Hello everybody!

This is my first post here, I've been sitting here mostly reading posts by Hoax believers and ripping out my hair in irritation.

My questions aren't really about the "hoax" so please let me now if i should post this elsewhere. However after reading a LOT of posts in this forum I know that there are a lot of people really knowledgeable about the Apollo program so I thought i'm bound to get a good answer.

Here they come and they are not the usual questions.

1. What was the sound level from the Saturn V when it took of.
Rumours say it was loud!!!

2. What was the temperature inside the F-1 engine chamber.

3. At sometime during the Apollo program, one of the launch pads was damaged when a Saturn V rocket took off. I think it was Apollo 11. Does anyone know what kind of damage? Was it caused by shockwaves? temperatures?

I will greatly appreciate any answers or inputs.

Thanks!

[/b]

It's kind of off-topic, but I Googled for "Saturn V sound levels" and came up with this bit of stupidity.

"The system can emit sound levels comparable to standing next to a Saturn V rocket used to launch the Space Shuttle."

I'm generally in favor of saving the whales, but at least they could keep their launchers straight.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

1. What was the sound level from the Saturn V when it took of.
Rumours say it was loud!!!

Rumors are right. This page says it was 200 decibels, where a jet engine is only 140 - and this is on an exponential (not linear) scale. No wonder they kept people at least 3 miles away!

2. What was the temperature inside the F-1 engine chamber.

2550 degrees

3. At sometime during the Apollo program, one of the launch pads was damaged when a Saturn V rocket took off. I think it was Apollo 11. Does anyone know what kind of damage? Was it caused by shockwaves? temperatures?

Couldn't find anything about this and don't remember it. Maybe one of our gurus knows something.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

It's commonly stated that the liftoff of a Saturn V was the second-loudest man-made sound, second only to a nuclear explosion. The explosion of Krakatoa is the loudest natural sound in recorded history.

The 200 decibel sound pressure was so large it had to be taken into consideration in the mechanical design of the Saturn V.

I believe that every launch caused some damage to the pad, though normally it was minor. The flame deflectors would be the most likely things to suffer damage. Perhaps they were one-use-only, or had to be resurfaced after each launch, but I don't really know. I haven't heard of any major, unexpected damage during an Apollo launch, either.

Could you be thinking of the Soviet Union's N-1 launch attempts? One of them caused devastating damage and hundreds of casualties when it exploded immediately after liftoff.

I don't remember any pad damage during Saturn-V launches -- but Walter Cronkite's too-flimsy CBS News trailer was nearly caved in and knocked over during the first liftoff in November 1967!

BWA ha ha ha!!! That would have been great to see on TV!!!

BTW, welcome, Viking!

__________________
Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

3. At sometime during the Apollo program, one of the launch pads was damaged when a Saturn V rocket took off. I think it was Apollo 11. Does anyone know what kind of damage? Was it caused by shockwaves? temperatures?

The answers to the other two questions are correct. Yes, some damage occurred on the Apollo 11 launch, but it was minor -- broken pipes, etc. Mark Gray's excellent DVD series includes the inspection film shot after the launch. Nothing that can't have been easily fixed.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

I think you are confusing the second N-1 launch (lost thrust, fell back on the pad with massive damage but no casualties) with the Nedelin disaster (unexpected second-stage ignition while being worked on, killed nearly a hundred pad technicians).

Slightly off topic but I had my nine year old son at the greatest place on earth last weekend, the Simthsonian NASM. There was a display of side by side models of the Saturn V and the N-1. After explaining the fate of the Soviet rocket he looked closely at it and said "no wonder it didn't work, look at all those engines, how did they get them to go off at the same time?"

Out of the mouths of babes....

BTW, has anybody seen the plans for the new Smithsonian Air and Space museum, the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, at Dulles airport? It looks AMAZING! It opens in December and we'll be there once the crowds go down (sometime next decade).

http://www.nasm.si.edu/nasm/ext/hazycenter.htm

I'm REALLY looking forward to that!

