 Well, as you may have read by now, I'm asking myself the question, how can humans fly to the moon? And because we've already done that, I'm taking this example of how to fly to the moon and kind of analyzing what went into it. Because we all essentially know Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong, these three people who made history by stepping onto the surface of the moon, well, Michael Collins not necessarily, but... The poor guys, I was left out of practically all living memory because until I started researching for this, I didn't. I knew there was a third guy in the orbiter, but you rarely know his name, so yeah. But all the people we do kind of leave out of this endeavor are the 400,000 engineers, administrative workers, assistants, factory floor workers, test engineers, and people who do the stuff that make the rocket actually fly, and not fall to pieces 20 seconds after launch. We need to understand why Apollo went from a bunch of crummy ICBMs at the start of mid-50s to a fully-fledged moon rocket at the end of the 60s. We kind of have to see where the money came from because, as we all know, science may have the most beautiful goals, but without the proper funding, you rarely ever get anywhere. So the state of the art is kind of the... I will take the address of President Kennedy here as kind of the public starting point for the Apollo program. It was actually running quite a bit before that, too, so... So yeah, well, with his address, he kind of published the efforts of the American bureaucracy because the public didn't really have anything to do with it, to put a man on the moon, and they did that because they were a bit scared. The Russians had launched their first satellite just before, and their own programs were lacking in coordination, they were lacking in guidance. They were technically trying to steal the good people from each other because it was essentially the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, all of them developing independent intercontinental ballistic missiles. And because of what happened there, we kind of... They pulled together. As you can read now, there was no infrastructure supporting that. There was no... There was nothing that had ever been done even remotely close to what was addressed by President Kennedy. By that time, we had the Russian dominance in space technology. They had flown the Sputnik, and if anyone has ever played Kerbal Space Program, that thing on the left will seem very familiar. That's the control panel of the Vostok spacecraft, which Yuri Gagarin used to orbit the Earth as the first human being. The spacecraft is underneath it, being a model of the probe in the Paris Museum. And the last, the Vostok rocket leaving the Cosmodrome. And funnily enough, the timing couldn't have been better because the Congress, a day after he launched, was about to decide on the funding for the Apollo program. So everything was nice. The Russian dominance was very farly ingrained in the senators at the time, and the funding was very generous, to say the least. They put over the 10 years, they kind of estimated, they put over $15 billion, which is at the time quite much more than nowadays, into funding their space venture to prove to the world that the Americans had in them, as they seem to always have to do. Again, the Russians were running ahead in technology, and the ICBM departments of the Army Navy and Air Force were battling each other for resources. And so it was not a good state to be in. And from this, through the confusion, kind of the Army ballistic missile agency with Werner von Braun as its chief scientist at the time, emerged as the most capable department in the DoD to build such rockets. They had preliminary plans for a heavy launch vehicle to launch payloads of up to 16 tons into orbit. They were all paper plans until that, but they had already thought about the basic problems of getting stuff into space and were desperately in need of funding because they realized with all the technology they had at the time, it just wouldn't be feasible. So they started kind of collecting the knowledge which was already in the different departments and kind of concentrating it in NASA. And actually the Saturn program, which then emerged to be the launch vehicle for the Apollo missions, was once close to being cut off from funding because the Army just simply said, well, this is nice to have this big rocket, but we actually don't have anything to launch with it. So we don't know why we should spend millions and millions of dollars on something we actually don't need. And that was one of the points where the administrators at NASA and the government noticed that they should really fund this venture separately from most others or all other ICBM programs. And that's kind of also a nice parallel to the motto of this KPN, we say works as intended. And actually the entire design and development up to that point was intended to kill people. And essentially, they didn't do that. And they used the technology kind of in the reverse way, then we fear that our technology is being used to then actually further science and international cooperation. So that is a rare but remarkable thing about Apollo and the time it was in. Yeah, NASA, these pictures, by the way, are all part of the NASA art program, which was kind of started alongside Apollo to kind of document the aspects a camera lens could not map sufficiently. They sent artists out to practically all sites of the construction, design and development of the rockets to kind of take sketches and see how and kind of take their view of the proceedings there and kind of ban them on paper. And the NASA had to bring together, as you can read, over 400,000 people to make this possible over a decade. And this is before Git. This is way before Git. I mean, this is not one branch. This is not two branch. These are hundreds of branches running crisscross throughout design and development. And everything had to fit together. Every nut, every bolt, every pin had to be precisely where it had to be. Otherwise, you will kill people, which did happen at one point. And they did like Robert Chaffee and the crew of Apollo 1 did die in a terrible fire on top of the launch pad. And they did learn from that. But that was only possible because of the organization they put into the project from