Best Rocket Engines Ever? RS-25 & F-1 Engines Up Close

John Williams shows you these engines up close and their cool features. The RS-25 was the main Space Shuttle engine and the F-1 engine was the most powerful engine ever built and powered the Saturn V into space. He visits the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville Alabama.
_________________________________________________
Space Intelligence shares fun facts and excitement about space history, current space missions and future space exploration. John Williams is an avid fan and young space historian. His videos are designed to educate others to learn more about space history and technology.

Attributed content below:
Link: Aerojet website
The RS-25 evolved from Aerojet Rocketdyne’s Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) that successfully powered 135 flights of the Space Shuttle. The engine underwent five major upgrades during its life on Shuttle, each time incorporating the modern technologies and innovations – and each time demonstrating major improvements in safety and reliability. Between the shuttle program and the SLS program, the RS-25 and SSME engines have collectively experienced more than 1.1 million seconds of use.

The RS-25 is a staged-combustion engine cycle powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, making it one of highest performing engines the nation has ever produced. The SSME engines on the Shuttle typically operated at 491,000 pounds vacuum thrust (104.5-percent of rated power level). The required power level for the RS-25 engines that will fly on the SLS is 512,000 pounds vacuum thrust (109 percent of rated power level) to augment the vehicle's heavy lift capability. Future evolutions will have even higher thrust capabilities.

Aerojet Rocketdyne has begun developing a new generation of RS-25 engines for when the 16 engines remaining from the Space Shuttle program are used. These engines are targeting a 30% cost reduction from the engines that flew on the Space Shuttle and will feature the latest in advanced manufacturing techniques, including 3-D printing.

NASA:
Powerful Proven Propulsion for America’s Exploration of Deep Space: The SLS RS-25 Engine
The RS-25 is half of the powerful, proven SLS propulsion systems designed to launch humans and large exploration payloads to the Moon and ultimately to Mars and beyond. Four RS-25 engines, along with two 5-segment solid rocket boosters, will give SLS approximately 8.8 million pounds of thrust during launch – more lift than any current launch vehicle and 15 percent more than the Saturn V rockets that launched astronauts on journeys to the moon.

With unmatched payload mass and volume capability, the advanced, super heavy-lift SLS is the only rocket that can send the Orion spacecraft, astronauts, and a large cargo to the Moon on a single mission. This reduces the number and complexity of in-space operations and increases the chances of mission success.

Wikipedia:
Rocketdyne developed the F-1 and the E-1 to meet a 1955 U.S. Air Force requirement for a very large rocket engine. The E-1, although successfully tested in static firing, was quickly seen as a technological dead-end, and was abandoned for the larger, more powerful F-1. The Air Force eventually halted development of the F-1 because of a lack of requirement for such a large engine. However, the recently created National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) appreciated the usefulness of an engine with so much power and contracted Rocketdyne to complete its development. Test firings of F-1 components had been performed as early as 1957. The first static firing of a full-stage developmental F-1 was performed in March 1959. The first F-1 was delivered to NASA MSFC in October 1963. In December 1964, the F-1 completed flight rating tests. Testing continued at least through 1965.[2]

Early development tests revealed serious combustion instability problems which sometimes caused catastrophic failure.[3] Initially, progress on this problem was slow, as it was intermittent and unpredictable. Oscillations of 4 kHz with harmonics to 24 kHz were observed. Eventually, engineers developed a diagnostic technique of detonating small explosive charges (which they called "bombs") outside the combustion chamber, through a tangential tube (RDX, C-4 or black powder were used) while the engine was firing. This allowed them to determine exactly how the running chamber responded to variations in pressure, and to determine how to nullify these oscillations. The designers could then quickly experiment with different co-axial fuel-injector designs to obtain the one most resistant to instability. These problems were addressed from 1959 through 1961.
Smithsonian
The F-1 engine, with 1.5 million pounds of thrust, was the powerplant for the first stage of the 363-foot long Saturn V launch vehicle that took the first astronauts to the Moon for six successful landing missions between 1969 and 1972 in the Project Apollo program.