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

A Professor of mine maintained, he was living here on the Space Coast during the program, you could "see" the compression wave of sound.

I imagine the engines to be comparable in audible out put to the space shuttle. The shuttle launches I've been to on the base you can see the sound wave's progression by the vibration of water across the bay when the engine's ignite. The sound wave literally feels like someone hit you when you're that close.

At a time when the ambient noise of the city is low, like an early morning launch, you can faintly hear the space shuttle from west Orlando. I think about 50 miles from the launch pad. It sounds like a very low rumble, like extremely distant thunder.

Sorry I can't help you here.

Most likely sound. Just prior to main engines ignition of the Space Shuttle, giant faucets, for lack of a better description, cover the pad in up to 4 feet of water. This is a preventative measure, kind of an acoustic baffels, to keep the enormous high energy sound waves from echoing off of the metal launch deck and destroying the shuttle.

Or it could just be the brute force of the 7 million pound thrust the engines of the Saturn V could generate.[/quote]

(edited for typoes)

__________________
...what's so wrong with a little overkill?

Thank you all for your great answers!

Now I know where to go next time I have some questions...No i'm just kidding, I will try to keep it a little more on-topic next time.

Again, Thank you all.

All the launch gantries were damaged during each Apollo launch and had to be extensively refurbished. Saturn V created a distinct roar and from the Press site which is 4.7 Km's away it was 195 decibals.

There's an absolute limit on the loudest possible sound which the Earth's atmosphere can transmit undistorted. The negative-going pressure excursions can't be greater in magnitude than the ambient pressure; if they were, the absolute pressure in the negative peaks would be less than 0- that is, less than the pressure of a perfect vacuum.

Since atmospheric pressure at sea level is in the neighborhood of 101 kPa, and the 0 dB SPL reference level is 20 uPa, this limit works out to approximately 194 dB peak.

A few years ago I read a sidebar in one of the audio industry trade magazines that explained the peculiar "crackling" quality of the Saturn V's noise, when recorded at a distance sufficient that neither mic nor recording chain overload should have been a factor.

The explanation given was that the pressure difference between the positive and negative-going excursions was so great that the velocity of sound (which is affected by pressure) differed substantially between the two, and that the waveform distortion produced by this generated the high-frequency components which produced the "crackling" sound.

Whether or not this is correct, you could reasonably describe the noise of a Saturn V as "so loud that the concept of 'sound' doesn't really apply any more".

Now THAT is cool!

I've done a lot of cool stuff, most of which I'm pretty pleased with, but near the top of my list is having been present for the launch of Apollo-8 in December 1968, and for several shuttle flights. I agree, 'sound' is a word that these experiences makes obsolete. You feel your sternum vibrating. The coins in your pocket rattle. The water in the lagoon in front of you ripples. It's like God has grabbed the sky in both fists and is tearing it in two -- that's what it 'sounds' like.

That is a very cool description. Man I wish I could have been aroun for one of those. The best I have is watching the shuttle land at Vandenberg once in the 80's. At least, I think it was Vandenberg, I was only about 10 at the time.

__________________
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Not Vandenberg - that's a launch site. It was probably Edwards, which is the primary west coast landing site.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Well, now I've gone and exposed my ignorance of the space program.

All I remember is driving for hours and then sitting on top of an RV and watching the shuttle come in. It was pretty exciting to me even though I didn't have a real grip on the whole thing (then and now I guess!). The only other thing I remember from the trip is huge fields of flowers.

Funny info form the Edwards AFB faq:

5. Why can't I find Area 51 on your web site?
Answer: There is no such place on Edwards Air Force Base. [/url]

__________________
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Any time I can see the shuttle it is pretty exciting. I was in college in Utah in the fall of 95 and they were flying the shuttle over on the back of the 747 (I forget why but I'm pretty sure it stopped in Salt Lake City). Anyway, I had actually forgotten it was supposed to go over and was on my was out on a date when I looked up to the sound of a loud jet. It seemed low but that might have just been because it is so huge. It was amazing. I just had to stop and look for a minute. On a somewhat related note, the flight sim X Plane allows you to fly the space shuttle during reentry and one of the planes I downloaded for it was a sim of the 747 carrying the shuttle. It allows you to design your own planes and work off of other designs. Somebody just put the two together and adjusted the tail some. It flies like a truck.