the beginning. So the question is, well, how to get to the moon is actually not that simple. Well, we could just go straight to the moon with one vehicle, which would result in tremendously heavy launch vehicle because you would have to ship all the fuel, all the stuff onto the moon's surface and back. And because rockets get exponentially more heavy because they have to lift the fuel, it was a mission that had clear advantages. You didn't have all the docking involved and the vacuum connections and all the stuff you have to kind of take care of in connecting two vehicles in space. But you had the deficiency of a very high rocket mass at the beginning. And that is just simply not feasible. I mean, the Saturn V weighed about 2,500 tons of fuel at takeoff. And the thing that came back weighed a little more than 7 tons. So everything else kind of got dumped on the way. And either burned up in the atmosphere was fuel, which was most of it. Or as one point, as one part still is, a part of the Apollo 11 space program is actually still flying. The S4B stage for the transliterate injection made a swing by the moon and is now in solar orbit, where it will probably remain until something blows it to smithereens or it will crash into the sun eventually. But that will take its time, obviously. Yeah, the second one was the Earth orbit rendezvous was essentially the same plan they used in the Martian. And the third one they actually finally went with was the lunar orbit rendezvous. It promised the least amount of delta V, and delta V is the amount of velocity change you can achieve with your rocket, which is not proportional to fuel, which is annoying when you've ever played Kerbal space program without MechJab on board. So, yeah, it was, however, kind of risky because you needed to get the dock if you were not, if you didn't get the dock on the lunar orbit, you were dead, essentially. So they had to be really careful with planning these missions and they had to be really reliable, which is why Buzz Aldrin was essentially the guy who flew the lunar lander because Buzz Aldrin was the only person who has a doctorate in orbital rendezvous at the time, and he knew it in and out. So if they thought, well, if someone can do it, then he can do it. And that's why he ended up on Apollo 11 as a pilot of the lunar module. Yeah, so I must say kudos to NASA because these are essentially NASA slides from, as you may read, 1968. It's Marshall Space Flight Center 1968, and then after that is the serial number. And I will be using a lot of those because they're already made and they're unbeatable, the contents kind of concerned. As you see, it's kind of a straightforward approach. You launch with your rocket, you dump your stages on the way up while you burn your fuel. And then stage four would be the coasting around Earth, where you do up to three hours of system checks. As soon as these are through and good to go, then you do the translural injection, which is phase four. After the tank has been fully spent, I think around about 200 seconds burn that is, the command and service module D, undocks from the S4B stage, flips around, takes out the lunar module, and decelerates just a tiny bit to get a free return orbit. And the cool thing about the free return orbit, which is you don't see in this graph, if something ever went wrong, like in Apollo 13, the lunar gravity would actually just slingshot them back down to Earth. So you actually didn't need any propulsion until injection into the lunar orbit. The S4B went six meters per second quicker and got slingshotted into solar orbit where it still is. So you land or you undock the lunar module land on the moon, leaving the descent stage behind with all of its equipment and scientific materials, like Apollo 17 took a car, which turned out to be quite a good idea. You then take off with the remainder, dock with the Apollo spacecraft, which is the tricky part. If you get that wrong, you're dead. Well, practically everything, if you get it wrong, you're dead. But this is especially for the two people in the lunar module, this is kind of as especially tricky to handle because you have very, very, very limited fuel. The lunar module was designed down to every ounce of material they could spare. So you dock, you dump the lunar descent stage in lunar orbit, you return with your engine to Earth, you dump the service module and the command module flips around presenting its heat shield to the atmosphere and then hopefully deorbit. You parachutes for the rest of the way and then splash down, someone has to pick you up or you're dead, as usual. But that's like the most of the least tricky part to people where you are quick enough. And now, because I kind of spent most of my time researching about the Saturn and not the Apollo mission, which is kind of what happened. So I will kind of explain where Saturn came from and what made it the thing it was at the time. So this is what they started with. This is a redstone mercury rocket. The mercury capsule was the first capsule to actually orbit Earth. And this is practically a direct successor to the V2. The fins are pretty similar. It does use thrust veins, if anybody knows what that these are, for steering, it's technically a V2 with some tweaks. Verneur von Braun developed it and continued development of this rocket at the army missile ballistic, army ballistic missile agency, along with his team. And as you can see, well, it's really just a concrete patch where you put up the rocket and then you ignite its engines and then you're good. It's not really that much of infrastructure required. You see the crane, but that's more or less it. The other one that they had, and this is a bit of a bigger beast, is the Atlas. This is a Air Force design. It uses RP-1 and liquid oxygen as propellants and was the first more or less operational intercontinental ballistic missile at the time. They swapped out the nuclear warhead for a mercury capsule. It seemed to have worked fine and did their test flights, but that's kind of what they had beforehand. And this is Juno-2, which is the Jupiter. Again, a von Braun design using liquid oxygen and RP-1 as propellants. RP-1 is a kerosene subtype. I'll go into that a bit later. And that's essentially what they had. As you can see, they're all kind of missile shaped and missile sized because they were