Case in point: NASA's Space Launch System (SLS), intended to be an enormous heavy-lift system that will rival the Saturn V in size and capabilities. But he doesn't mind stepping back and giving his team interesting challenges and then turning them loose to work out the details. He's smart, of course-that's a prerequisite for his job as the director of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center's (MSFC) Propulsion Systems Department. Tom Williams is the kind of boss you want to have. Lee Hutchinson Enter our young rocket scientists And it's due in no small part to a group of young and talented NASA engineers in Huntsville, Alabama, who wanted to learn from the past by taking priceless museum relics apart. For thirty years, NASA's astronaut corps rode into orbit aboard Space Shuttles powered by RS-25 liquid hydrogen-powered engines and solid-propellant boosters. With the Shuttle's discontinuation, NASA is currently hitching space rides with the Russians.īut there's a chance that in the near future, a giant rocket powered by updated F-1 engines might once again thunder into the sky. This happens to be very similar to the peak electricity demand of the United Kingdom."ĭespite the stunning success of the Saturn V, NASA's direction shifted after Project Apollo's conclusion the Space Transport System-the Space Shuttle and its associated hardware-was instead designed with wildly different engines. The power generated by five of these engines was best conceptualized by author David Woods in his book How Apollo Flew to the Moon-"he power output of the Saturn first stage was 60 gigawatts.
The rocket redefined "massive," standing 363 feet (110 meters) in height and producing a ludicrous 7.68 million pounds (34 meganewtons) of thrust from the five monstrous, kerosene-gulping Rocketdyne F-1 rocket engines that made up its first stage.Īt the time, the F-1 was the largest and most powerful liquid-fueled engine ever constructed even today, its design remains unmatched (though see the sidebar, "The Soviets," for more information on engines that have rivaled the F-1). There has never been anything like the Saturn V, the launch vehicle that powered the United States past the Soviet Union to a series of manned lunar landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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