Up Goer Five Neil Tyson once lamented that the Saturn V rocket, a vehicle once heralded as the first generation of a coming era of interplanetary rocket travel, was taken for granted by a world looking to the future. And instead of the first of its kind, it was the last. We haven’t surpassed the Saturn V. The largest, most powerful rocket ever flown by anybody, ever, the thirty-six-story-tall Saturn V was the first and only rocket to launch people from Earth to someplace else in the universe. It enabled every Apollo mission to the Moon from 1969 through 1972, as well as the 1973 launch of Skylab 1, the first U.S. space station. Inspired in part by the successes of the Saturn V and the momentum of the Apollo program, visionaries of the day foretold a future that never came to be: space habitats, Moon bases, and Mars colonies up and running by the 1990s. But funding for the Saturn V evaporated as the Moon missions wound down. Additional production runs were canceled, the manufacturers’ specialized machine tools were destroyed, and skilled personnel had to find work on other projects. Today U.S. engineers can’t even build a Saturn V clone. With this epic, holy-crap-rolling-on-the-floor-laughing-but-also-crying comic, xkcd provides us with a simplified set of plans, in easy-to-understand terms, to build the Saturn “Up Goer” Five/V. Think of it as a swift kick in the pants to get our space-exploration efforts back on the right track. Sure, what was impossible yesterday can be made possible today, through the hard work and application of science. But we must also remember that if we don’t keep stoking the fires of curiosity, what was possible yesterday can be made impossible today. Otherwise, much like failing to point the end with lots of fire toward the ground, we will find ourselves “having a bad problem and you will not go to space today”.
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Up Goer Five Neil Tyson once lamented that the Saturn V rocket, a vehicle once heralded as the first generation of a coming era of interplanetary rocket travel, was taken for granted by a world looking to the future. And instead of the first of its kind, it was the last. We haven’t surpassed the Saturn V. The largest, most powerful rocket ever flown by anybody, ever, the thirty-six-story-tall Saturn V was the first and only rocket to launch people from Earth to someplace else in the universe. It enabled every Apollo mission to the Moon from 1969 through 1972, as well as the 1973 launch of Skylab 1, the first U.S. space station. Inspired in part by the successes of the Saturn V and the momentum of the Apollo program, visionaries of the day foretold a future that never came to be: space habitats, Moon bases, and Mars colonies up and running by the 1990s. But funding for the Saturn V evaporated as the Moon missions wound down. Additional production runs were canceled, the manufacturers’ specialized machine tools were destroyed, and skilled personnel had to find work on other projects. Today U.S. engineers can’t even build a Saturn V clone. With this epic, holy-crap-rolling-on-the-floor-laughing-but-also-crying comic, xkcd provides us with a simplified set of plans, in easy-to-understand terms, to build the Saturn “Up Goer” Five/V. Think of it as a swift kick in the pants to get our space-exploration efforts back on the right track. Sure, what was impossible yesterday can be made possible today, through the hard work and application of science. But we must also remember that if we don’t keep stoking the fires of curiosity, what was possible yesterday can be made impossible today. Otherwise, much like failing to point the end with lots of fire toward the ground, we will find ourselves “having a bad problem and you will not go to space today”.
Zoom Info
Up Goer Five Neil Tyson once lamented that the Saturn V rocket, a vehicle once heralded as the first generation of a coming era of interplanetary rocket travel, was taken for granted by a world looking to the future. And instead of the first of its kind, it was the last. We haven’t surpassed the Saturn V. The largest, most powerful rocket ever flown by anybody, ever, the thirty-six-story-tall Saturn V was the first and only rocket to launch people from Earth to someplace else in the universe. It enabled every Apollo mission to the Moon from 1969 through 1972, as well as the 1973 launch of Skylab 1, the first U.S. space station. Inspired in part by the successes of the Saturn V and the momentum of the Apollo program, visionaries of the day foretold a future that never came to be: space habitats, Moon bases, and Mars colonies up and running by the 1990s. But funding for the Saturn V evaporated as the Moon missions wound down. Additional