![]() ![]() Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and took the first serious steps toward a moon landing. The Air Force canceled the project when it became apparent there was no military need for such a huge engine. The five F-1 engines of a Saturn V’s S-IC first stage spew flame and smoke at Marshall Space Flight Center. The huge structure’s legs were solidly anchored into California bedrock. Everybody in the entire region heard it.”Īfter that, Rocketdyne moved the testing to Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, where the company built a massive test stand. During one test, that thing just exploded. “We called that nozzle ‘King Kong.’ It was huge. Butsko worked on the nozzle, the bell-shaped cone from which the rocket’s force was expelled. “You really felt it when that thing went off,” he said with a laugh. Jerry Butsko, who joined Rocketdyne right after graduating from the University of Washington, described the tests as impressive. Based in Canoga Park, Calif., the company built and first tested components at its facility in the Santa Susanna Mountains north of Los Angeles. In 1958, the Air Force contracted with Rocketdyne for an engine that would become the F-1. Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala. Rocketdyne was founded by North American Aviation with a team of skilled rocket engineers from the U.S. How the F-1 was conceived, designed, built and tested is a saga worthy of the Wright brothers or Charles Lindbergh, but on a far grander scale. This was woefully inadequate for the task that lay before NASA in early 1961. Prior to the F-1, the largest and most powerful liquid-fueled rocket engine in development was the E-1, with 188,000 pounds of thrust. It represented a quantum leap in size and power from anything built before. The Rocketdyne F-1 was, quite literally, the driving force that took mankind to the moon. Together, their 7.6 million pounds of thrust lifted that huge 3,000-ton vehicle away from Earth’s gravity and into the boundaries of space itself. At the very base of the mighty Saturn rocket were five massive engines, each of which produced a little over 1.5 million pounds of thrust. Their flight to the moon took two days, but it was the first 165 seconds that made it all possible. ![]() Far atop the huge Saturn V launch vehicle, three men began a journey that has been unmatched since the end of the Apollo program. One of the defining images of the 20th century is of Apollo 11 ascending on a pillar of incandescent fire from Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969. Rocketdyne's F-1, the World's Most Powerful Rocket, Sent Us to the Moon Close ![]()
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