Tales from the Road: MACH.19 - Saguaro Country, Day 4: Rocket Man

Saguaro Country, Day 3
Rocket Man

Wednesday May 1, 2018

From my early years, I have been a space geek. In grade school and high school, I'd spend hours on clear, subzero winter nights with friends focusing a telescope into the starlit Pennsylvania skies. In eighth grade I wrote an award-winning space travel fiction short story. It didn't end well: There was a problem with the yaw attitude adjusters and the spacecraft tumbled into an irrecoverable decreasing-radius orbit around the sun. I have been fascinated with the possibilities of space travel and space technology all my life.

One of my life's dreams was to watch a space shuttle liftoff from Cape Kennedy. I missed my window and it's one of the things I regret. That, of course, and seeing the Earth Dog Cafe in Berkeley Springs, WV close its doors before we ever made our first stop there.

For years I've wanted to stop at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville AL, but our trip parameters didn't seem to align. But today that goal will be realized. We've set aside the entire day as a no-travel day. Today I'm a Basic American Tourist; the bike and trailer will stay covered and parked at the hotel. Today, a cab ride will transport us to and from the venue.

We spend the first part of the day wandering around the museum, which is filled with all kinds of artifacts and facts. I'm amazed that this technology of rockets and what became space flight and moon landings was computed with slide rules and computers whose computing power pales in comparison to today's most minimal smartphone. There's a fascinating exhibit that shows the development of the space race between the USSR and the USA, along with the social climate of the times.

It wasn't long after the Soviet Union launched the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into space, that John F. Kennedy outlined his impassioned goal to put a man on the moon in 9 years. When we visited the Davidson Center, which contains an actual Saturn IV rocket lying horizontally, 11 stories tall if it were vertical, we learn that when Kennedy made his speech, the largest and strongest rocket engine in the US inventory was able to produce about 188,000 pounds of thrust. The engines needed for a moon shot needed to produce a staggering 1,500,000 pounds of thrust - about 8 times what anyone had envisioned to that point.

Over the next decade, that engine, the F1, used in the Saturn series of rockets, was developed. There were a myriad of extremely serious and potentially show-stopping engineering obstacles, perhaps chief among which was that the engine would explode because of violent vibrations and nobody could figure out why. Engineers eventually introduced some baffles into the fuel delivery system, which for unknown reasons seemed to solve the problem. To this day nobody knows what caused the problem or why the baffles solved it.

This engine is the largest rocket ever built. The Saturn V rocket, containing five of these monsters, had 7 million moving parts, and those engines together produced 7.5 million pounds of thrust. Nothing before or since has equaled that output.

"Can you imagine how the engineers felt the first time they saw their rocket engines launch such a monster into the sky!?" I ask Kitty. For some reason, we both have tears in our eyes.

We'd signed up for the bus tour to RedStone Arsenal, where we visited the old test pads and saw the new test pad for the new Space Launch System (SLC), which includes the Space-X launchers.

We saw the actual test pad where the first simultaneous test firing of five F1 Saturn engines was conducted. This 6.5-second test created a 3.5-magnitude earthquake 350 miles away and damaged $3 million worth of windows in Huntsville!

It's amazing to me that the last Saturn V rocket was launched in 1973 for the Skylab program, more than 45 years distant. When I think of today's technology and compare it to the technology available then, I marvel at the ingenuity of the engineers and scientists of the day! Nothing came close to stressing society's every level of engineering, metallurgy, chemistry, and aerodynamics like this rocket. This was indeed an apex predator! It's very humbling to stand, literally, among these giants.

When we get back to the hotel, there's a car show going on in the quadrangle across the street, with maybe 200 cars and jeeps on display. Did I mention that I'm also a gearhead and mechanical geek? So after an early dinner at Taco Mama's next door, we wander through the display, which features a whole row of supercharged Corvettes, some with racing slicks and nitrous oxide tank holders in view, and another row of Ferraris of similar ilk. Beautiful, beautiful vehicles! A gearhead's bonanza!

Tomorrow it's back on the road again for a moderate 380-mile ride to Vicksburg, MS. We're looking forward to seeing our crawfish-eating friends for the next couple days.