Wernher von Braun said in the late fifties that a rocket to the moon would have to be the size of the Empire State Building to contain sufficient fuel for the trip. His scientific opinion apparently changed with the script when the Apollo Mission was abruptly declared in the late sixties.
Weight. Every pound your rocket weighs versus your thrust is a pound that you cannot have in payload. A rocket made in the '50s would weigh so much they would have to add fuel, which is also weight. There's a point where it can become a runaway cycle where the weight and extra fuel don't make the rocket better. In the 50s when he said this he was 100% right. But the innovation and engineering that the American space program did to create the specialized launch vehicle Saturn 5 was amazing. Up until then every single astronaut was sent into space atop an ICBM ballistic missile repurposed for the space program. They developed Saturn 5 and it didn't need to be the size of the space program because it had 7.5 million pounds of thrust
Wernher von Braun said in the late fifties that a rocket to the moon would have to be the size of the Empire State Building to contain sufficient fuel for the trip. His scientific opinion apparently changed with the script when the Apollo Mission was abruptly declared in the late sixties.
Weight. Every pound your rocket weighs versus your thrust is a pound that you cannot have in payload. A rocket made in the '50s would weigh so much they would have to add fuel, which is also weight. There's a point where it can become a runaway cycle where the weight and extra fuel don't make the rocket better. In the 50s when he said this he was 100% right. But the innovation and engineering that the American space program did to create the specialized launch vehicle Saturn 5 was amazing. Up until then every single astronaut was sent into space atop an ICBM ballistic missile repurposed for the space program. They developed Saturn 5 and it didn't need to be the size of the space program because it had 7.5 million pounds of thrust