Part III: Fire, Smoke, and Thunder: The Engines

The H-1 engine traced its ancestry to postwar American development of rocket propulsion systems, and the opening section of chapter 4 includes an assessment of this engine’s technological heritage. While the development of other engines discussed in Part Three differed in specifics, the overall trends in their design, test, and achievement of operational status paralleled that of the H-1 and sprang from the same evolving technology. Introduced on the Saturn V, the giant F-1 engine, while more akin to the conventional cryogenics of the H-1, experienced many development problems. The problem of scale affected many aspects of Saturn hardware development, as the F-1 story attests.

Application of liquid hydrogen (LH₂) technology constituted one of the key aspects of Apollo-Saturn’s success. The upper stages of the Saturn I and Saturn IB introduced LH₂-fueled RL-10 and J-2 engines, respectively, as discussed in chapter 5.