Saturn V Damaged Launch Pad 39A With First Test

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There are two photos from pad 39A after the first Saturn V launch in 1967. The Saturn V damaged the launch pad during its launches and set fires on the launch tower. The Saturn V has half of the power of the SpaceX Starship. The SpaceX Starship’s successful hold down test at half power was equivalent to a full-power Saturn V.

Following the launch the techs climbed up to retrieve the film from a camera and found a huge beam had broken loose from the LUT structure and fallen down the structure, bouncing between levels.

The SpaceX Starship Test Launch Had a Lot of Damage to the Launch Pad in 2023

8 thoughts on “Saturn V Damaged Launch Pad 39A With First Test”

  1. That was a couple hundred million of tax payer dollars that went up in smoke, not private equity funding.

    Artemis was stupidly expensive but it went around the moon as planned.

    Yes, NASA is bloated, but their standards for success are much higher.

    And to think that SpaceX has been contracted to build the lunar lander based off this farce?!?

    What’s the rule we learned with STS? You don’t put people on the side of nor inside of a bomb. You put them on top with an escape system. How, exactly, are astronauts going to escape from this lander? How is the lander an escape vehicle if the booster has a problem?

    This is some amazing rocketry, indeed, but time for a reality check. It doesn’t make any sense. None of it.

    Musk claims they were “out of time” to build a flame trench or other mitigation? How, exactly, does one run out of time when hundreds of millions are at stake and it is a well known fact that this kind of mitigation is not optional but an absolute requirement?!?

    Something is rotten here.

  2. I know its fail fast and learn and all….. but that does seem excessive. The looks like the aftermeth of Chernoble. If the 8 engines were out because of debris damage, thats going to be far outside of the worse case scenario surely.

    Though the FAA must also have passed it for launch.

    • Sure, sometimes they go a little bit too far and furious. We could play it safe, and end up with over budget and way behind schedule. How many people have been permanently injured or killed by these tests, how many flights/how much cargo moved to space by SpaceX, how much progress? Picture the US space industry without it. So far, they have a better launch record than NASA in even it’s second 20 years of operation, and in less than 20 years have passed NASA launch capability and all others at a fraction of the cost. We could go back to buying old Russian rockets at a 1200% markup with worse reliability, wait for others to eventually catch-up at 5-10x the cost, or just hitch a ride with the Chinese. The are always other options.

      • Not a clever response. You don’t understand rapid development. If you want another SLS, then pay $50 billion for half the performance. If you want rapid develop, expect some failures and spend $5 billion. It’s absolutely pathetic to that the US has lost its drive to move forward, trapped behind miles of red tape nothing gets done and it costs 10X more, taxpayer money btw if you haven’t figured that out.

    • How do you test the line of how little is too little, without breaking eggs?

      That’s what spacex has been doing this entire time, they’ve been blowing up “flying water tanks” to find where the bare minimum for “rocket rockets” starts.

    • So that’s what the Doomsday Machine carving chunks out of a planet looks like.

      Elon! Make nice with MSFC and launch from Stennis

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