essentially missiles. And from there, they kind of had to think up something. And this is what they came up with. They literally bolted them together. They took eight redstone rockets and a Jupiter core and put them on a frame and stuck rocket engines at the back and said, this will work. It did. They used eight engines. This thing is called cluster's last stand in reference to General Custer. And yeah, it's kind of you take two big frames on the front and back, bolt the tanks to it, and then attach engines to the bottom and hope it doesn't explode. They did explode, like some of them did. They tested very thoroughly, more thoroughly than anyone ever does at Kerbal Space Program. But if you're flying multimillion dollar vehicles, you probably should do that. These are two proposals. And if you've ever played Kerbal Space Program, the left one just screams no. You see the booster at the bottom is the same kind of design. And on top of that, you put a centaur stage, which you elongate, which doesn't work. And the second one was the kind of the same idea, just thicker. It was called and that was known as the Pogo problem at NASA. So you could see why. These were essentially two real live fully thought out concepts they wanted to build, but luckily got scrapped before they could. And this is what they then came up with. And yeah, it's a rather conventional rocker. You get the bottom stage with the clusters. You get a S4 stage, which is liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, which was a tremendous development for the time because liquid hydrogen is bloody cold. Liquid oxygen is kind of like 100 degrees Kelvin and therefore can be handled relatively fine. Liquid hydrogen, however, goes down to somewhere like four Kelvin, diffuses through literally every material. If you just leave it in a tank long enough, it will be gone at one point. It boils terribly easy. It's terribly flammable. It's explosive. It's generally just crap to handle. But it packs a lot of punch. The engines that are using liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen get about 40% more efficiency out of the engines in terms of delta V for mass. And it was essential because if they hadn't done that, they would have been stuck with RP1 fuel and liquid oxygen, which is fine if you want thrust, but if you want specific impulse, it's terrible because the mass travels at a low speed and then physics and you don't go as quick, essentially. And on top of that, you put the Apollo spacecraft itself and you hope it doesn't explode as usual. Yes? It simulates the kind of estimated it. I mean, you know how much fuel goes through them. You know how much thrust comes out of the other side, so you do some preliminary calculations and then the rest is just testing. They didn't have any, like, today you do computer analysis on everything because you can, but if you literally have a job description called computer, this is like, there were people, they were called computer. Their daily job was it to solve integrals and differential equations. I can imagine something more fun, but you needed them. And without them, this thing wouldn't have ever left the ground. And yeah, you kind of do some preliminary calculations and then you say, well, it's going to be that hot, probably. So you put heat shield in between you and your fuel and then, yeah, try it out. But they did have, like, you get good at kind of estimating how hot it gets if you do it a few times. And they did, like, test firings all the time. So that's not technically too much of a problem, but yeah, you have to take it into account because the things do get hot pretty damn quickly. Yeah, the S4 stage is somewhat of a specialty. It was designed, it was developed from a already existing liquid hydrogen and oxygen stage, also an ICBM, heavily repurposing stuff. And you put an instrument unit on top and that's kind of the brain of the whole thing, which amounts to nothing more than what you can find in modern day headphones. But yeah, you've got that put a poll on top and you're done. They improved it with the Saturn 1B launch vehicle. You can see that the main difference here is not the first stage, even though it has a new engine set and a bit of a different fin design. The main difference is the S4B stage. It's now switched from five liquid hydrogen and oxygen engines, the RL10 to one J2 engine. Oh, that's correct. Yeah, one J2 engine, which was entirely a new engine design for this project, which took its time and had it setbacks as they do and was then mounted on top of the S4B. And that thing became the final stage of Apollo, the final upper stage for Apollo and did the Translune injection and the final ascent into orbit for the Apollo spacecraft. They did test the Apollo spacecraft enough orbit with this rocket. They didn't spend a Saturn 5 every time they wanted to test something. Thank God, that would have been expensive. And yeah, it's kind of a similar design, a bit updated and a bit improved, but generally the same concept. And then you have the Saturn 5 vehicle. This was a big leap forward in terms of scale. The tank or the first stage weighed around about 1,000 tons. That burned 13 tons of fuel per second through the engines, which is, yeah, enough. The five turbo pumps alone, five turbo pumps, generated together 200 megawatts of power. And that's the turbo pumps pumping the fuel into the engine. These are not the engines themselves. You could power a small city from that thing. Not very long, but 120 seconds. That's kind of the burn time. And then you're through. And as you can see, the first stage is using separate tanks for the liquid oxygen and the RP1. The RP1 is nice and dense, which is why you can... The liquid oxygen is actually a bigger part of the volume for this rocket, which is unique because hydrogen always weighs less than the oxygen. They had to, however, drill five holes through the RP1 tank to deliver the liquid oxygen, which is a problem because liquid oxygen is cold and the RP1 actually does crystallize. So you kind of had to insulate the liquid oxygen against the RP1 inside of the tank and everything's pressurized and it's, yeah, difficult to say the least. Except for that, it's kind of a conventional rocket stage. I mean, you put fuel in it and you fire the engines and you're more or less good. The thrust structure