Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

How much can really be usefully gleaned from an engine that's spent nearly half a century at the bottom of the ocean? It seems like the long-term salt water exposure would obliterate anything useful for actual engineering. However, I don't know this stuff well, and would love some details on why I'm wrong if I am.

View on HN

I'd bet that there's still stuff to be learned, especially in metallurgy. Some types of cracking, especially within the bulk of metal, should be well-preserved.

Wear patterns should still be visible, even after corrosion.

Some chemical changes only take place at high temperature.

Furthermore, if any old NASA designs were lost (or if details are classified), salvaging the hardware guarantees you access to flight hardware.

From reading about the SpaceX program there are remarkably very little left of the Apollo program engines. Having a real model even in disarray would be a useful study.

No, there are complete F-1 engines in storage. They fired up the gas generator from one of them just a few months ago:

    http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/f1_test.html

There's a proposal to build new F-1B engines to power liquid boosters for the SLS (as a future replacement for the shuttle-derived boosters that will be used for the first few flights).

Still awesome to get some of the old ones back, though!

How so? There is an Apollo rocket at Kennedy Space Centre complete with engines. Surely there are others around?

I had the joy of seeing 2 F-1 engines in one week. The first is at the old RocketDyne (now Pratt & Whitney) facility in Woodland Hills, CA (on Canoga, I think), and the second at the NM Air and Space Museum in Alamogordo.

http://campl.us/jisP4TQtMJg (Alamogordo) http://campl.us/i26CYMtwf8K (Woodland Hills)

* Confirmed, an F-1 engine stands tall [1] outside Rocketdyne corporate HQ on Canoga Ave just north of Victory Blvd in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. One can walk right up to the engine and have a gander; it's 18 feet tall. You can admire the maze of cooling pipes on the upper half of the nozzle and imagine the heat and roar.

* In decades past, during development of the Apollo space program, Rocketdyne tested engines at its Field Laboratory test facility in the Santa Susana Mountains a few miles West. The sustained outdoor roar of those engine tests was audible better than 7 miles away. Source: My elementary school classmates, blase about the whole thing, saying "Oh, that's just Rocketdyne testing again".

* Lots of facility pictures of several of the Rocketdyne facilities (with engines under assembly) in the Rocketdyne Archives [2]

* It's a safe bet the name "Rocketdyne" would be a portmanteau of "Rocket Dynamics".

* Some rocket equations and stability discussion at [3]

[1] http://www.dailynews.com/ci_21138479/pratt-whitney-rocketdyn...

[2] http://www.rocketdynearchives.com/canoga.html

[3] http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/~space/ess472/Lecture_Roc...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com