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Why Can't we Remake the Rocketdyne F1 Engine?

Curious Droid · 4.2M views · 2018-07-24 · 5:04

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Overview

Short Curious Droid video on why NASA could not simply rebuild the Saturn V's Rocketdyne F-1 engine for the SLS boosters. It explains that the engines were hand-tailored and that much of the know-how was never documented, so the blueprints were not enough.

On Hacker News

Cited as the standard illustration of lost tacit knowledge and why old blueprints cannot be turned back into hardware.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2019–2022

Topics

Space exploration & spaceflightMechanical & precision engineering
Search by tags
f-1 enginesaturn vtacit knowledgenasa slsapollo

What people said

lmilcin · 2021-07 · Recommendation

Sure. Not a source but still interesting. [VIDEO] (Why Can't we Remake the Rocketdyne F1 Engine?) TLDR: everything was handcrafted, notes were not made or lost, people have retired or passed away and today's engineers don't know the tricks that the original engineers used. Effectively, existing blueprints are not enough to rebuild the engine.

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CountSessine · 2022-02 · Reference

Technical know how, mostly. But in expected ways. Machining and engineering skills as they relate to manufacturing are different now. [VIDEO]

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est31 · 2021-03 · Reference

Reminds me of how NASA had to design completely new rocket engines for SLS because while they still had the plans for the Saturn-V rocket engines, back then plans weren't followed to such high accuracy as nowadays a 3D model would be followed. Each engine was custom tailored with small modifications here and there. The knowledge to custom tailor them was lost, so they went with designing new engines from scratch instead. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Curious Droid, played through YouTube.

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