British officer stole Indian rocket design
In the 1700s, an Indian army commander converted primitive rockets made of of paper and cardboard into efficient war weapons made of metal. A British officer took the idea and developed a rocket design that paved the way for Saturn V.
Tipu Sultan had the best rockets
The British army was attacked with rockets during hostilities in southern India in the 1790s. Tipu Sultan, the Muslim army commander known as the Tiger of Mysore, terrorised the British with sophisticated war rockets.
Brits brought the technology home
In spite of his formidable weapon and early theories about rocket artillery, Tipu Sultan’s army lost the battle against the British in 1799. Thousands of metal cylinder rockets were subsequently carried to Britain.
Rockets in armour
Back in Britain, artillery officer William Congreve developed the technology, inventing a model with gunpowder placed in an iron case. It was much more stable, could fly up to 3.2km, and exploded on impact.
speed to lift the 13-tonne rocket. His solution was a high-speed turbo pump which injected fuel and liquid oxygen at a rate of 125 litres/ second, resulting in a thrust of 25 tonnes. Von Braun’s team also equipped the V2 with a control system including gyroscopes and accelerometers, the first use of a method that is still employed today. The system not only stabilised the rocket when it travelled faster than the speed of sound, keeping it on course, the system monitored the speed, so the missile shut down the engine on time to reach its designated destination.
Shock triggers lunar ambition
So clear was Germany’s leading position in rocket development that in the wake of the war, the Allied victors rushed to grab secrets and staff from the Nazi rocket programme.
Russia obtained some ready-for-launch V2 rockets along with detailed records and drawings. But the Americans got the biggest prize: the world’s best rocket engineer, Wernher von Braun himself, who surrendered to the US together with his team. As the Cold War developed between the US and the Soviet Union, an intensive space race developed. The Russians won round one, when their Chief Designer Sergei Korolev used their gathered remnants of the V2 programme, to develop the R-7 rocket. On 4 October 1957 it took the Russians into the space age by enabling the launch of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik.
Sputnik so shocked the Western world that the US quickly established its own space agency, and in July 1958 NASA was born. Wernher von Braun was brought in, assigned with development of a powerful rocket for manned space missions. It was a boyhood dream come true for him – finally he could reach for the Moon. In 1967, the Saturn V rocket was completed, far larger than its ‘father’ V2, a swelling bundle of muscle compared with its slender predecessor. Fully fuelled the 111-metre-high Saturn V rocket weighed 2.8 million kilograms, roughly the same as 500 elephants. To lift such a monster, von Braun and his rocket team constructed a three-stage rocket with separate engines and fuel tanks. When one stage burned out, it was discarded and a smaller stage took over, so the lighter rocket accelerated even more – in keeping with the ideas of Hermann Obert, Robert Goddard, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
The rocket’s first and biggest stage – which would achieve lift-off – was equipped with five huge Rocketdyne F-1 engines, the biggest ever, powered by a mixture of liquid oxygen and kerosene. The second stage used five smaller J-2 engines powered by liquid oxygen and hydrogen, while the third stage – to push the Apollo capsule towards the Moon – included only one engine.
“Six, five, four, three, two, one, zero. All engines are active.” At 9.32 AM on 16 July 1969, Saturn V – with the Apollo 11 spacecraft at its top – lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center. Only four days later, on 20 July, the Apollo landing module Eagle landed softly in the moon dust. Soon von Braun – and the rest of the world – could watch Neil Armstrong place his left foot on the barren surface, a giant leap for mankind – and particularly for von Braun: 27 years after his V2 was the first to reach the threshold of space, his Saturn V had succeeded in sending the first humans to another world.
The king of rockets was used 13 times on long missions – the last time in May 1973, when Saturn V launched the US’ first space station, Skylab, into an orbit around Earth.
SLS – son of Saturn V
This monster rocket’s legacy is not yet over. NASA today is developing the Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever built, planned to be the backbone of NASA’s future lunar programme Artemis. Yet still the SLS is essentially an upgraded version of Saturn V, and so hence another mighty descendant of the V2. It is almost identical in height and weight to the Saturn V, but delivers around 15% more thrust. NASA plans its maiden voyage for this November 2021, a flight around the Moon carrying an unmanned Orion capsule, and fittingly it will launch from the site where all of NASA’s space adventures have begun – the Kennedy Space Center.
The plan continues on, aiming to achieve a landing of two astronauts on the Moon in 2024 (a woman and a man), and then in the mid-2030s for the SLS to take the next great space leap and launch astronauts on our first odyssey to Mars. Of course it is unknown whether the timetable will be delayed – the SLS has been in the pipeline for a decade and has suffered several delays. A planned test of the four main engines on 16 January 2021 did not go according to plan. Only 67.2 seconds into a test that should have lasted for eight minutes, the engines shut down – an error of the hydraulic system, according to NASA.
But delays are part of the history of space flight. Saturn V was originally due for test launch in 1965, but not until November 1967 did the rocket actually travel for the first time in connection with the first unmanned Apollo launch. Two years later the delay had long been forgotten and forgiven, when the king of rockets launched humankind into a new era.
WATCH THE LAUNCH OF THE SATURN V ROCKET
NASA’s archival video covers the early development of the Saturn V launch vehicle during the Apollo program of the 1960s: tinyurl.com/rockets84
The 2019 doco Apollo 11 uses superb 70mm footage: see it on Netflix, or watch the trailer here: tinyurl.com/rockets85