We did lose the capability. Read up on the engineering behind Saturn-V. There are books that go into extensive detail. A lot of the things described there required completely novel approaches that would be very difficult to replicate in deindustrialized United States of 2024. Not to mention that cost of all this would be absolutely astronomical, far more so than it was back then.
> lot of the things described there required completely novel approaches that would be very difficult to replicate in deindustrialized United States of 2024
Give me one example.
> cost of all this would be absolutely astronomical, far more so than it was back then
Inflation adjusted, the Saturn V was a $45bn project [1]. That's a mulitiple of the total capital SpaceX has raised (or been granted).
I’ll bite. The capability in the US to do large castings and forgings is basically gone. Good luck getting anything with a lead time of less than a couple years. In some cases, it simply can’t be done. That’s why we’re seeing so much investment into large scale additive manufacturing.
It’s interesting how this has become such a problem again. Post WW2, the US dismantled massive, basically building size hydraulic presses in former Nazi Germany and shipped them back to the US because that was a capability we didn’t have.
> capability in the US to do large castings and forgings is basically gone
This is true but irrelevant to space flight. We don’t fly big cast or forged parts.
Saturn V contained aluminium cast parts, but nothing we can’t make today [1]. (To my knowledge, no components were built in our WWII-era forges.) Modern carbon composites and aluminium alloys are superior, and we’re in the process of surpassing the Saturn V’s capabilities in SpaceX’s Starship.
Eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive_forming of upper and lower parts of the fuel and oxidizer tanks with extremely tight restrictions on the weight of the part, and its structural integrity. This is but one example - there’s a great book on this, “Saturn-V, Owner’s workshop manual”. Your mind will be blown literally on every page. Buy it and read it just to see how incredible the engineering was, and how unrealistic it is to reproduce today, when NASA can’t even get humans to LEO on its own.
We’re building lighter and stronger pressure vessels—more reliably, at larger scale and, inflation adjusted, probably cheaper—today than those tanks.
We’re entering a halcyon of American space flight, with multiple teams doing what others cannot and Apollo-era engineers could only dream of. It’s mind-boggling to see the disconnect between a lunar landing alongside a caricature of American industrial decline.
Until we successfully land people on the Moon again we by definition haven’t surpassed the Apollo program. And don’t latch onto just this one example. Read the book. There are a thousand more things like that there.
> Until we successfully land people on the Moon again we by definition haven’t surpassed the Apollo program
That’s an application, not a capability. It would be like arguing iPhones never surpassed ENIAC because mine hasn’t simulated a thermonuclear detonation.
> Read the book. There are a thousand more things like that there.
I asked you to name one. Explosive forming is something (a) we can still do but (b) that nobody does because we have better materials and processes.
The engineering of the Apollo era was remarkable. But the problem with promulgating this myth of lost capability is it stunts our ability to get things done today.
The reason NASA's current plan is taking a bit longer is it is considerably more ambitious than the Apollo program. If they were only trying to replicate Apollo it would be far easier to do.
Smarter Every Day had a rather interesting video on his concerns with the program. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU and they were more about a program design that requires over 15 fueling launches for every trip to the moon, and concerns about management and transparency.
I don't think anyone is claiming this issues are lost technology though.
> proof is in the pudding. The pudding is that NASA of 2024 has no human space flight capability
Stupidity and ignorance sometimes tread into troll territory.
Nobody has gone back to the Moon since America. That’s not because of a simultaneous global coma. It’s because nobody bothered. If your understanding of aeronautics and mechanics is so base as to propose that we, America, cannot lap what we did in the 60s today, there might be better reading material available than anecdotes [1].
If your complaint is literally a private v public one, that’s beyond me and my cat.
> very difficult to replicate in deindustrialized United States of 2024.
While we might have deindustrialized a lot of commodity electronics and small consumer things, I'm pretty sure we're still totally fine when it comes to aerospace. What with our Air Force and NASA and SpaceX and all that. More than fine, even.
It's the taking engineers out of retirement that's deindustrialization. A properly industrialized nation would have an active program with educators in the prime of their career to do the educating, and not need to pull someone out of retirement because there wasn't a need for them to train their replacements until after they'd retired.
That's not what a "properly industrialized nation" is, and it's an impossibly high bar.
There are always going to be bits of technology and training that seem to no longer be needed for modern products. And sometimes, some new product will need to resurrect one or more of them.
The idea that there's an "active program" to train people on literally every previous engineering practice ever created isn't feasible.
Agreed. For super specialized advanced materials or processes, some Western-aligned country will usually be able to provide it, even if no one in the U.S. can.
They aren't difficult to replicate because of deindustrialization, they're difficult and pointless to replicate because they were based around handcrafting, while modern rocket manufacturing is all computer controlled.
The designs are not optimal for modern production approaches.
As an example, a modernized F-1 engine would have far simplified plumbing, much fewer parts, the injector, which contained hundreds of handcrafted and hand-tuned parts to minimize combustion instability would be replaced with one machine crafted part where the instabilities would be properly cancelled out through computer simulation. But, what's the point?
The F-1s were designed because computer control systems of the time were not good enough to control a large number of smaller, more efficient engines. Nowadays such control systems exist, with Falcon Heavy flying 27 engines, and Starship doing 33. The fuel they used is also not really being seen as the future, with medium and heavy lifters shifting towards Methane for its better efficiency, cleaner combustion aiding reuse and being liquid at similar temperatures to oxygen, simplifying the cryo-tank design.
They simply aren't relevant anymore outside of out of touch Congress critters looking for ways to pour more billions into the dead end of SLS.
The other big point is that Saturn V wouldn't even meet the expectations current lunar landers are expected to meet. Both lander proposals are huge, potentially with the habitable volume of the entire ISS. They could, on their own, serve as small long term lunar bases, if it weren't for Orion being unable to spend an extended time in space.
