The Saturn V was – and still is – an engineering marvel. But how did they go through the design process? I’m familiar with the concept of the rocket equation, but how did they know how much power they would get out of the engines before they had built them, how did they know how big to make the fuel tanks to be able to get each stage to launch the stages above it (which were also still under design) to orbit, especially when the final mass was unknown? Even more so, how did they do this before computers were common place?
In: Engineering
They did build the rocket engines. And then they tested them on the ground to see how much force they produced. The engineers were able to do a lot of math to model how everything would function, including with the rudimentary computers available in the day, but the only real way to check their work was to put the thing together and find out what happens.
The Saturn V was the product of an evolution in rocket design. What’s really amazing is most of that evolution occurred in about 10 years. The early Redstone rockets of the 1950s progressively were enlarged. Each progression taught new things and advanced design.
The design began in 1960. They knew approximately what size payload would be needed and scaled up to reach that.
You can do a lot with enough money and engineers.
To note the Saturn rocket started out as the V2 rocket, which just about made it into space before blowing up parts of allied Europe during WW2 the designers of the V2 were smuggled into America at the end of WW2(operation paperclip) where they continued to work on rockets scaling up and advancing the V2 into the Saturn V.
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