is, as always, at the bottom, taking most of the load and then kind of distributing it equally onto the two fuel tanks and then you mount on top whatever you think is useful, which is then the second stage. These are again using JTU engines, similar to the first to the third stage. It's burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. You can see here the liquid oxygen tank is far smaller than the liquid hydrogen one. It's the bottom small bubble there where it says liquid oxygen vent. That's kind of the height of the tank. And the bulkhead, they didn't separate the tanks like in the S1 stage. If you look here, you've got the RP1 tank, which is a self-contained pressure vessel and you've got the liquid oxygen tank, which is a self-contained pressure vessel and if you can, they're not linked in any way, but that costs weight and that costs performance. So you don't do that. You build a common bulkhead. And this common bulkhead has to be of a very specific shape to withstand the pressures of the hydrogen boiling and the oxygen and all the other stuff moving around. So they used a somewhat unique technique by forming these plates of metal by explosions. They didn't weld it. They didn't use any standard techniques you would normally use for forming of these metal sheets. They actually used explosive charges and shock waves underwater to kind of bend it in the right direction. They made six leaves of it and then welded them together and that was the common bulkhead. And they were like the most error-prone parts. They were a few bulkhead ruptures in the tests, luckily none in actual operations. And yeah, it again has five engines like as predecessor to get the thrust you need to move the vehicle. And then, yeah, you attach the usual stuff to it and you're good. The third stage is the S4B and it's already been flight proven on the Apollo 1B stages, which is important because you have to rate everything all the time and testing is important and cannot be like, they have to rate and test every single thing of every single rocket, which is even more work than just building these things already are. Because you are now effectively in zero G, you kind of have to pressurize your tanks, which you didn't have to do beforehand. This is why there are cold helium spheres inside of the hydrogen vessel to pressurize all the fuel lines and to get fuel flowing where you want to have it. Or else your engine doesn't start and you're not quite dead, depending on where you want to fire your engine. And the J2 was rated for multiple ignitions. Again, Kerbal Space Program engineers don't have that problem. They just increase thrust and then the engine magically ignites. But with modern day rocket engines, this is actually something of a problem because you have terribly cold fuels and you want to get them to react together so you kind of have to pack lots of energy into the combustion chamber until these things actually do react. And yeah, this thing, the J2 was actually rated for multiple ignitions, which of course they tested in orbit and on the ground. And it was and still is one of, a very reliable liquid oxygen engine and liquid hydrogen engine, sorry. And yeah, this is essentially the entire Saturn vehicle because the rest of it now is Apollo and these were more or less two separate projects for most of the time. They did connect to them up at one point but they were different beasts altogether. So this is like a size comparison. You notice the difference from the S1 to the S1B being the more or less single engine on the upper stage and then you just transplant the entire upper section of the S1B to the S5, put two big fuel tanks on the bottom of it and then you're done with the Saturn V launch vehicle. And that kind of is the development which was there is obviously far more complicated than I can put it. And obviously, a lot more intricate than you say here because there were like tons of different projects that contributed here a bit and contributed there a bit to the science and technology needed to actually build these things. And yeah, that kind of concludes my round of Saturn. And so I'm gonna now look at the Apollo vehicle and see what that is, what that's all about. Yeah, it's got some basic requirements. You want to have your three sausages alive and well at all times. You want to have storage for samples and scientific equipment. You want to have, you want to land on the moon which is also kind of required. You want to do navigation calculation which is not that easy without GPS because you're outside of the range of those things and you don't have them at the point. So yeah, not the easiest thing to do. And you want to provide power and propulsion. And this is like power and propulsion is like a separate topic for the Apollo because it had to be ultra reliable. It was not allowed to fail at any point in time which is why they didn't use either RP1 nor liquid oxygen nor liquid hydrogen to power the things but they used a combination of red fuming nitric acid and hydrazine which both substances could kill you. As they usually do. If you come in direct contact and the good thing about these are if you bring them in contact they ignite spontaneously which is terrible for everything else but rocket engines as it turns out. Especially when you want to ignite the thing multiple times and you have varying mission conditions that you have to do it in and you want like the least amount of possible moving material on your rocket then that's kind of perfect. I mean Ulse has already mentioned that before and he actually had a quite nice slide on that so go watch his talk on that one. I do have a small trivia at the end for that. Yeah, the vehicle concept was you could again do like a single launch vehicle and land the entire thing on the moon and return but it's going to be pretty heavy. So they split it into like the lunar module and the space module and then they noticed that the space module would have quite a high kinetic energy when reaching Earth's atmosphere so they kind of split it again to the surface module and the command module leaving just essentially your three sausages and the command module with like enough life support to keep them alive until someone picked them up at the other end. Because the descent phase from the entire mission duration is about three days the descent