Turning a real product into a set of CAD files, though, requires a bit of ingenuity, especially when that product is a gigantic rocket engine.
Don't any copies of the original blueprints survive any more? The articles say they have all the blueprints still. So surely it would be easier to go from blueprints to CAD directly, rather than trying to scan from the physical object to CAD instead.
While blueprints survive, there was likely quite a bit of on the fly engineering that modified the design. Between the intense timelines and amount of skilled labor that went into building these, I would be there was a lot of drift between the blueprints and the final engines.
As mentioned in the article, “every scrap of documentation produced during Project Apollo, including the design documents for the Saturn V and the F-1 engines, remains on file. If re-creating the F-1 engine were simply a matter of cribbing from some 1960s blueprints, NASA would have already done so.”
And “each F-1 engine was uniquely built by hand, and each has its own undocumented quirks,” which is why it’s so difficult to “just build it again” from the blueprints. There’s so much skill and craftsmanship that has been lost to time that we would probably make similar mistakes trying to rebuild the engines as the original manufacturers.
With the advantage of light scanning technology, it’s much easier to scan and save than go through the engineering design/CAD, manufacture, and iterate cycles of development in order to ensure the CAD is correct. Plus, it sounds like there is little desire to reproduce the engines exactly. While it’s good to have a starting point, any future designs will be modified to the F-1B (or any other engine).
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 17.7 ms ] threadDon't any copies of the original blueprints survive any more? The articles say they have all the blueprints still. So surely it would be easier to go from blueprints to CAD directly, rather than trying to scan from the physical object to CAD instead.
As mentioned in the article, “every scrap of documentation produced during Project Apollo, including the design documents for the Saturn V and the F-1 engines, remains on file. If re-creating the F-1 engine were simply a matter of cribbing from some 1960s blueprints, NASA would have already done so.”
And “each F-1 engine was uniquely built by hand, and each has its own undocumented quirks,” which is why it’s so difficult to “just build it again” from the blueprints. There’s so much skill and craftsmanship that has been lost to time that we would probably make similar mistakes trying to rebuild the engines as the original manufacturers.
With the advantage of light scanning technology, it’s much easier to scan and save than go through the engineering design/CAD, manufacture, and iterate cycles of development in order to ensure the CAD is correct. Plus, it sounds like there is little desire to reproduce the engines exactly. While it’s good to have a starting point, any future designs will be modified to the F-1B (or any other engine).