production runs were canceled, the manufacturers’ specialized machine tools were destroyed, and skilled personnel had to find work on other projects. Today U.S. engineers can’t even build a Saturn V clone. With this epic, holy-crap-rolling-on-the-floor-laughing-but-also-crying comic, xkcd provides us with a simplified set of plans, in easy-to-understand terms, to build the Saturn “Up Goer” Five/V. Think of it as a swift kick in the pants to get our space-exploration efforts back on the right track. Sure, what was impossible yesterday can be made possible today, through the hard work and application of science. But we must also remember that if we don’t keep stoking the fires of curiosity, what was possible yesterday can be made impossible today. Otherwise, much like failing to point the end with lots of fire toward the ground, we will find ourselves “having a bad problem and you will not go to space today”.
Zoom Info
Up Goer Five Neil Tyson once lamented that the Saturn V rocket, a vehicle once heralded as the first generation of a coming era of interplanetary rocket travel, was taken for granted by a world looking to the future. And instead of the first of its kind, it was the last. We haven’t surpassed the Saturn V. The largest, most powerful rocket ever flown by anybody, ever, the thirty-six-story-tall Saturn V was the first and only rocket to launch people from Earth to someplace else in the universe. It enabled every Apollo mission to the Moon from 1969 through 1972, as well as the 1973 launch of Skylab 1, the first U.S. space station. Inspired in part by the successes of the Saturn V and the momentum of the Apollo program, visionaries of the day foretold a future that never came to be: space habitats, Moon bases, and Mars colonies up and running by the 1990s. But funding for the Saturn V evaporated as the Moon missions wound down. Additional production runs were canceled, the manufacturers’ specialized machine tools were destroyed, and skilled personnel had to find work on other projects. Today U.S. engineers can’t even build a Saturn V clone. With this epic, holy-crap-rolling-on-the-floor-laughing-but-also-crying comic, xkcd provides us with a simplified set of plans, in easy-to-understand terms, to build the Saturn “Up Goer” Five/V. Think of it as a swift kick in the pants to get our space-exploration efforts back on the right track. Sure, what was impossible yesterday can be made possible today, through the hard work and application of science. But we must also remember that if we don’t keep stoking the fires of curiosity, what was possible yesterday can be made impossible today. Otherwise, much like failing to point the end with lots of fire toward the ground, we will find ourselves “having a bad problem and you will not go to space today”.
Zoom Info
Up Goer Five Neil Tyson once lamented that the Saturn V rocket, a vehicle once heralded as the first generation of a coming era of interplanetary rocket travel, was taken for granted by a world looking to the future. And instead of the first of its kind, it was the last. We haven’t surpassed the Saturn V. The largest, most powerful rocket ever flown by anybody, ever, the thirty-six-story-tall Saturn V was the first and only rocket to launch people from Earth to someplace else in the universe. It enabled every Apollo mission to the Moon from 1969 through 1972, as well as the 1973 launch of Skylab 1, the first U.S. space station. Inspired in part by the successes of the Saturn V and the momentum of the Apollo program, visionaries of the day foretold a future that never came to be: space habitats, Moon bases, and Mars colonies up and running by the 1990s. But funding for the Saturn V evaporated as the Moon missions wound down. Additional production runs were canceled, the manufacturers’ specialized machine tools were destroyed, and skilled personnel had to find work on other projects. Today U.S. engineers can’t even build a Saturn V clone. With this epic, holy-crap-rolling-on-the-floor-laughing-but-also-crying comic, xkcd provides us with a simplified set of plans, in easy-to-understand terms, to build the Saturn “Up Goer” Five/V. Think of it as a swift kick in the pants to get our space-exploration efforts back on the right track. Sure, what was impossible yesterday can be made possible today, through the hard work and application of science. But we must also remember that if we don’t keep stoking the fires of curiosity, what was possible yesterday can be made impossible today. Otherwise, much like failing to point the end with lots of fire toward the ground, we will find ourselves “having a bad problem and you will not go to space today”.
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Up Goer Five

