Saturn LV Launch System

[Alvis 3.14159]

What if the 1950s Collier/Von Braun designs lingered on into actual hardware?
We'd have wound up with vehicles like the Saturn LV (55), named after the 55 main engines the first stage used.


The reliability and power of the Saturn LV allowed the landing of Americans on the moon in 1976. A safe and leisurely lunar program was achieved in no small part by the end of the Cold War in 1954. A series of manned space stations and orbita labs were also lofted by the Saturn LV, which still to this day performs as the main stage for the Orbital Spaceplane Program.

This kitbash was achieved by using a Lindberg 1/200 Mars Probe launcher and the AMT 1/200 Saturn V kits. The stages fit perfectly!

Alvis Pi

[PR19_Kit]

That looks brill. 

FIFTY FIVE engines?  Room for some redundancy then.......... 

[Hobbes]

Very nice! Can you take a photo of the bottom of the stage? I want to see those 55 engines!

[Paper Kosmonaut]

Nice idea!


PS: CV is 105 in roman numbers. LV is fifty five. (and also could stand for Launch Vehicle..)

[scooter]

PS: CV is 105 in roman numbers. LV is fifty five. (and also could stand for Launch Vehicle..)

Unless its shorthand for the designers...

And I'd expect to see something like this in Kerbal...

[Alvis 3.14159]

Nice idea!


PS: CV is 105 in roman numbers. LV is fifty five. (and also could stand for Launch Vehicle..)

Oh, I was using the Metric Roman Numerals.


Oops, well, that was dumb of me. Thanks, I'll fix it.

Alvis Pi

[Alvis 3.14159]

Very nice! Can you take a photo of the bottom of the stage? I want to see those 55 engines!

Back in the dawn of spaceflight, nobody seemed to envision the massive engines like the F-1. Clusters of smaller, but apparently high-performing engines seemed to be the norm. The Vostok launcher to this day still used an amazingly large number of engines, and it's still in production.
Here's the bottom of the Lindberg rocket. Originally it was released as a moon rocket and a shuttle launcher, with the Mars probe being a recent change. The main stage has remained the same.
55 main engines, and 4 main attitude thrusters and 8 directional thrusters, all firing at once. You'd have to hope all of them were beyond 100% reliable, and none would blow up, you would not be going into space that day. The statistical probability of a cascade failure begins to get crazy after a number far less than 55.
But the noise would have been astounding!




Alvis Pi

[Paper Kosmonaut]

Indeed! In the early days of the Space Age, there weren't enough technologies and materials to even grasp the idea of an engine the size of the F-1. But the multi-engine concept used on this rocket type wasn't von Braun's idea but actually dreamt up by the man who initially made the young Wernher von Braun enthusiastic about spaceflight and rocketry, Hermann Oberth.

When in 1929, famous film maker Fritz Lang started a film about a flight to the moon (Frau Im Mond), he asked Oberth to join the crew as technical advisor. Oberth designed a two-stage rocket with 49 first stage engines. He designed them to be placed in a honeycomb-like pattern which I think would have had some serious disadvantages, but nevertheless was theoretically possible. The stage even was equipped with parachutes to be able to make a soft landing. The second stage was used for a landing on the moon.
The launch sequence of the rocket, called "Friede" (Peace) is eerily similar to the countdown of the Apollo launchers almost 40 years later.
Paper model designer Ralph Currell made a kit of "Friede", this is my rendition of it in 1/96:





Fun story: The F-1 actually was a discontinued side project of the USAF who just ordered Rocketdyne to try and build the biggest possible engine, just for the purpose of wanting to know. There was plenty of money for such excesses, in the late fifties. The Air Force soon realised they would never need such a big engine and they cancelled the project. But at the same time, NASA just was established and immediately saw the usefulness of such a large engine and ordered Rocketdyne to continue developing the F-1. And the rest is history.
There also were plans to build an even larger engine called the M-1, by the way.

[Alvis 3.14159]

Wow, that M-1 was a monster!
I can see some loss of efficiency with squared nozzles, as well as the potential for catastrophic failure being way higher. Still, it's a pretty good design for the day, although the fins are a bit excessive. But they look sharp!

Alvis Pi

[Mossie]

Love this, that's a whole of bang!

Reminds me of the British Interplanetary Society moon rocket project of 1938.  They didn't know much about liquid fuels so packed it full of little solid fuel motors, hundreds of them.  They revisited the plan after the war and came up with a much better soloution.

[Modelling_Mushi]

... Oberth designed a two-stage rocket with 49 first stage engines ...  placed in a honeycomb-like pattern which I think would have had some serious disadvantages, but nevertheless was theoretically possible. ...

Sounds like the OPEL RAK series of rocket powered cars, gliders and rail cars of the late 1920's. Damned scary vehicles (I think at least one either blew up or spewed rocket cartridges everywhere), have a look here : http://strangevehicles.greyfalcon.us/OPEL%20ROCKET%20VEHICLES.htm

[KiwiZac]

And now Elon Musk and SpaceX are working on a 42-engine booster for Mars missions!

I'm sorry I missed these, Alvis, I love your space work! Very clever and interesting to note how such disparate models actually work together.

[kerick]

Imagine all the plumbing to feed fuel to those 55 engines?! Nothing could go wrong there!!