Quote:
Originally Posted by DampRobot
Handheld friction stir welder... Yeahbuddy!
SpaceX does friction stir welding to make their rocket bodies, it's really a extremely cool process. Worth a google for all those looking at this thread.
On a side note, I've heard the reason that we beat the Russians to the moon was because we had better welders. Ours could figure out how to weld tanks which were good enough to hold liquid hydrogen, whereas the Russians could only make kerosene tanks. We ended up with the slightly smaller and more reliable Saturn V for our moonshot, and they ended up with that massive kerosene powered rocket that looked like a Christmas tree--which turned out to be impossible to control in the sky.
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For what it's worth, this is one of those great sounding stories that is almost certainly false. The Soviets never invested in hydrogen rocket engines, despite repeated funding requests from Korolev, who was basically their Von Braun. As such the Soviets were way behind, particularly because the military had been building the engines for the Saturn V long before NASA even planned to go to the moon. The military recognized that the engines are typically the schedule driver on aerospace projects, and figured they could develop vehicles to go with them later. Or another way, they just wanted bigger more expensive toys than the other branch, since the Air Force and the Army both wanted in on the missile game.
The N1 was actually lighter (still weighing several million pounds) and shorter (still nearly 350 feet tall), than the Saturn V, but it had a ridiculous number of rocket engines (43!!) compared to the Saturn V's 11. It also had an additional stage to make up for the performance loss of Kerosene vs. H2.
Taming Liquid Hydrogen is a wonderful book (if you're a huge nerd like me
) that NASA put together that describes the technical and political challenges of designing the Centaur upper stage that is still in use today.
I love Kerosene Christmas Tree... great name!
EDIT: Moral of the story I forgot: Rocket development (and aerospace product development in general) is so complex it rarely gets held up for just one thing.