into the atmosphere is about seven minutes so you actually don't have to do very much you just have to keep them from burning. So yeah, this is a quite nice sketch again kudos to NASA of the Apollo vehicle and its systems and the thing on the left side is the launch escape system which is integral. The first test of the launch escape system was like kind of unintentionally a real test of the launch escape system what they wanted to do, they had like a small booster put their launch escape system on top and they fired the booster, it went out at one point they simulated a booster a booster ruption and normally the motor should ignite and pull the capsule to safety. What happened was that the booster actually did explode. The rockets did fire and the capsule was pulled to safety but the test was successful but not quite as planned. There were like very, there was a nice video about just what like the booster is called little joe so if you Google little joe explosion you'll get nice pictures. Yeah, you want to then pack everything necessary into the command and service module. The command module has to have your computer it has to have your life support systems it has to have space for your astronauts which is kind of a premium at this point. It should be non-flammable which they kind of figured out after the Apollo one and if at all possible your hatch should open outward because that's essentially what killed the three astronauts of Apollo one is that number one they were in a high oxygen environment the vehicle was flammable and the hatch opened inward and if you pressurize your vehicle on the inside opening a hatch inward is literally impossible and they learned from that they built a far more complicated outward opening hatch that then had to keep the pressure in had to keep sealed they built all kinds of testing for non-flammable materials they actually took literally every part and held it into the hottest flame they could find and if it ignited it wasn't good enough which in my opinion is quite a responsible thing to do because burning in space is even worse than burning on Earth because you have nowhere to run or you can go outside but that poses its problems So yeah, the question, another one is power the most of the command and service module was actually not taken up by fuel as you might expect because everything else was taken up mostly by fuel and was mostly taken up by the liquid hydrogen and oxygen used for the fuel cells also an invention more or less made for Apollo they used their high gain antenna they used all kinds of new inventions essentially to keep them alive the fuel cells still are in use today but unsurprisingly were invented for space usage as often technologies are they have as you can see a high gain antenna and that part is the easy one the more complicated one is getting the signal on the other side the Navy actually outfitted around four ships with high gain antennas and navigational equipment to stay put on oceans so they could receive and relay the signal from Apollo to the people who needed to know it which was for 1960 quite an achievement because you have to route signals across the globe without the internet so again another piece of infrastructure which you forget but is again kind of essential for everything you do this, thank God, is a real panel of a real spaceship if anyone has ever looked at SpaceX that is not a spaceship that is I don't know it's just like that is my personal opinion if you have two touch screens and a scroll bar that's not a spaceship even if it flies autonomously and yes you probably want the spaceship to fly autonomously because humans are bad at nearly everything you need to be good at to fly a spaceship that is how a spaceship should look like not two touch screens and a scroll bar good thing the Lunar module wasn't very much better than that they had as many flip nice switches as the Apollo command module had because it was essentially an independent spacecraft which it had to be so yeah this is the Apollo guidance and navigation system you have a sextant on board you have astronomical equipment on board you have a computer which is a full one megahertz in speed has 2048 2048 words of storage runs yeah uses 35 watts of power and weighs 70 pounds which was state-of-the-art back then the the the disky the interface was especially fun because you essentially like you interfaced with it in assembly language so you had like a noun and a verb and you entered the noun and then you entered the verb and from the noun and the verb combination it did something so but it wasn't like nice with like it wasn't even words you had to like list type in a number that you read from a chart where the number was translated into the command and it then took its while and spat out what you had to do or directed the telescopes and the other navigational equipment and it actually was astonishingly precise for the day because they had to again invent all kinds of technology we take for granted nowadays like priority scheduling it didn't exist beforehand and thank God it did then because not in the Apollo they copied the system for the lunar module and as the lunar module was on descent to to the moon you switch off your radar at one point but switching only switch on your radar you switch on your radar at one point but switching on the radar triggers hardware because the wires are intertwined and the signal kind of cross feeds into another into another wire which wasn't intended but this sets off a 13th interrupt which the machine can't handle it freezes shuts down and reboots luckily enough all within a few milliseconds and then after it comes back online it does priority scheduling if that wouldn't have been the case they would have crashed and died and this was a bug they found out through simulating the entire lunar module up and down a few hundred times because there was this thing that the error occurred and they logged the error but they didn't know why they first assumed that Buzz Aldrin did like something in the wrong order but he didn't it was actually cross feed from one cable to another inside the lunar module which caused an interrupt overflow because it only had a fixed amount of interrupts it could handle and if it wasn't priority scheduled they would have been dead as usual and there's a picture of it this is the lunar