ROCKET ENGINES

It was a hot night and the TV image was grainy. Apollo 11 had already landed on the moon, and Armstrong’s moon walk started at around 11 PM. I was working on the large scale Revell model of the Apollo lunar lander, which complimented my Saturn V model rocket. I guess I’ve always found solace in working on scale models in real time.

I retrieved these memories loud and clear during our visit to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. There is an entire building dedicated to the Saturn V, and the information is excellent. Did you know that the Saturn V had it’s own computer, which made it autonomous? (I would have guessed that the astronauts would have had some input to their ascent, but they didn’t want any Navy test pilots messing anything up.) There was a display on the rocket’s gyroscopes, where they were placed on the vehicle, and how they were integrated into the guidance system. The guidance computer memory core was hand woven. To stay on course, the huge first stage rocket engines gimballed. The first Saturn V flight was all up. And if that would have failed, the space program would likely have been canceled, given that this first flight was only two months after the Apollo 1 catastrophe.

In our globalized world, it is amazing to realize that the entire rocket was designed, fabricated and tested entirely in the US. The rocket engines were tested in Huntsville. The exhibit drives home the point that the Saturn V program was run mostly by a team of German rocket scientists, all living in Huntsville, who were spirited out of Germany right before the end of the war. And homage is paid to the German V2 engine, which formed the foundation for the US rocket program.

The drawing at the top is of the second stage engines. As I was drawing from the photo, I began to realize the organic similarities between this assembly, and what might be presented in On Growth and Form, which we touched on last page. The symmetry, repetition and structure liken it to a form that has grown, rather than assembled by humans. The yellow starts to suggest a form which begins to thread thru the assembly.

Possibly, when human design gets stripped to it’s most basic, we produce organic, ultra efficient forms with great elegance. When pure knowledge is the design driver, humans may indeed do their best work. Bucky Fuller would agree. I also surmise that Corb would agree.

The drawing below is of the F1 first stage engine. After knowledging the object, I was moved to interject a bit of Automatic Form at the top and bottom. Taken as one holistic piece, the beginnings of a new form paradigm start to become a constructible reality.