Apollo 8 The Bold Odyssey to the Moon's Far Side

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Why Can't we Remake the Rocketdyne F1 Engine?

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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 en...
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F-1 The Engine That Nearly Stopped the Apollo 11 Moon Mission.

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With the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 coming up is easy to forget that the whole Apollo program was a ground-breaking succession of technologies but one was essential to  literally get things of the ground. The Rocketdyne F1 engines would be the biggest, most  powerful single chamber rocket engines ever built but there was a point in their  development where they were so unstable it was looking like they might never get  anything off the ground,so how did the F1 go from a dangerous failure to 100% reliable. The history of the F-1 goes back to 1955 when the USAF contracted Rocketdyne to build a very large rocket engine. Two were designed the E-1 and the much larger F-1 for what was seen to be a need for future rockets to be able to carry large payload like the emerging spy satellites. The E-1 was tested but dropped in favour of the F-1 but then that was also dropped shortly afterwards, and development was shelved. After NASA was creat...
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What if Apollo 11 got stuck on the moon.

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For all the celebrations surrounding the first manned lunar landing of Apollo 11 1969 what is forgotten today is just how close they and the other Apollo missions flew to the edge of disaster. Apollo 11 came within seconds of aborting the landing because they had overshot the landing area and we're running low on fuel. This was only one of several issues with the Apollo missions that arose that could have led to the loss of the mission and the crew, though as it turned out only Apollo 13 came close to this actually happening. This does obviously excludes the Apollo one accident where the crew died because of the fire as they rehearsed the launch on January 27th 1967. Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice during the launch and although it knocked out several electrical systems the main navigation systems continue to work and the rest of mission proceeded successfully. On Apollo 16 the engine backup system malfunctioned on the command module as it orbited...
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NASA's Vaults Show How They Assembled Apollo 11 Saturn V.

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NASA's Vaults Show How They Assembled Apollo 11 Saturn V. 45 years ago today—on July 16, 1969—astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins launched to the Moon on top of the mightiest spaceship ever built. These amazing photos from NASA's vaults show how they built and launched that spaceship—I look at them in awe and admiration. It was the most important trip in the history of humankind, a trip that many deemed impossible—some people still do think it's impossible—an odyssey that started many years before and changed our perception of the world itself. Only eight years before this day—on on May 25, 1961—Kennedy announced a plan to go to the Moon. It was a plan that they didn't have. In fact, the mere idea was one that almost everyone thought was impossible to do in that time frame . Just think about this: The United States only launched its first man to space on May 5, 1961—and he didn't even orbited the Earth. That happened after K...
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