Longer Lived Saturn V

SsgtC

Banned
So, in doing some reading about the Apollo program, and the Saturn V in particular, I started to wonder where NASA could have gone with the program had they been allowed to further develop it. IOTL, they weren't allowed to because of budget cuts from Vietnam. There were proposals however for uprated F-1 and J-2 engines to increase the Saturn V's payload to Low Earth Orbit to 150 tons. So, my question is, with no US involvement in Vietnam, how much further would NASA develop the Saturn V and how long would it keep flying? Bonus points if you can keep Apollo going with it and work in additional moon landings and/or a push for Mars.
 
My 20 year old self would be screaming at me for saying this, but I don't think the Saturn V is economically viable. Even if we went with some wild departures in policy and public opinion, it would be hard pressed to be useful. We can do cool things, but each cool thing burns out funds in a program that makes handcrafted vehicles. We could probably get more use out of a suped up Saturn I.
 
Anything beyond low earth orbit has nothing to do with economic viability, its all national ego / pure science. Manned missions to Mars / Venus flyby would require big vehicles with 1970s tech. Once that is out of the way I have no clue what would keep things going.

You really need Mars to be at least have the possibility of life, planetary dynamo needs to be still going and or Venus to not be tide locked to sun with no dynamo either. MAYBE possibility of life on either or both could drive deep space manned missions.

Michael
 
Its popular legend that Saturn V production was killed for Vietnam War
in fact things looked different

The CIA had pretty good inside of Soviet Lunar program or better it failure, like N1 rocket that explode during launch destroying there Launchpad
So President Johnson gave termination order for Saturn V production after 15 units were build and destruction of unit SA-516 and SA-517 who were almost complete.
NASA mothballed the Production tools of Saturn V until 1972, in Hope of restart production, what never happened.

So what is needed ?
you need Manned Soviet Moon landings to Push the Apollo program further, on long term possibly a Manned Mars Mission with Saturn V as launcher.
But that depends who long the soviet keep up with there Manned Lunar Program, once that is Over, its game over for Saturn V production.

What happen next ?
The new Saturn V (from SA-518 on) would feature the J-2S engine a Simplified and improve J-2, it push Payload to 150 and 55 metric tons.
On long therm the Saturn V would get F-1A engine modernized version with option of throttle Thrust.

What Payload ?
Next Apollo Mission, the USA could launch Apollo Application Program for Lunar mission and several Skylabs into low Orbit.
On long term, NASA could launch Manned Mars Mission with Saturn V like fly by mission or Zubrin Mars Direct in 1990s
 
IMHO, the greatest issue facing the Saturn V - and by extension, the Saturn IB - lay in that they were created chiefly to serve a Political Purpose, namely to one-up the USSR which until the mid-60’s, held the lead in the Space Race. And in order to claim it from them, the US committed to the Manned Lunar Mission for which the Saturn V was selected as the Launch Vehicle to make it happen.

In this regard, it succeeded. Wondrously. Achieving the self-imposed goal of both landing a Man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth before the decade was over.

But this was also its Achilles Heel.

Having achieved its Political Goal, its Purpose was served. The fact that they had a lot of surplus hardware left and sufficient funding - albeit greatly reduced and still falling - combined with Inertia kept it going for a while longer, even with Apollo 13 happening. But after Skylab, there was no real reason for Saturn V to be retained anymore - especially considering that (a) STS had been approved not that long before, and (b) the Soviet Counterpart, the N1 never managed to complete a Block A Burn before being destroyed.

The only way I can see for Saturn V to have any hope for continuation is a substantially more advanced Soviet Space Effort by about 1968. They don’t need to be ahead, but close enough to the US to make them want to keep pushing to keep the lead they worked that hard to take from the USSR.
 
Anything beyond low earth orbit has nothing to do with economic viability, its all national ego / pure science.
It has a lot to do with economic viability, or to put it better cost. The question is whether you can justify the purchase of a certain amount of national ego and pure science at a particular cost. Obviously, the lower the cost is, the more likely is is that people are actually going to go for a program promising a certain amount of national ego and pure science. A good point of comparison is the United States Antarctic Program, which has a similar lack of "practical" utility, aside possibly from some value to weather forecasting and practice for military operations in low-temperature environments, yet maintains two large bases with hundreds of people who travel to the ice every year. That's because maintaining that program only costs a few hundred million dollars per year, so it hardly disturbs Congress to keep it going. If it were similarly cheap to maintain a base on Mars, then Congress would probably be doing it--that's practically pocket change, after all.

The Saturn V therefore has the problem that it's expensive enough for Congress to take an interest while lacking any utility aside from your mentioned value of national ego and pure science. This is a hard combination to deal with, and there's really little chance of it not being an issue around 1970.
 
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