module ego the bottom part is the descent stage and is left on the moon as every descent stage was and the upper thing is the ascent state and can return to the to the vehicle yeah it's it's built as light as possible they literally said to their engineers we're going to give you extra pay if you can remove an ounce of stuff from this thing so this is why it's not aerodynamic this is why it's literally paper thin everything you could poke holes in it with a pen and it's essentially a fully functioning spaceship which is again kind of kind of astonishing for the time the lunar module however was not the first thing to land on the moon they did send robotic probes ahead because they were kind of they were curious and a bit worried that the lunar module could actually just like not dissolve but kind of land on the moon and except for landing on a on a rigid surface it was landing on dust and therefore just go go floop and then disappear in the moon this was a worry of the people at NASA and they did send robotic probes and they did their investigations of the landing sites and they found out well the moon is just as you would probably expected semi-rigid and you can land on it um thank god yeah so it's kind of similar same old same old you have your fuel you have your your command and control you have your antennas you have your your rcs thrusters and this thing was capable of sustaining two astronauts over days this thing is not big you could easily just put it beside me here and it would be just happily sitting there and getting in and out of these things in space suits was even more challenging thank god you couldn't forget a key because that's been um that's been protested more than often enough by JPL that's the first thing that would happen with with astronauts if they go somewhere they will forget the keys for the spacecraft but um as there was very little chance of anybody stealing it that would be a good try yeah you can you can do without it anyway yeah you have your you've got your your very famous ladder with the small steps for man and giant leaps for mankind and yeah good old good old same old same old this however is the training vehicle it's a turbojet engine in the middle and they sat the pilots on the front where this lovely person sits and they said okay if you can fly this you can fly the lunar module because the the final descent stage was actually not computer controlled because you kind of couldn't because you would have to like judge the lunar surface and like not land on rocks which would probably kill you the human had to fly it the last few meters and they wrecked those things constantly like they were like 10 of them built and a few of them survive but a few of them crashed and burned it did have however a um a flight as it's which is the which word for that yes it had an ejection seat so the pilots survived but um yeah it doesn't look safe and it wasn't yeah um now we're looking at manufacturing and these are like this is the job that a lot of people don't realize the manufacturing was done at first at the Marshall Space Flight Center by NASA employees and they built most of the most of them built like the mock-ups and the the prototypes of the of the engines and of the of the spacecraft but essentially it was outsourced to Northrop Grumman to North American aviation to Boeing Boeing built the first stage it was get the biggest thing for some reason and it was essentially built entirely by contractors Chrysler actually builds rockets or built rockets they built the S1 and S1B first stage and the later and the later later times so yeah this is a picture of the S1B tankage and on the on the factory floor just before at at checkout they're going through all the systems and seeing if they've connected everything correctly which is a very tedious job which takes weeks if not months to do for a flight duration of under 200 seconds where the thing actually has to work again you can see the special tiling you send about the heat shield if you look at the picture you can see the special tiling at the bottom of the spacecraft which is heat resistant because it's close to the engines and you can see the the kind of asparagus style build of the of the tank here this is the second largest computer or the second well actually the larger computer but the second computer to be integrated into Apollo which is the guidance control package of Saturn it was built by IBM which did a fair job of it and was packed full of sensors and telemetry equipment and radio links and everything you could possibly think of and was again custom built for this entire endeavor this is at checkout and it was redundant as of course it was it had to be and it was again intricate and needed again weeks and weeks of checkout before they actually could launch the thing you don't want to be there when it goes off but as long as there's no fuel involved this is fine these are four of the five F1 engines producing 1.5 million pounds each I'm not quite sure what that in Newton is but that could be like it's it's a lot to be short it's about 3,000 tons of thrust which then calculates into Newton's the turbo pump is the most interesting part as I said the turbo pump can be is this small part here and and rocker engines using rp1 fuel can have a heart attack which sounds strange but essentially it's a heart attack the small tubes which go around the around the then the dome of the of the exhaust are filled with rp1 that they pump through it to heat the fuel up and cool the bell unless it would melt but rp1 has to be a special mixture of kerosene and they figure that out as one of the engine engines melted because if you do not use kerosene but if you don't use rp1 but just plain kerosene the kerosene starts to chemically fall apart and on the one hand build gas on the other wax and this wax settles down in the pipes blocks the pipes they cannot cool the engine bell anymore and the engine bell goes to smithers essentially being a rocket engine heart attack which is why again these hundreds of tons of rp1 fuel are very expensive and need as everything special care this is the finished s4 s1 stage of the Saturn the tankage is kind of similar like not similar but looks identical to the ITS the interplanetary transport system which ASX is now building their tank for the liquid oxygen blew up theirs obviously