center at Cape Canaveral was looking up. They were looking toward the stars, rather than looking down with the depressed state of world affairs, civil rights and Viet-Nam going on at the same time. So this was a relief story to all of us.” In Brinkley’s book, there is speculation that Cronkite was to aerospace, what Carl Sagan was to science, making it all accessible to the layman. Cronkite’s broadcasts were filled with emotion, in stark contrast to many other science reporters at the time, whose monotone presentation sounded like they were reading from a text book.

     The whole story of man’s adventure to the Moon started with our S-IC first stage. Brinkley writes about the atmosphere in the small CBS studio at Kennedy Space Center during the Apollo 11 Moon shot, just as this beastly S-IC began to operate; “The tension in the CBS booth was overwhelming. At liftoff, Cronkite was speechless. Those present worried that he was so transfixed by the rise that he’d forgotten he was on air…Cronkite knew, from experience, that no voice should ever interrupt a reverie.”

Ne avevamo visto la riproduzione al Gateway to Space, a Udine 🙂