These simple facts will make an HBer out of you yet Jay. It is never too late my friend.
No thank you, I have an engineering degree and decades of relevant professional experience. I'll stick with those. And your only explanation for why others similarly situated agree with me, and not with you, is that they somehow must all be lying or mistaken.
From the Associated Press article...
Why is an AP reporter's analysis relevant? Why are you so afraid of the opinions of the actual engineers?
It flat out does not work. It failed, and abysmally so.
You are not qualified to judge whether this flight was an "absymal" failure. You have no relevant education or experience. The Apollo 6 Mission Report contains a detailed breakdown of all formalized mission objectives and whether they were satisfied. Please deal with the actual facts instead of your knee-jerk, shoot-from-the-hip, uninformed opinion.
Samuel Phillips was also quoted as saying that if the flight had been intended to propel astronauts to the moon however "we would have had to conduct an alternative mission in earth orbit".
Yes, that was NASA's standard contingency plans in case of some failure with the launch vehicle. Real Apollo scholars understand all the contingencies, since they were part of the original mission plans that they study as part of their background research. Most casual readers such as you don't know anything about them. Thanks again for exposing even more of your ignorance.
But it didn't perform flawlessly Jay, matter of fact, the performance stunk to high Holy Heaven, you know...
Actually I know differently, speaking from my considerable experience. This Saturn V flight experienced anomalies for reasons that were very quickly, easily, and conclusively discovered. Yes, the rocket did not perform as expected. But it failed in predictable and highly characterizable modes that led engineers very quickly to a conclusion.
That is the purpose of flight test. A flight test demonstrates problems that were not visible during ground test. A ground test is devised to duplicate and measure the anomaly, after which the ground test -- not additional flight testing -- becomes the qualifying criterion. Ground tests, where devised to be suitably faithful, provide more information to engineers because they can be so much more effectively instrumented. For example, S-IC ground testing is the definitive method of isolating and eliminating pogo because the resonances can be measured in ways that are problematic in a flight test article.
pogoing bad enough to injure spacemen
No. Again, you mistake the customary measurement of acoustic loading with the experienced force.
As an example, I was the project engineer on a large piece of instrumentation (roughly phone-booth size). Because it incorporated a COTS hard drive, there were vibration constraints in the plane of the disk platters. And because of the COTS cooling fans, there was a considerable source of vibration. Using disk seek errors as a rough metric, we determined that vibration was unacceptable. Further instrumenting the chassis in the relevant planes with commercial accelerometers, we discovered a strong vibration at around 40 Hz, whose magnitude was measured at just under 2 g. Yet even with this "two gee" acoustic load, I was able to place a full coffee cup on the chassis, filled to the brim with liquid, without any spillage. When you understand how that was able to occur, you'll understand why you don't have much of a case here.
Maybe you should do some research into the measurement of acoustic loading, since you're clearly confusing the units. You also got them wrong: the CSM accelerometers measured a calculated acoustic load of +/- 0.6 g, not 10 as you claimed. You should also further research the subject of pogo in rockets, and the resulting force coupling that determines whether the vehicle is in danger (cf. Sutton and Biblarz,
Rocket Propulsion Elements, pp. 348-351). And please also consider that my discussion of pogo in the Saturn V is currently used in the aerospace engineering curriculum at Georgia Tech.
Since the S-IC pogo problem was well known, the problem here was not a matter of confusion or ignorance, but simply a matter of getting the tuning right. The root cause of the pogo on Apollo 6 was a clerical error; it does not require a retest. The performance of the S-IC here would not have terminated the mission, but it would have exceeded the conservative mission rules for that one frequency band (5 Hz). Several frequency bands are of interest, and all the rest passed.
So please kindly omit the bluster. You really don't know what you're talking about.
stage 2 engines shutting off early leading to inappropriate/unplanned trajectory and orbit
The engines were shut off early by the onboard control system, which was part of the engineered safety devices (ESDs) for which the Saturn V was so justly famous and why it ranks as one of the world's most reliable launch vehicles. The J-2 engine shut down before it could explode from overheating. The second engine did not fail, but was shut down via cross-strapping due to a miswired cable harness. The engine connectors did not have wiring references at this time; they were added as a design revision.
This root cause was quickly discovered, and a method was devised to test it on the ground, obviating the need to test it in flight.
guidance system failing to correct errant course
On the contrary, the guidance system here performed far better than most we use today and was judged successfully demonstrated under the mission rules. Most launch vehicle guidance systems have an "envelope" outside which the guidance system cannot recover. All nominal flight and many failure modes remain inside this envelope. However, propulsion system failures often push the vehicle outside the safe operating envelope. Not so on the Saturn V. While the ensuing trajectory and resulting orbital insertion were characterized as non-optimal, they were nevertheless successful because they did not require range-safety destruction, which is the usual outcome of out-of-tolerance guidance failure.
With the failed engines it was simply not possible to achieve the design orbit. There wasn't enough thrust. If your car's engine breaks down and delivers too little power, it's not the cruise-control's fault that the car can't achieve the commanded speed. The Saturn V IU managed to deliver the vehicle to the best possible approximation of the design orbit using considerably diminished thrust and without subjecting the vehicle to destructive flight loads. That is not only a working guidance system, that is an
extraordinary guidance system.
There were some disagreements between the IU and the AGC reference platforms during S-IC boost, but this is normal. The purpose of flight test here is to characterize and calibrate the disagreements. Reference platforms always drift.
failure of the command module engine to restart
The command module has no engine; only small steering jets.
If you mean the service module engine, then no -- all SPS mission objectives (P3.2, P3.3, S6) were accomplished.
If you mean the S-IVB restart failure, that was due to the same J-2 engine failure that affected the S-II stage during the ascent. The same type of engine failed in the same way due to the same root cause. Engineers like to see that type of failure. It makes diagnosing it so very easy.
...restarting needed for translunar injection burn, and most importantly, the burn needed to return astronauts to the earth from a lunar orbit
No. The S-IVB stage's J-2 engine was restarted for translunar injection (TLI). The SPS engine was used for transearth injection (TEI). The two engines cannot possibly be more different.
Thank you for confirming your ongoing ignorance regarding Apollo mission profiles. Someone who can't keep the terminology straight and who doesn't know that TLI and TEI were accomplished by two completely different propulsion systems cannot possibly have the expertise required to judge whether a flight test is successful.
So of course one would test the Saturn V again...
No, you lack the experience in aerospace flight test to determine that a new test flight was needed. You exhibit the common layman's misunderstand for what all-up testing is designed to reveal.
Once again, you're simply begging the question. Just because
you, in your infinite ignorance, would want to do another flight test does not mean that's what qualified, highly-experienced engineers would deem necessary.
it is all FAKE, and confirmed so!
No, we've merely found another set of topics that you don't know anything about, can't get the facts straight on, and can't help shooting your mouth off about.
Having proven you don't even know the difference between the Saturn V and the service module, shall we revisit your idiotic claims of militarizing the moon (whose questions you still haven't answered), and your colossal inability to do basic budgetary arithmetic? I think it's rather conspicuous that you'll plow on to new "smoking guns" before you've answered the criticisms of any of your previous claims.
