Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: SATURN V BOOSTERS
Message-ID: <1988Mar9.180720.618@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <21644@bbn.COM>, <5129@uwmcsd1.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 88 18:07:20 GMT

Grump.  I'm only gonna write the following one more time, so listen up! :-)
The history of the Saturn Vs is quite well documented.  Fifteen were built.
Two flew unmanned tests, Apollos 4 and 6 as I recall.  Three were used
for manned Apollo tests, Apollos 8, 9, and 10.  (Apollo 7 went up on a
Saturn 1B.)  There were seven actual lunar missions.  That leaves three,
originally scheduled for Apollos 18-20.  One of those was used to launch
Skylab.  (The Skylab crews went up on 1Bs.)  That leaves two real, live
flight-ready Saturn Vs, which were mothballed in the VAB against possible
future use.  In about 1976, with no such use in sight, it was officially
decided that the modifications to Complex 39 for the shuttle would *not*
preserve Saturn V compatibility, and therefore those two would never fly.
One of them is rusting on the lawn at Kennedy, the other is rusting on
the lawn at JSC (in Houston).

There were several "test articles", which were not considered flight-ready
although some of them could probably have been flown in a pinch.  These
preceded the real Saturn Vs on the production line, and were used for
things like ground tests and shaking the bugs out of the production process.
One of them, used for vibration tests I think, is now protected as a national
monument or something on that order; it is in protected storage at (I think)
Marshall.  The one rusting on the lawn at Marshall (well, properly speaking
at the whatever-the-museum-and-visitors-center-is-called-I-forget) is also
a test article.  There may be more.  There is quite a bit of miscellaneous
hardware, e.g. engines, in storage in various places.  There are also a lot
of Saturn 1Bs around, most of them ex-flight-ready, since a fair number of
them were built and very few were used.

(For those of you in such a revolting state of ignorance that you cannot tell
the difference on sight, apart from sheer size the most distinctive thing
to look at is the main body of the first stage:  on the Saturn 1B [and
Saturn 1, but that's a distinction we need not worry about], it is a bundle
of cylinders rather than a single cylinder.  The 1B first stage was the 
biggest that could be built using mostly off-the-shelf hardware, and its
first-stage tanks are a collection of stretched Redstone and Jupiter tanks
bundled together.  The Saturn V was just too big for this approach.)
-- 
Those who do not understand Unix are |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
condemned to reinvent it, poorly.    | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry