Neil Armstrong The Moon Missions Channel

Why was the Saturn V rocket painted black and white? There's a pretty cool answer to this one... it all boils down to temperature. The Saturn V is an iconic rocket, and its black and white paint scheme is pretty easily recognizable to even casual space fans. And like its technological heritage, we can trace its stylistic roots to WWII Germany as well. The Saturn V was painted predominantly white to keep the craft cool as it sat on the launch pad in the hot Florida sun. Holding down the rocket’s body temperature reduced fuel boil-off and improved overall safety. The black markings were to help ground cameras with roll measurements as the craft rotated around its vertical axis on lift-off. The Saturn V’s iconic black and white paint scheme is a remnant of its German roots.  When Wernher von Braun and his rocket engineer colleagues tested early prototypes of the Vergentungswaffe Zwei or V2, they painted a large black and white checkered pattern on ...

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...

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...