That is my point. Too much credit is given to Von Braun for the US successes. He was part of a big team and his successes and failures were also due to politics. I don't see it as accurate to say that the US succeeded because of Von Braun where the Russians failed (by logical extension because they didn't have Von Braun).
I thought you'd make a LONG-*SS photo with IMPACT font and you'd post it instead of that. I am disappoint, Señor aquí 'tan, DIRECTOR TéCNICO.
Which makes it that much more of a miracle that we got him, our military is basically Germany's with nukes and minorities.
The Russian N1 would have certainly worked if it had been properly funded and not insanely rushed to beat the US. It's a very good design and undoubtedly inspired the design of the SpaceX Falcon S9, which has about the same number of small engines. This allows the payload to safely make it to orbit with multiple engine failures.
I disagree, the falcon heavy has a bunch of engines because they wanted to simplify the first stage by just putting three Falcon 9 boosters together. I think if you are designing a heavy lift from the ground up you upscale the engines like the Saturn V. Adding engines generally makes reliability drop. 30 engines isn't a well designed first stage. Bigger = better His designs were groundbreaking, and successful. Sputnik was an R7 which is a V2 with 4 boosters strapped to the first stage. He had incredible foresight and began planning the Saturn as a condition of continuing to work with NASA. His designs were at the core of First american satellite, first Russian satellite, first man on Moon, first american in space.
From their website: The Falcon Heavy is designed for extreme reliability and can tolerate the failure of several engines and still complete its mission. As on commercial airliners, protective shells surround each engine to contain a worst-case situation such as fire or a chamber rupture, and prevent it from affecting the other engines and stages. A disabled engine is automatically shut down, and the remaining engines operate slightly longer to compensate for the loss without detriment to the mission. spacex.com
I'm no rocket enthusiast, but instinctively to me that reads like a sales brochure. Less is better. There are so many analogies in other science (certainly computer science) that complex, more, redundancy is only better ... on paper. In practice, do it right with less is better. Multiple redundancies means you expect failure. Maybe that works for a mission to another solar system...but for (what?) 20 seconds of burn, strip out the redundancy and focus on less main engines.
The entire Space X vehicle is made much more simply than a traditional rocket -- (as in) there are fewer parts less to break/ go wrong. Also, as i'm sure you know Nasa is very big on redundancy -- I believe they typically have at least 4 of each critical part (example - on board computer systems). Since Nasa will be using this rocket i'm sure they insisted Space X follow suit. The Falcon will be the first rocket since Saturn to be able to complete the mission with an engine failure. My memory is fuzzy on this, but I believe Saturn could make orbit on 3 engines -- the Falcon will obviously be able to lose many more than that. Nasa wouldn't have pumped in a billion plus dollars in development to the company if they thought it was a bad design.
^^^ My bad. I thought we were still talking about the Russian one that failed with all those little engines. Redundancy of the system is one thing (like a plane)...I was talking purely about overly redundant amount of engines that the systems fuel. But you know what...Linux proves little engines of huge amount beats IBM's massive supercomputers. First Palo Alto's defense lab used 1,000s of networked Linux boxes to perform faster, then Google did it. So, nevermind me.
No problem. My original point was mainly that the Russian rocket was a good design, but failed primarily because it was massively underfunded and rushed to beat us. The Russians have an excellent history with rocketry and would have most likely been successful if they funded the development properly and took there time.
Wow, your right. In Apollo 17s famous first ever picture of the full view of Earth...there are no stars, either. That whole Rocket taking off thing and visibly orbiting the Earth must have been staged, as well. That must have been taken in a hollywood studio, too. And in 2003, the first photo of Earth from Mars has no stars Trips to Mars...obviously fake, because there was no stars. Spoiler The reason: From National Geographics bust of the conspiracy theories http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/photogalleries/apollo-11-hoax-pictures/photo3.html the astronauts photographed their lunar adventures using fast exposure settings, which would have limited incoming background light. "They were taking pictures at 1/150th or 1/250th of a second," Bad Astronomy's Plait said. "In that amount of time, stars just don't show up."
Redundancy in computers isn't the same as having a bunch of small engines and it certainly cannot be compared to parallel computing. There are more parts and plumbing in a rocket with many small engines. That seems pretty obvious. There is also more waste. The first stage is a great system, strapping three together is a way to get a heavy lift vehicle without designing new engines and boosters. It isn't the best way.
