great news everyone we're here at the u.s space and rocket center in
huntsville alabama and i brought myself
a friend what's up it's destin from smarter every day and uh he is going to
be dropping some knowledge bombs today because behind me is the actual guidance
computer from the saturn v rocket this is one of the engines and maybe you can
enlighten us what's the significance of the saturn v oh everybody knows that's
what we use to go to the moon this is the 50th anniversary of the apollo moon
landing and uh so it's a really big deal right now so yeah what you're gonna talk
about today the instrument unit that's what got the rocket on course to go to
the moon and then the apollo computer took over but you're talking about the
rocket steering wow mark your calendar ladies and gentlemen
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so what we're looking at right now is the instrument unit for the saturn v
rocket why is it in the shape of a ring well to answer this and many other dumb
questions we've got some amazing resources today so some of you probably
don't know this but destin from smartereveryday is literally a rocket
scientist by training and he actually arranged someone no offense to him quite
a bit more special as well so the person
i'm talking to right now is luke talley who actually worked on the flight
evaluation team for this rocket when he worked at ibm back in the 60s and he was
kind enough to stick around for literally hours to educate my canadian
self let's start by breaking down what we're looking at here there are three
main parts navigation guidance and control is from about the bottom of the
ring up to a little over halfway up the left side the telemetry section is up at
the top and the other side is environmental control the umbilical
plate and our power sources so let's start with that section it includes our
main power source now some flights we get three of these batteries and some of
them we get four but it's always the same silver zinc 5300 amp hour
125 pound batteries now the technology to build lighter
weight batteries didn't really exist at the time and in fact these aren't even
rechargeable you just pour the goop in about 28 hours before launch and let it
rip now these gave the scientists about 11 hours of lifetime depending on which
of the four buses was pulling power and that was all they needed
so the crew separates at about four hours and then they only really need
about another hour or two of tinkering to either send the rocket around the sun
or smash it into the moon if they want to get some seismic data readings it
really depended on the purpose of the mission now we've got the rest of the
environmental control panel or triple point device so called because it's got
liquid solid and vapor all in one spot
the main pieces are as follows you've got your cooling duct which runs around
the entire outside of the ring this circulates conditioned air pre-launch
because it's pretty hot down at the cape then right before fueling it switches
over to nitrogen because oxygen and
rocket fuel is a pretty bad time
then you've got coolant pumps that pump a liquid coolant to be clear not water
around to the anodized aluminum cold plates that are distributed around the
ring and then oh this one really got my
inner cooling geek all sorts of hot and bothered these two plates here are part
of what they call the sublimator now if you've got up to 400 watts of
heat per cooling plate and we've got 15
of them around the ring you've got to dissipate that somehow but the keen
witted among you have probably already figured out that in the vacuum of space
conventional radiators don't work there's no air to exchange the heat with
so the way the sublimator works is it has a piece of sintered metal that's
exposed directly to space this reservoir down here then is full of
water and pressurized nitrogen gas with a flexible membrane in between that
forces the water through the micro pores in our sintered metal
now because these channels are so small
the water freezes nearly immediately
then because that ice gets exposed to such a low pressure environment it
sublimates going directly from solid to vapor allowing it to dissipate about 9
000 watts so this is kind of like conventional
phase change cooling but space age literally
this system allows our coolant to stay between 50 and 60 degrees fahrenheit
throughout the entire mission with only the volume of water in the reservoir to
fuel it next up power comes in from the batteries to our power distributors
these are the high current ones here that break out two sub-power
distributors one at the top of the ring and the other one over on the other side
those ones go directly to components or
to further lower current power distributors and the whole thing runs at
28 volts we'll get back to those a little bit later
now all this distribution is actually done with relays
no semiconductor switching or anything like that the cold hard truth is that
semiconductors just weren't reliable enough yet so the way that that worked
was they got a signal from the black box called a switch selector so it's the one
that's right to the right of our tic tac toe box here and that was tied to the
computer so when it's time to fire a
retro rocket or start an engine or turn on the cooling system the switch flicks
now we're getting into navigation guidance and control down here on the
bottom of the ring so this sphere right here in front of me
is full of pressurized nitrogen gas and it feeds the gas bearing remember we
want as little friction as possible to reduce drift for what they call the
guidance platform now it looks similar to the nitrogen
ball but the insides are absolutely nothing alike we've actually got a
breakaway here that we can look at to see the main components three
accelerometers and three gyroscopes now the fixed thing in the middle is
called the stable table and before launch they release it and then courtesy
of our x y and z axis gyros it actually
maintains a fixed position so it's always in the exact same orientation it
was left in no matter how the rocket is oriented or traveling around the earth
now i said exact but that wasn't quite what i meant because for short missions
this kind of system is fine but for longer ones it needs to get a little
more advanced because no matter what you do even if you've got a nitrogen bearing
a gyro is going to drift a little bit so
if you're doing a multi-month mission you need to build in systems to allow
you to recalibrate it now the accelerometers which are just
gyros with a weight hanging off them that torque them causing them to precess
use the degree of precession as a measure of the acceleration that gets
sent to the computer which uses that data to calculate velocity which i guess
brings us pretty nicely to our computer
so this small box here is the lvdc or
launch vehicle digital computer this is a truly remarkable machine the
processing modules had transistors that are actually big enough to see with the
naked eye and were soldered to the compute chips built into these boards
using a predecessor to ball grid array soldering and the memory well the 917
504 bits of working system memory was
actually hand woven from copper wire and
iron rings that whole system was double redundant
for memory and triple redundant for the compute
destin and i actually go into a little bit more depth on this in the video on
his channel so don't miss it we're gonna have it linked below the second box here
is the lvda or launch vehicle data adapter this contains a whole bunch of
stuff it's got power supplies for itself and the lvdc and a bunch of interfaces
to other electronic components as well as digital to analog converters and
analog to digital converters because thing is not everything about this
system was digital so this cylinder
right here contains the analog computer
from the saturn 5. this is the one that actually issues the
commands to move the engines and steer the rocket so the whole computer here
digital and analog has no operating system but the thing is you wouldn't
want to run windows or android on something like this anyway consumer
operating systems work by queuing up inputs and processing tasks and then
executing them whenever it's most convenient it basically processes them
in batches well this is a real-time
system and it operates on a fixed two second loop with interrupts so if an
input comes in that must be executed within a given amount of time or people
could die it needs to be able to handle that
now let's come back to these two black boxes again remember these are our
switch selectors they've got 112 lines going out of them
that carry commands from the computer directly to components or distributors
telling them to power on or power off so again for example let's say uh the
cooling vent if we go over our temperature threshold it sends out a
command that says hey open it up we need to sublimate some ice
now each stage of the rocket needs these and that's actually what the wiring up
on the top of the ring is for it's to link our computer here to more of these
in the other stages although obviously
they're not attached right now while we're up here this last quarter or so of
the ring is for the telemetry package so we've got our transmitters measuring
racks multiplexers and apparently the vhf systems on here are pretty close to
what apollo 12 would have looked like so this is not an r d thing that might have
had more telemetry stuff this is pretty darn close to the real deal which i
guess is a pretty appropriate way for us to celebrate the apollo 11 missions 50th
anniversary yes my friends it has been that long since humans first walked on
the moon if you believe in that sort of thing
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so thanks for watching guys and a massive extra shout out for destin from
smarter every day again go check out his channel and to the us space and rocket
center in huntsville alabama for making this entire thing possible they really
did keep the thing open late for us to finish this video so they're super
awesome people here and if you're ever in the area make sure you check it out
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