A visit to Rocket City USA

An AMAZING day yesterday at the NASA Marshall Space Centre in Huntsville, Alabama - also known as "Rocket City" for being the engineering powerhouse of the US Space Race and the Saturn project in particular.

How's that for a poetic shot!

To make the trip even more special, I went with a posse of colleagues which included two current rocket scientists, and met two living legends who worked on the Saturn V project back in the day. They told us "Houston only worried about the human part of the system - we did the real work" :-)

And so, this post is unapologetic pic spam! (and is about 2% of what I took)

This is the US Army Redstone Rocket - the first derivative from the German V2 rocket by the German team (BTW we met another NASA guy who was in the Shuttle program, who told me that as a lad he lived next to Dr von Braun in Huntsville, where all the German team were located. With such inspiration no wonder we became a rocket engineer!)

This is the PGM-19 JUPITER Medium Range Ballistic Missile which was used my NASA for suborbital biological test flights with monkeys.  And from these two was derived the Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle

The first successful launch was in late 1960, and Alan Shepard was taken aloft as the the first American astronaught in May 61. "The Mercury 7 were great guys but really just rode it as ballast' the Saturn V vets told us! :-)

The heavy lift capability program commenced in 1958. Initially called the JUNO V, the team at Huntsville just started referring to it as SATURN because "its the one after JUPITER" and it eventually became official!

"You use what you've got to solve problems" our 87yr old NASA veteran told us. "So to save retooling costs and time, we strapped a bunch of Redstone rockets around a Juno fuel tank to make a first stage and it seemed to go ok". The first Saturn 1 was launched in late 1961.  

The "rocket park" was inspiring and the exhibits are in showcase condition 

The Marshall Centre has other exhibits including US Army missiles designed and built at the Defence facility next door, including the "Nike Hercules", "Corporal", "Honest John" and "Spartan". 

Not in quite the same condition and while interesting, something else had caught my eye and was drawing me in....

OK, this one is a 1:1 scale replica standing proud outside but inside the building next to it...

This was originally built for the Apollo 19 Mission and is one of only three Saturn V Launch Vehicles remaining in existence - the others are a Kennedy Space Centre (Cape Canaveral) and Johnson Space Centre (Houston). Now I've seen two - one to go!

Pic of this Rocket from Wikipedia to give a different perspective

The business end! The outer R1 engines could gimble up to 5 degrees each while the centre one is fixed. Together they burned 6,000 pounds of fuel per second!

These were our hosts for the day and we were amazed for 3 solid hours as they rattled of data, design principles and many personal anecdotes. I feel very lucky to have had the chance to shake their hands and hear their stories.

One such story went along the lines of "It was getting very busy to control the spacecraft and manage all the inputs, so we decided to invent the first digital computer" (!) Partnered with IBM, it was designed with electromagnets, where North orientation was 1 and South was 0. So the first digital computer was made by employing local seamstresses to sew magnets with copper wire to build a whopping 144kb capacity weighing 88lbs.

As if that wasn't enough, there is also this treasure - Command Module Casper from the Apollo 16 mission and which orbited the moon 72 times in 1972

This capsule and its crew, John Young, Ken Mattingly and Charlie Duke, were recovered by USS Ticonderoga in the Pacific Ocean near Kiribati

The collection of astronaught training equipment here was also outstanding

Closeup of the driver's console and instrumentation

The LEM trainer was also very cool - I hadn't seen this before. This first pic is a close up of the instrumentation, while the second puts it into context.

Now imagine you're trying to move around, with your crew buddy, in a full space suit!

And finally, as you exist; where it all began - the V2 rocket

Cool mockup in the carpark next to the adjacent "Space Camp". I like that its called Pathfinder, which was used in the Apple TV Series For All Mankind 

An unforgettable and inspiring day