To be fair, Saturn V was by height about 1/3 first stage LOX/RP-1, 1/3 second
stage LOX/LH2, and 1/3 payload or third and payload. Falcon H parallel stages
1&2, then third is a dense LOX/RP-1. An all kerosene S-V with F9H length
payloads would be more like 200 than 350 feet...
Sent from my iPhone
On Dec 23, 2017, at 8:31 PM, Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 23 Dec 2017, Monroe L. King Jr. wrote:
You know what I meant... Big rocket little rocket. Not on the same level,
N1 was comparable at 209,000 lb but still not quite the Saturn V.
Peter Alway's old "Rockets of the World" poster is instructive. It shows
pretty well all the research rockets and launchers (he excludes the pure
ballistic missiles) at the same scale, lined up by height.
At the top is a row of little ones, all suborbital. In the next row, Black
Arrow and Pegasus -- the shortest of the orbital launchers -- show up. The
third row is mixed, the fourth mostly orbital (some of them manned).
The bottom two rows are the large ones (up to about twenty years ago),
including Shuttle and Buran. He cheats a little bit for the Saturn IB at the
end of the bottom row -- the top of the Apollo escape tower actually sticks
up slightly into the row above -- and an updated version including Falcon 9
and Falcon Heavy would have to do the same for them.
But those bottom two rows stop early and don't run the full width of the
poster. Because in the lower right corner, towering the height of both
bottom rows *put together*, are the two giants: the N1 and the Saturn V.
They really were in a different class.
Henry