didn't and again it's hundreds of thousands of bolts and nuts and diligent work by hundreds of people to get this thing off the ground because you don't have CNC you don't have all the things that we have come to take for granted in smartphones which have less than the micrometer of precision in the execution that was more or less all hand built entirely so you kind of do forget that pretty quickly and this is one of the documentation centers this is the git server of Apollo or just a part of it really because every every contractor had it's his special team and every team said had its special stuff they wanted to see done their way but keeping track of all of this and actually building a finished vehicle out of millions of millions of parts is not that easy and they did have some occasions where on test vehicles they swapped parts out which then failed or made improvements like you improve code you push it on GitHub and you know if it works but if you just improve your rocket and it then fails in a test and it is blown to smithereens you don't know what was in that rocket and you want to know that and that's why keeping track is important and that's where NASA is especially good at it learned a lot through or generally like management theory learned a lot through the Apollo space program in how to bring contractors together to work on the similar things on how to build the documentation and build processes for documentation which are resilient against people making mistakes and I must say like NASA documents everything I found researching this talk I found the logs of the lunar excursion like not the handwritten logs but obviously transcribed ones running on obviously terribly old servers where they used handwritten HTTP and other relics of all time to preserve it and I must say they did a tremendous job of it you can find hundreds and hundreds of books open domain or public domain from NASA because it's a federal federal bureau on the internet if you just look hard enough like past the Wikipedia page that is and that is maybe something that like could be should be implemented more often really yeah so yeah keeping track is important and then we get to testing because now we've built all of the stuff and it should work well but it sometimes doesn't this is a F1 engine in action this is one of the five engines that power the first stage and you don't want to be there they actually had to build the concrete like the concrete basing the basement of the whole thing they had to build it because if they wouldn't have had the rocket engine would have lifted the structure up yeah that's like you can see it's burning RP1 fuel because of the bright red exhaust hydrogen actually burns pretty colorless um it's making a roaring sound but you don't really see it and the roaring sound was a problem or still is a problem the sound waves that are emitted by these engines actually limit the design of satellites sitting atop the rocket because the sound waves can shatter solar panels and can shake loose literally everything on your on your satellite which is why you want to check and double check and recheck that you're within the parameters of sound it's again literally stuff that kills you they dump as they still do by all the launches they dump tons and tons of water into the into the exhaust not to cool the exhaust but to to cover a curtain of sound absorbing material between it and the rocket so yeah this is the Marshall Space Flight Center with the test sands for the different engines they erected those essentially just to hang rockets from them and fire them that was literally all they were good for and again something that you entirely forget when you think about Apollo it's like oh yeah they build a rocket and then that takes off when you're good but it's not that easy you test your engines you retest your engines you have to certify every configuration of every part so that it's human rated and you're allowed to use it it has to be documented and reported and signed and stamped and whatnot of course that is a pain in the s normally but it did pay off that all of the astronauts that actually left Earth returned even when one of their spaceships was blown semi-blown to smithereens on the way there yeah this is one of the boosters and the s1 booster being hoisted up onto one of these test stands yeah during its flight proving exams and this is it firing and you can see that they have to do that in remote places because it's going to shatter glass miles and miles away and you can actually use the ramps that you used to put underneath the flame the flame deflection ramps they could actually just use them once and they had to rebuild them from scrap because they were essentially gone by the end of it it actually did like the total amount of testing time of the engines amounts to about 20 hours of continuous firing from the different engines like before they actually went from prototype to actually being flight proven every booster ever built had to be tested beforehand so it's actually not the first firing of the engines that you see when they take off but the second or third most of the time and again the ground equipment and the support you need to to run these tests effectively and get data out of them is tremendous and they dumped millions if not billions of the money just into building support equipment and measurements or and taking measurements of the of the hardware involved this is I said the Apollo one burnt out and this is what they did to all subsequent parts of the material the small test tube on the in the center of the picture or the small test area in the center of the picture is coated or holds one of the materials that they used to design subsequent Apollo flight capsules and that's literally the hottest flame you can find and they tried it out every time until something burned and then they replaced it and they they invented a dozen or so new materials just to prevent stuff from burning after that happened and again that it threw off the Apollo program by about two years which is why they they took off in 1969 and not 1967 but I think was kind of more than necessary and has led to stuff like Teflon in our pans for example or other useful space-grade materials we use in our everyday lives now this was a kind of very interesting part of of the design which is a vacuum chamber