When the mighty Rocketdyne F-1 engine was conceived in the late 1950s for the U.S. Air Force, it had no defined mission and there was no launch vehicle it could power. It was a bold concept to push the technological envelope of rocket propulsion in order to put massive payloads into Earth orbit. Few realized at the time that the F-1 would one day propel American astronauts to the Moon. In The Saturn V F-1 Engine, Anthony Young tells the amazing story of unbridled vision, bold engineering, explosive failures during testing, unrelenting persistence to find solutions, and ultimate success in launching the Saturn V with a 100 percent success rate. The book
• contains personal interviews with many Rocketdyne and NASA personnel involved in the engine’s design, development, testing and production;
• is lavishly illustrated with black-and-white and color photographs, many never previously published
• is the first complete history of the most powerful rocket engine ever built.
The F-1 engine remains the high point in U.S. liquid rocket propulsion – it represents a period in American history when nothing was impossible.