today's workers aren't capable of building a Saturn from the available documentation.
I'm going to say that would be BS.
You mentioned welding...welding is WAY more advanced today than it was in the '60s, along with our knowledge of metallurgy.
The F1 was saved, but most of the Saturn blue prints were intentionally destroyed. Much of the same was the open policy of NASA administrator Griffin towards Shuttle.
I've heard that the claim that the Saturn V blueprints were destroyed for (insert reason here) is not the truth.
One of the myths of space history is that NASA lost or destroyed the blueprints for the Saturn 5 launch vehicle and could not build it again even if they wanted to. Critics of the agency use this myth to attack what they call petty or narrow-minded bureaucrats.
Except that it is not exactly a myth. The claim is partially true, but too complex for the soundbite version that “NASA lost the blueprints,” a charge that readily suited the agency’s critics.
Much of the technical design documentation for the Saturn 5 and the Apollo spacecraft has indeed been lost or destroyed. In fact, much of it was never saved, nor meant to be saved. Certainly there are hundreds of thousands of pages of technical documentation preserved on microfilm and in boxes at the National Archives facility near Atlanta. But these records (I’ve seen them) are incomplete, and they contain considerable gaps. There is nothing close to a complete set of “Saturn blueprints” in federal archives. I have also been to the archives at Kennedy Space Center, Marshall Space Flight Center, Houston, and Fort Worth. There is nothing approaching a “complete set of Saturn 5 blueprints” anywhere.
But then, there never was a complete set of the technical documentation.
There is nothing approaching a “complete set of Saturn 5 blueprints” anywhere. But then, there never was a complete set of the technical documentation.
One problem is the definition of a “blueprint.” Lots of information goes into the design of a complex vehicle like a rocket, and it is not all blueprints. There are technical drawings, but also lists of calculations and specifications for materials used to produce parts, as well as instructions for how to assemble the pieces. In addition, although complex machines require significant documentation, some of the information required for their production resides in the minds of the workers who build them and will fade as they retire and die. Imagine the construction of a house. There are the blueprints of what the house should look like, but also the knowledge of the carpenters, electricians, and plumbers that is important to the construction but not contained in the actual instructions. The plans for a house usually do not include instructions on how to pound a nail with a hammer, but if there is nobody alive who knows how to do this, then the blueprints themselves are useless until somebody re-learns that skill.
Perhaps more importantly, much of the technical documentation for the Saturn was developed by contractors and kept at their facilities, and not provided to NASA. When the contracts ended, they were under no obligation to keep materials unless the contract required it. This is the same with any government contract. The Air Force buys fighter planes and manuals for how to maintain and repair them, but does not also acquire the detailed documentation on how to build them. That stays with the contractor.
The Saturn had many contractors. The first and second stages were built by different contractors, and they did not share their documentation with each other. So when the program shut down, detailed technical documentation was spread around at various contractor facilities. NASA did not collect it all and save it.
Another issue is the tooling for the vehicles. Documents and blueprints are not the only things necessary for building a rocket. They also require tools, many of which are built exclusively for assembling the vehicle and many of which are large, such as jigs that can hold ten-meter-diameter fuel tanks. Those tools also have to be designed. When the contract is over, the tools take up space that can be devoted to other tasks. So the tools are either put into storage and later scrapped, or simply scrapped immediately. The tooling for the Saturn 5 was destroyed over three decades ago. If a complete set of technical documentation existed, the tooling to build it would have to be designed (more blueprints!) and then built.
Technology evolves, however. A Saturn 5 was not simply a piece of technology, or even many pieces of technologies, it was the product of many other technologies, many of which were evolving or becoming obsolete. For instance, welding evolved throughout the 1960s and continues to evolve today. Friction stir welding and laser welding did not exist in the 1960s yet are commonly used in aerospace manufacturing today. Similarly, aluminum-lithium alloys and carbon fiber composites are common materials today that were unavailable in the 1960s. Welding, milling, and bending machines are now computer-controlled and produce more accurate parts. Materials are cured and chemically treated in ways that had not been invented in the 1960s.
A Saturn 5 was not simply a piece of technology, or even many pieces of technologies, it was the product of many other technologies, many of which were evolving or becoming obsolete.
If NASA wanted to build a new Saturn 5 today, the agency would not want nor need the original blueprints. They would want to, and would have to, do things differently. They would want to develop computer-assisted drawings of the pieces, for starters. And they could build pieces lighter and stronger than in 1966. The plans, the blueprints that the agency “lost,” would not be all that useful in developing similar equipment using technology that has evolved and improved over four decades.
But NASA officials were also not stupid when they shut down the Saturn program. They realized that key parts of the vehicle were likely to be useful in the future and they made a strategic decision to preserve that technology. In particular, they preserved most important part of the Saturn 5, the engines.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/588/1IMHO, they would have scrapped the existing Saturn V vehicles (of which there are a few) if they wanted to erase the Saturn V information.
