Why not just upgrade the Saturn 1B & 5 for Constellation?

Anyone in the know? The Soyuz launcher seems economical %26amp; reliable enough for the Ruskies- and is of the same era as the Saturns-wouldn't it have been quicker, easier and cheaper to go back to whats already worked and upgrade the crap out of it? Is it politics? Admitting that NASA screwed up in the first place ending Apollo Applications for the Shuttle?Why not just upgrade the Saturn 1B %26amp; 5 for Constellation?The Von Braun designed Saturn 1B ( nicknamed clusters last stand) was a late nineteen fifties design. Basically the cores of several Redstone missiles clustered together. The S-IB stage was an eight engine booster for Earth orbital missions. It is composed of nine propellant containers, eight fins, a thrust structure assembly, eight H-1 rocket engines, and many other components. The propellant containers consist of eight Redstone tanks (Four holding LOX and four holding RP-1.) clustered around a Jupiter rocket tank, which contains LOX.

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Modern Liquid Oxygen/Hydrogen systems offer much more bang for the buck than the old systems that burned kerosene (RP-1) They can thus offer more payload and can be throttled and restarted.

.Why not just upgrade the Saturn 1B %26amp; 5 for Constellation?
The tooling, plans, jigs, components and materials for the Saturn 1B and 5 are all long gone.



You simply cannot buy the parts that would go into the subsystems of those launchers.



So a simple duplicate of those designs is impracticable. To use old designs with modern subsystems would be more effort than starting afresh, and would yield a sub-optimal design.



The Soyuz has such a remarkable success record because it was not optimized for mass-fraction. It's relatively crude, but has stupendous engines which *have* been optimized through the benefits of mass-production.



Most amusing that the Soviet bureaux took something so quintessentially American (mass-production) and yielded a better launcher (almost 1500+?) while the shuttle system was becoming bogged-down in politics, inter-agency rivalry, and the demands of such a, ah, tempermentally high-strung high-pressure engine - the SSME.Why not just upgrade the Saturn 1B %26amp; 5 for Constellation?It could probably be done, but the old Saturn factories have been converted over to support the shuttle and NASA thinks it would be cheaper to use the existing Shuttle facilities as much as possible, so the new Ares rockets are designed to use the solid rocket boosters and external tank of the Shuttle, which are still in production. But they are planning to use the Saturn J2 engine instead of the more expensive Shuttle main engine on the new rockets.Why not just upgrade the Saturn 1B %26amp; 5 for Constellation?
Building a Saturn IB and Saturn V is a highly specialised task that requires a great deal of equally specialised tooling and equipment. While the Russians have been making their Soyuz launched continually since it was first produced, the Saturn rockets were closed down in the mid 70s. Since keeping all the construction material and equipment for a a huge rocket that is not going to be made any more is highly inconvenient, the tooling was broken up and removed. It is now impossible to rebuild the Saturn V without first rebuilding all the tooling for the job. Since such a task would effectively be a ground-up restart, it is far easier to design something new based on the existing tooling and infrastructure.



As an example, the first stage of the Saturn V is ten metres across, and has a curved bulkhead at the end of each of the two tanks. Production of those bulkheads required a highly specialised jig and welding rig that could ONLY be used to make ten metre wide bulkeads of the type needed in that rocket. With no rocket currently in production that needs ten metre wide bulkheads in its tanks, the welding rig is just an expensive ornament, taking up space that is better occupied by functional equipment.



By contrast, the new Ares vehicles are based on the shuttle solid rockets and the external tank. That means there is ALREADY tooling and expertise available for making many of the components. It is far easier to make use of that than try to resurrect a fifty year old rocket.Why not just upgrade the Saturn 1B %26amp; 5 for Constellation?It is politics. Our government must have the best of everything, so we spend tons of money on technology that we basically already have.Why not just upgrade the Saturn 1B %26amp; 5 for Constellation?
A miss direction of US government funding caused this error.
never heard of any of this