Neil Tyson once lamented that the Saturn V rocket, a vehicle once heralded as the first generation of a coming era of interplanetary rocket travel, was taken for granted by a world looking to the future. And instead of the first of its kind, it was the last.

We haven’t surpassed the Saturn V. The largest, most powerful rocket ever flown by anybody, ever, the thirty-six-story-tall Saturn V was the first and only rocket to launch people from Earth to someplace else in the universe. It enabled every Apollo mission to the Moon from 1969 through 1972, as well as the 1973 launch of Skylab 1, the first U.S. space station.

Inspired in part by the successes of the Saturn V and the momentum of the Apollo program, visionaries of the day foretold a future that never came to be: space habitats, Moon bases, and Mars colonies up and running by the 1990s. But funding for the Saturn V evaporated as the Moon missions wound down. Additional production runs were canceled, the manufacturers’ specialized machine tools were destroyed, and skilled personnel had to find work on other projects. Today U.S. engineers can’t even build a Saturn V clone.

With this epic, holy-crap-rolling-on-the-floor-laughing-but-also-crying comic, xkcd provides us with a simplified set of plans, in easy-to-understand terms, to build the Saturn “Up Goer” Five/V. Think of it as a swift kick in the pants to get our space-exploration efforts back on the right track.

Sure, what was impossible yesterday can be made possible today, through the hard work and application of science. But we must also remember that if we don’t keep stoking the fires of curiosity, what was possible yesterday can be made impossible today.

Otherwise, much like failing to point the end with lots of fire toward the ground, we will find ourselves “having a bad problem and you will not go to space today”.

Source: xkcd.com

kidsneedscience: Today is the 45th anniversary of the first Saturn V test flight.  The naming history is complicated, so a quote from NASA’s history page:   Evolution of nomenclature for the Saturn family of launch vehicles was one of the most complex of all NASA-associated names. On 15 August 1958 the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) approved initial work on a multistage launch vehicle with clustered engines in a 6.7-million-newton-thrust (1.5-million-pound-thrust) first stage. Conceived by designers at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), the vehicle was unofficially known as “Juno V.” (Juno III and Juno IV were concepts for space vehicles to follow Juno II but were not built.) 1 In October 1958 Dr. Wernher von Braun, the Director of ABMA’s Development Operations Division, proposed the Juno V be renamed Saturn and on 3 February 1959 ARPA officially approved the name change. The name Saturn was significant for three reasons: the planet Saturn appeared brighter than a first-magnitude star, so the association of this name with such a powerful new booster seemed appropriate; Saturn was the next planet after Jupiter, so the progression was analogous to ABMA’s progression from missile and space systems called “Jupiter”; and Saturn was the name of an ancient Roman god, so the name was in keeping with the U.S. military’s custom of naming missiles after mythological gods and heroes. Image of all Saturn V launches courtesy of NASA, image in the public domain. It’s nice that we have the NASA history office to remind us of this, since after decades of ignoring the business of creating rockets to carry men outside of near-Earth orbit, we couldn’t build a Saturn V if we had to. Let’s change that attitude.
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kidsneedscience:

Today is the 45th anniversary of the first Saturn V test flight.  The naming history is complicated, so a quote from NASA’s history page:  

Evolution of nomenclature for the Saturn family of launch vehicles was one of the most complex of all NASA-associated names. On 15 August 1958 the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) approved initial work on a multistage launch vehicle with clustered engines in a 6.7-million-newton-thrust (1.5-million-pound-thrust) first stage. Conceived by designers at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), the vehicle was unofficially known as “Juno V.” (Juno III and Juno IV were concepts for space vehicles to follow Juno II but were not built.) 1

In October 1958 Dr. Wernher von Braun, the Director of ABMA’s Development Operations Division, proposed the Juno V be renamed Saturn and on 3 February 1959 ARPA officially approved the name change. The name Saturn was significant for three reasons: the planet Saturn appeared brighter than a first-magnitude star, so the association of this name with such a powerful new booster seemed appropriate; Saturn was the next planet after Jupiter, so the progression was analogous to ABMA’s progression from missile and space systems called “Jupiter”; and Saturn was the name of an ancient Roman god, so the name was in keeping with the U.S. military’s custom of naming missiles after mythological gods and heroes.

Image of all Saturn V launches courtesy of NASA, image in the public domain.

It’s nice that we have the NASA history office to remind us of this, since after decades of ignoring the business of creating rockets to carry men outside of near-Earth orbit, we couldn’t build a Saturn V if we had to.

Let’s change that attitude.