__________________
"Eternal vigilance is the price of supremacy"
------------Mark Twain

"Women are like Voltron. The more you can hook up, the better it gets."

I seem to recall seeing the Columbia orbiter parked on the outskirts of the Atlanta Intl. Airport years ago. Perhaps this is some strange amalgam of memories, but I seem to recall looking outa window on the right side of an airplane landing for a transfer in ATL and seeing the Columbia (the name was visible on the side). Or perhaps I am imagining this...

Aporetic
www.polisci.wisc.edu/~rdparrish[/list]

I was in college in Utah in the fall of 95 and they were flying the shuttle over on the back of the 747 (I forget why but I'm pretty sure it stopped in Salt Lake City).

It did. I remember it well. They flew very low and went up and down the valley from Bluffdale to Bountiful a couple of times before landing to give everyone a good view. I was teaching part time at the U in 1995. It would be too weird if you were one of my students.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

I've seen the "piggybacked" shuttle twice. Once I was at the El Paso airport, and it was sitting atop the 747 at the adjacent Air Force base. On another occasion it was deliberately flown over the Washington Beltway - actually that might have been when the Enterprise was being delivered to Dulles Airport for inclusion in the Air & Space Museum annex out there.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

You know that "PLACE ORBITER HERE... BLACK SIDE DOWN" sign at the carrier strut on the Boeing? Those guys have good humour.

Harald

No sorry, I was at the Y. Still not too far away though.

__________________
"Eternal vigilance is the price of supremacy"
------------Mark Twain

"Women are like Voltron. The more you can hook up, the better it gets."

Kucharek: "You know that "PLACE ORBITER HERE... BLACK SIDE DOWN" sign at the carrier strut on the Boeing? Those guys have good humour. "

That's cute, but I can't make out if that's what the lettering on your link really says. Is there a higher res linkable?

That's the highest-res photo available on that site. I googled for another image but couldn't find one.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

I also couldn't find a higher resolution photo, but the text is confirmed in some postings on s.s.s. It is said, it is on the 911, not the 905 SCA.

Harald

My high school buddies and I watched Neil Armstrong et al take off in 1967, after spending the night on the beach three miles away. We could see the gantry and the Saturn V, just barely, in the distance. It launched and slowly rose on an incredibly brilliant tail of fire, gaining altitude much more slowly than a shuttle. Then the sound reached me. It sounded like a bass drum in a marching band--boom-boom-boom-boom--coming at intervals of approximately a quarter of a second. It felt like somebody was rhythmically hitting me in the chest at the same tempo! Even from three miles away. I'm not sure what caused the booming rhythm instead of a continuous roar, perhaps it had to do with the design of the engines. Space shuttle? There is no comparison--the Saturn V was far and away a superior vehicle for the exploration of space. The shuttle was a mistake from the beginning--more expensive and less reliable than the Saturn. After 35 years, no progress made!

Welcome, Vuille!
I also watched Apollo 11 launch (it was in '69, not '67). I was only 5 at the time, but I remember the launch and the sound. You describe it very eloquently. Being so young, going out to the pad to see the rocket the day before made more of an impression on me than the actual launch. What I remember most from that day was going inside the visiting the Vehicle Assembly Building. Apollo 12 was mostly stacked in the High Bay. In the Low Bay there were two stacked CSM/SLA assemblies. In my memory, they were Apollo 13 & 14, but I may be wrong. I remember, as we walked in, my father saying, "This is the building where they build rockets to fly to the Moon." It crushes me to realize that no such place exists any more.

__________________
"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." St. Exupery