When work on the F-1 began, the most powerful rocket engine in existence made about 150,000 pounds of thrust. The F-1 had to make ten times that: 1.5 million pounds from a single nozzle. Five of them powered the Saturn V’s first stage, 7.5 million pounds of thrust, throwing a 363-foot, six-million-pound rocket 50 miles downrange and 40 miles up at Mach 7 in two and a half minutes, burning 4.5 million pounds of propellant. Each engine stood about 18 feet tall and 12 feet wide. NASA Marshall still calls it the most powerful single-nozzle liquid-fuelled engine ever built.
Full video on the channel. Related long: NASA Bombed Its Own Rocket Engine. On Purpose.
SOURCES
– NASA SP-4206, Stages to Saturn (Roger Bilstein), ch. 4:
– NASA MSFC, F-1 Engine Fact Sheet / Liquid Propulsion Technology and Development:
– Robert Biggs (Rocketdyne), “F-1 Saturn V First Stage Engine” (AAS History Series), as quoted in the long
FOOTAGE / IMAGERY
– Courtesy NASA (Marshall Space Flight Center, Kennedy Space Center) via images.nasa.gov, public domain; use does not imply NASA endorsement. Films: Apollo 11 launch footage, Saturn V at Pad 39A, Test Stand 4670, Marshall test stand B-roll, Saturn V launch film. Photos: NASA MSFC F-1 engine and S-IC stage at Michoud.
– Animations: our own simplified illustrations (not to scale), no generative AI
MUSIC
– “Rising” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 –
– Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC BY 4.0
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