For those that are not familiar, the Saturn V was equipped with 5 (yes, you read that right)... five F-1 rocket engines. Each engine produced an absolutely staggering 1,500,000 pounds of thrust; that's a total of 7,500,000 pounds of thrust!
Can you imagine being tucked into the small, cramped Command Module, sitting on top of this power at lift-off?
The whole thing, the technology, the sound, the people coming together to make it happen... it's soul-stirring.
18.3 GW – tech: peak electrical power generation of the Three Gorges Dam, the world's
largest hydroelectric power plant of any type.
...
190 GW – tech: average power consumption of the first stage of the Saturn V rocket
After that, there are a few lasers that can fire for millionths of a second, but no proper man-made machines. Excluding those experimental lasers, the Saturn V remains the most powerful machine ever made. I have heard that stated a lot, but the truth behind that statement never really sunk in for me before.
Can you explain what "power consumption" refers to in this context? The power released by the fuel to achieve the thrust, taking efficiency into account? Or how is it calculated?
Good question, I am not sure. I suspect that power figure is derived from thrust ("The three-stage Saturn V had a peak thrust of at least 7,650,000 pounds-force (34.02 MN)") and velocity.
This (annoyingly "furloughed") page on nasa.gov has an article written by Wernher von Braun that says:
>"A large stand was built to static-test the huge stage under the full 7,500,000-pound-thrust of its five F-1 engines. These engines generated no less than 180 million horsepower. As about I percent of that energy was converted into noise, neighborhood windows could be expected to break and plaster rain from ceilings if the wind was blowing from the wrong direction or the clouds were hanging low. A careful meteorological monitoring program had to be instituted to permit test runs only under favorable weather conditions."
Don't think so, but I don't know if it is appropriate to add those values on either. It should probably be possible to generalize the output of the engines without knowing much about their internal workings, and calculate a power figure just knowing how much they are lifting and how fast.
This stuff is really straddling the line of physics that I remember and physics that I forgot/never learned, so... heavy dose of salt, etc.
The series that that clip is from ("When We Left Earth") is soul stirring throughout. It's one of the most inspirational things I've ever seen. And it's on Netflix! They should really show it in schools, it's incredible.
Yeah, it really is an incredible bit of footage. If you can watch the series, though, it makes it so much better, because it really expresses the breakneck pace that these guys were working on. They would go from major milestone to major milestone within weeks or months of each other. I got the sense that they knew very little in the beginning, and basically had ballistic missiles, and they had to become very proficient very quickly to meet their goals.
This very-slow-motion footage of the Saturn V taking off is one of the more impressive pieces of footage I've ever seen. The entire launch process is described in detail, too.
Watching the entire launchpad engulfed in a fireball is crazy enough. Watching that fireball reverse direction and get /sucked/ down the exhaust hole as the F-1 engines quickly ramp up to that incredible 1.5M lb of thrust is, for me, up there with the photos of Sandia's Z-Machine as evidence that the Cool Sci-Fi Future has indeed arrived.
And it is nowhere near the space nerdiest item on display. Von Braun lived in Huntsville, and Redstone Arsenal is where lots of the grunt work was done to put men on the moon.
Can you imagine being tucked into the small, cramped Command Module, sitting on top of this power at lift-off?
The whole thing, the technology, the sound, the people coming together to make it happen... it's soul-stirring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-cv_JJOxGI