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- 5, 4, 3
[TJ Cooney] What rocket is best,
is an argument had daily on
space flight forums around the internet.
Nobody though can deny that the Saturn 5,
and the Falcon Heavy are
the biggest, heaviest,
and most powerful American
launch vehicles ever produced.
They each have unique
capabilities the other doesn't,
and both have the ability
to send an insane amount
of cargo to space.
The Falcon Heavy and the
Saturn 5 are two rockets that
nearly every person in
the world would recognize.
But what is their story?
(upbeat tempo music)
Hi everyone, Tj here
for I Need More Space.
In each episode of this series
I'm gonna take two components
of space flight and compare
them to one another.
Hopefully we both learn
how they came to be,
and get a better
understanding of the story of
space's past and future.
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back to the episode.
Today on head to head
we're pitting the iconic
Saturn 5 against the
Falcon Heavy in a match up
we're just gonna call best booster.
We're gonna pair them
based on five criteria;
payload, total cost, operational record,
cultural impact, and how they were made.
I know the comment section
is going to ask about
Starship, New Glenn, and Vulcan,
but guess what?
They haven't flown anything to space yet,
so they don't count.
Anyways, lets just jump in.
Payload, if you're going to
judge a launch vehicle on
one thing it should probably be payload.
If our goal is to safely
fling heavy pieces of
machinery and/or human
beings into orbit we need to
consider our rockets payload rating,
and on that question
we have a clear winner.
While the Falcon Heavy
can hoist an impressive
140,700 pounds into low earth orbit,
it's no match for the colossal
power of the Saturn 5,
which is rating to launch
a whopping 310,000 pounds
of payload into the same low earth orbit.
So that's it right?
The Saturn 5 can lift more
than twice as much payload
as the Falcon Heavy.
End of comparison right?
Well, maybe not.
Because space flight isn't
free, the pendulum is gonna
swing back toward the Falcon
Heavy once we consider
the total cost.
The first versions of the Saturn
rocket family were designed
back in 1960, and since nothing
like it had ever been built,
its designers had to
solve a lot of problems
for the first time.
Saturn 5 engineers had
to solve everything from
insulating thousands of
gallons of liquid hydrogen,
to the warping of booster tank
frames during construction,
so building these rockets
was very, very expensive.
By NASA's own estimates
the Saturn 5 program
cost about 42 billion in today's dollars,
and each individual
launch cost 1.23 billion,
with about 60% of that price tag being
the Saturn 5 itself.
By contrast the newer Falcon
Heavy was designed with
the benefit of more than
40 years of hard earned
experience and data.
SpaceX relies on private funding,
so we don't have the same
kind of data we had for the
tax payer funded Saturn 5.
But reports suggest that
Falcon Heavy's development cost
were less than a billion
dollars, and Falcon Heavy's
per launch cost starts at
a mere 90 million dollars.
That's less than a tenth
of the per launch cost
of the Saturn 5, and none of
this even starts to account
for the fact that the Falcon
Heavy's boosters can be
recovered and reused,
while the one and done Saturn 5 can't.
This ones not even close.
Standing on the shoulders
of the Saturn 5's
programs engineers the Falcon Heavy
is definitely cheaper to develop
and operate than the Saturn 5.
Operational Record.
So, this is where the
comparison gets tricky.
There were only 13 Saturn 5
launches and twelve of them
were total successes no
Saturn 5 ever had a loss of
payload or life,
and over the course of its
life span Saturn 5 successfully
sent two dozen human beings to the moon.
That kind of service record
is going to be tough to beat.
By contrast, the Falcon Heavy has three
successful launches under its belt,
but the comparison isn't really fair.
The Saturn program was designed
for crude space flight,
while the Falcon Heavy has
been used almost exclusively
to launch communication satellites.
That's still no easy task,
but space flight gets a lot
less complex when you don't
have to worry about life support systems.
Falcon Heavy's lone, none
satellite launch was its
maiden voyage, which
put Elon Musk's personal
Tesla Roadster on a course for Mars.
Now that's undeniably cool
photo op, but a posed mannequin
is not the same thing as
letting fleshed and blood
Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon's surface.
While both Saturn 5 and Falcon
Heavy boast some impressive
operational records, only
one of those operational
records included life or
death stakes of putting humans
into space, and returning
them safely to Earth.
Cultural impact.
We can compare engineering specs until
we're blue in the face,
but ultimately numbers alone
won't capture why these
rockets captivate us.
We know how these modern
marvels of science perform
in space, but how did it
live in our imagination?
Well in one hand we've got
the freaking moon landing.
Saturn 5 fans can rightly
ask when the last time that
Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon,
and Ed Harris immortalized
the Falcon Heavy in a movie.
But on the other hand, did
you see the video of SpaceX
successfully recovering
the Falcon Heavy boosters?
I have to plead the fifth here.
I grew up in a world
where the moon landing had
already happened.
It always seemed like
something that was already in
history books you know?
But watching Falcon Heavy's
boosters falling to Earth
at terminal velocity, then
executing a perfectly timed
series of burns, in order
the land to standing upright,
I don't know.
I just don't really have
the words to describe that.
Especially when that human being
is talking from the surface
that is not a place that's on this planet.
There is one final thing
we need to look at,
and that's the how of
these launch vehicles.
How they were made.
During World War II, some
of our planets best rocket
scientists were fighting for the bad guys.
When the war ended in
1945 the United States
and the Soviet Union raced
to grab as many Nazi rocket
scientists as possible,
and put them to work on the
quickly arriving Cold War.
All told the United States
ended up expatriating
16 hundred hundred German
scientists including
Wernher von Braun.
Who led the Nazi rocket
programs, and went on to become
the chief architect of the Saturn 5.
Now by contrast, the Falcon
Heavy was developed with the
engineering assistance
of precisely zero Nazis.
Well as far as we know anyways.
There are other big differences here too.
Von Braun's work on the
Saturn 5 was the result of
massive government sponsor programs,
spanning decades in both
United States and Germany.
He worked in concert
with both academia and
the private sector too.
With each of the Saturn
5 stages being farmed out
to different companies the
public, private partnership
helped NASA recover from the
embarrassment of Sputnik,
and win the race to the Moon.
On the other hand, Elon Musk's
SpaceX is a single company,
run on private money.
It's not in the business
of proving that we can go
to the moon, it is in the
business of being a business.
SpaceX wants to turn a profit
in a way that NASA never did.
SpaceX designed its rockets
differently than NASA, because
SpaceX's rockets are not
intended to perform the same
mission as NASA rockets.
On this one I'm torn.
It's a little apples to oranges,
but Falcon Heavy is smaller, cheaper,
and the no Nazi thing has
to count for something.
So there you have it which
booster would you prefer
to fly with today?
Let me know in the poll above.
Over the near term we're
gonna see a lot more
Falcon Heavy launches
than Saturn 5 launches.
Sadly the infrastructure for
the Saturn 5 is long gone
and in the history books,
but the Saturn 5 is still
the gold standard in human
rated, super heavy lift launches.
And if Elon Musk wants to send more
than a mannequin to Mars,
the Falcon Heavy has got
a long way to go before
it catches up with the old Saturn 5.
If you have your own
opinions on how the Saturn 5
and the Falcon Heavy stack up,
I hope you'll drop them in
the comment section below.
For more videos about all
the cool stuff that people do
in space please subscribe to my channel,
and come please find me
on my social media I'm
@TJ_Cooney on twitter.
I post daily videos and
photos about space flight
and just things I find neat.
So thanks for watching and
I hope to see you soon.
Alright, bye.
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