/sci/ - Science & Math

Cluster's Last Stand deserves more recognition. NASA needed a heavier rocket than what they had, but they only had spare parts from other rockets. In five years they got one put together, and that was the Saturn I. It probabally wasn't the best in it's size, but it never had a significant failure if I recall correctly and it was good enough.

Now. If only NASA of today had that capability to make a new rocket from spare tankage and engines from other rockets. If only they could do this with the speed of Apollo-era NASA, and be able to do this without overspending billions of dollars.

>>4613569
This. I mean, fuck, Saturn was basically a jumble of Jupiters and Redstones duct-taped together with an up-scaled Titan bolted on top.

Von Braun was a mediocre engineer at best. He had other, more brilliant engineers doing all the hard work for him both in Germany (Thiel and Ehricke, among others) and eventually in the US as well (a number of nameless American engineers working for the various corporations contracted by NASA and ABMA). In the mean time, in case you're to ignorant to realize, ABMA very much stagnated, with Von Braun's crippling conservatism preventing any significant evolution whatsoever beyond the original V-2/Redstone design. Meanwhile, Korolev and gang at OKB-1 were blazing ahead on the revolutionary R-7 rocket, and other American corporations such as Convair and Rocketdyne blazed ahead with their own radical advancements on their own accord. It wasn't until Von Braun & Co. actually WITNESSED the radical improvements in action that they finally began to open up to diverging from the original V-2/Redstone family at all, and EVEN STILL they irrationally clung to parts of it all the way to the Saturn IB and it's clusterfuck of a first stage.

Von Braun was a visionary, and a good team leader, but that's about all he was good for. In many ways, we probably would have been better off without him.