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To the Moon: Boeing, the Rocket Foundry
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The historic Apollo 11 mission in July of 1969 culminated in the first manned moon landing. While many of the proud Americans who were involved in that project are no longer with us 40 years later, the technologies they built still live on, will be further refined, and will return us to that lonely world and beyond.
IBM and UNIVAC: The Integrators
As part of a series through the beginning of August, I am going to profile the key companies and the projects which made Apollo 11 a reality -- from the firms that performed the systems integration, built and designed the avionics components, engineered and manufactured the powerful rocket engines which hurtled the mighty Saturn V into space, and created the legendary spacecraft which made history. Our first profile is Boeing Integrated Defense Systems.
Boeing's work on the Saturn first stage booster took place at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans. Parts for the booster were shipped to Michoud from the company's Wichita plant, as well as from subcontractors around the country. (Boeing)
The Saturn V rockets, standing 363 feet tall, were the most powerful launch vehicles ever built by the United States, and the most powerful in the world ever brought into operational status. They were comprised of over hundreds of thousands of component parts and weighed in at nearly 6.7 million pounds when fully loaded with liquid oxygen/hydrogen (LOX/LH2) and liquid kerosene (RP-1) propellants. Over 6.5 Billion dollars was appropriated in 1962 for their design and construction, which adjusted for inflation is roughly $45 Billion today. 15 of these gigantic multi-stage rockets were constructed, with 13 launched in missions between 1967 and 1973.
Click on the "Read the rest of this entry" link below for more
The manufacturing of the Saturn V was the most ambitious and complicated multi-contractor construction and assembly project ever created or executed by the US aerospace industry. To build and design the rocket, several large contractors were assigned the "Primary" roles. There were dozens of medium-sized or "Secondary" contractors, and hundreds of smaller contractors which supplied parts as well as specialized engineering and consulting experience to the Apollo program.
Hundreds of thousands of workers from all of the companies and NASA combined were employed to achieve the goal of a successful Moon landing by the end of 1960s, as President Kennedy had vowed the country would complete in his historic speech in 1962. While Kennedy is often given credit for this push to the moon, the previous administration under President Eisenhower set up much of the infrastructure to enable the military-industrial complex to achieve the eventual goal, as well as having formed NASA itself.
The Primary contractors for the "airframe" of the Saturn V were Boeing, North American Aviation and Douglas Aircraft. Ironically, through a long series of mergers and acquisitions in the aerospace industry, only Boeing remains today, holding most of the assets of those combined companies which built the rocket.
The heritage units of the Boeing company -- which today include McDonnell Douglas and the aerospace and defense units of Rockwell International -- built all the major components of the Saturn V launch vehicle, except the lunar lander. North American Aviation (NAA) and Rocketdyne, noted above, were part of Rockwell International (Illustration by Boeing)
The Saturn V rocket was comprised of 3 stages, the S-IC boost stage, the S-II Second Stage, and the S-IVB stage, above which sat the Command Module/Service Module which carried the astronauts to the moon via Trans Lunar Injection (TLI). From the Apollo 10 through the Apollo 17 missions, a Lunar Module Adapter was also used atop the S-IVB to house the Grumman-built Lunar Module (LEM).
Gallery: Boeing / Saturn V Construction and Development
Supplementary Reading: Boeing Apollo Stories (PDF)
Also Read: To the Moon: How we built the technologies
Also See: Boeing Integrated Defense Systems Apollo 40th Anniversary Website
Video: Apollo 11 (Boeing, Windows Media)
The rocket engines on the Saturn V themselves were built by Rocketdyne, which was owned by Rockwell during the 1960s as part of their acquisition of North American. Rockwell was sold to Boeing in 1996 and the assets of Rocketdyne were divested to Pratt & Whitney in 2005, a United Technologies company. Rocketdyne built two types of engines for the Saturn V, the liquid kerosene/oxygen fueled F-1 and the liquid hydrogen/oxygen fueled J-2. The Command Module/Service Module engine, the AJ10-137 was built by Aerojet, whereas the Ascent/Descent stage engines of the Lunar Module were built by Bell Aerosystems and Rocketdyne, respectively.
The logistics involved in constructing and assembling all of the stages of the Saturn V were enormous. The heaviest portion, the S-IC, was constructed at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, with tool machining done at Boeing's Wichita, Kansas plant. Testing and integration of the S-IC with engine coupling was performed nearby at the Mississippi Test Operations Complex (now Stennis Space Center) in Bay St. Louis. At Michoud the S-IC was mated to the huge J-2 rocket engines which were flown in from Rocketdyne's assembly plant in Canoga Park, California, using a specially designed aircraft known as the Super Guppy.
After assembly at Michoud and testing at Stennis, the entire stage was barged to Cape Canaveral where it and the rest of the other stages (which traveled by ship through the Panama canal FOB to Florida from North American and Douglas's facilities in Seal Beach and Huntington Beach, California) and were stacked on top of each other in the massive Vehicle Assembly Building which was constructed specifically for housing the Saturn V. The rocket was then rolled onto one of two launchpads using a specialized crawler transport vehicle/mobile launch platform. The first Saturn V flew on Apollo 4, in early November of 1967.
Floyd Long (seated left in upper left photo) was the 1st Stage (S-IC) Supervisor for Boeing during the Apollo Program.
Since the conclusion of the Apollo Program, Boeing's space initiatives through their Integrated Defense Systems subsidiary included important roles as a primary contractor on the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, as well as becoming a world leader in expendable heavy-lift rockets such as the Delta series through the United Launch Alliance for private and military use and an important supplier of modular commercial and military satellites. Without Boeing, their Delta launch system and their 702 series of satellites, you'd have no DirecTV, XM Satellite Radio or Google Earth, whose General Dynamics-built GeoEye-1 was launched on a Boeing Delta II rocket in September of last year.
While the successors to the Saturn V, the Ares I and the Ares V are still on the drawing board, Boeing has already submitted proposals to NASA to help design and build them. While contracts have yet to be awarded and none of the designs are set in stone, knowing Boeing, it's not unlikely that we'll see the company in a key role in our nation's return to the Moon with the Constellation Program.
Were you or someone you know an employee of the Boeing family of companies that contributed to the Apollo program? Talk Back and Let Me Know.
posted by Jason Perlow
July 10, 2009 @ 10:12 pm
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