that is a vacuum chamber you can hang a spacecraft up in that and you literally will hang it there empty the air out of the surrounding and then you bombard it with sunlight because metal expands when it heats up and this is still a problem they use the barbecue roll to kind of circumvent that because if you heat your spacecraft on the one hand with 3000 degrees Kelvin radiation and you cool it with 2.73 degrees Kelvin on the other side that's not going to be very good for your screws and joints and other stuff especially when you have two different materials which you then interconnect and more than enough more than often enough screws came loose and the thing fell apart because you started shaking it in a vacuum while bombarding it with radiation and they did that again with every part of the spaceship which was exposed to to space essentially yeah and putting it all together you get this the only rocket that has essentially landed people on the moon and it's quite old now I mean yes we have we have projects which kind of aim to resend people to moon I would hope that we do because it's because Apollo has inspired so many of people and so much of what we've learned we learned because we could and we just or we not but the people there could just go and follow what they wanted to do with Apollo and kind of be left alone by the politicians because there was once in a while a consensus that we did have to do that and as you can see it's productive if you do that and it helps buying people together and nowadays space is a venture which is done by literally all all of the world and the ESA has started cooperating with the Russians it's launching Soyuz grade rockets from their from their launch facilities in in French Guyana and it binds people together having a common goal and if this common goal is actually not killing yourself with nuclear warheads but flying to the moon as a change it gives you rockets and it's cool essentially so yeah that kind of I want to get one last thing I want to say thank you to Richard Kulzu from Historic Spacecraft because his website did not provide I provided one picture of the Juno2 rocket and was tremendous help and I can only encourage you to go there if you want to research stuff about Historic Spacecraft his graphics are really really good and his explanations and sources are really well well researched and it's a fun to read it yeah obviously kudos to NASA for doing most of my presentation work I mean in the 60s but still yeah and this third person which put up his picture of the Vostok spacecraft as a GPL version 3 picture which is why I'm mentioning it here so um I was a bit quicker than I suspected but um that leaves time for questions does anybody have anything yes oh um yeah the like this S1 yeah of course why were there gaps in the stage numbers the S1 was built because of the stage one of the Saturn 5 launch vehicle was built as a as a as the concept was already finalized as you saw the proposal like these very like impractical proposals in the beginning of the talk showed like spacecraft that were kind of never manufactured but also got designations and that's why part of the boosters were actually part of other projects which is why they kind of got different numbering schemes and then they kind of fitted them all together this is why the stage one and two because they were designed for this vehicle in particular have subsequent numbering and the four then diverges from that yes like depends on where you are yeah of course sorry which parts of the rocket do not kill you essentially none but that depends on where you are um if you're on the launch pad pretty much can go wrong but if you're in space literally everything kills you and like Apollo 13 was a was a Hail Mary close to killing the people and only because of the ingenious engineers that came up with a solution on time didn't kill the people but essentially every part of a rocket kills you if it doesn't do what it's supposed to do hi out to that one a runner from Brown actually proposed a moon rocket way before Saturn became a reality and as I said the upper stages like the Apollo service module used hypergolic fuels Brown actually proposed of stacking three and a half thousand tons of those stuff on top of each other that's about one and a half thousand tons of red fuming nitric acid which will kill you and the other part of 1500 tons of hydrazine which will also kill you and which explode on contact thank god they never built it but the Russians had actually also built a spacecraft for that matter it exploded four times and is recorded as the fifth largest non-nuclear explosion in human history so yeah they didn't have very much luck with that one yes thanks for how we got in the past to the moon do you give it possible that we will revisit in the next 10 years 20 years 30 years what do you where do you see spaceflight going in the future the question was where do I see spaceflight going in the next 10 to 30 years it's most probably going to be Mars because people for some reason say Mars is a good idea I mean there's nothing there except for rock and we've got enough here and the moon has supposedly has a large amount of deuterium and trisium on its surface which would make it a prime candidate for mining if fusion ever gets possible and you we all know or some of us may know the fusion constant which is it's going to be ready in five years or 50 years that doesn't really matter as long as it's greater than zero yeah so if that ever becomes feasible if fusion ever becomes feasible and usable then the moon may be economically viable to fly there Mars for some reason is economically viable to fly there but don't ask me why NASA is planning on a deep space mission where they use a Lagrangian orbit around the moon and earth or like somewhere between moon and earth to to orbit a space station from which they will then supposedly run deep space missions deep space man missions but I mean there's nothing there which is economically viable so I suppose except for exploration purposes which needed the Russians to kick the American's asses so that they got they had to envision the next bigger thing probably not going to happen I mean yeah Google challenges and what's happening now is small steps but nothing akin to a moon base in my opinion anything else I suppose that concludes it