Author here, the point of the piece isn't the asbestos. It's that we literally (in the original sense of the word) forgot the asbestos; asbestos was used as a part of the first stage F-1 engine's thermal protection system for the famous Saturn V rocket.
As the insulation was applied at the very last step, there aren't many photos of the final product. Add the presence of the cancer-causing asbestos, none of the existing displays and museum pieces show this vital component.
Because the museums don't reflect this fact, it doesn't exist in popular culture. And because it doesn't exist in popular culture, and that the people who built the Saturn V are dying off, we are largely in the process of forgetting what the most famous machine of the 20th century looked like.
The point of the piece is the forgetting. Not the asbestos.
This has my curious. I could have sworn every space museum I went to made a point about the asbestos coating. Just an odd fake memory of mine? (Sincere question, btw. I have more synthetic memories than I'd care to admit.)
Here's a report for the command module, which starts with a very funny quote, "The JSC Director waived the use of the International System of Units (SI)for this Apollo Experience Report because, in his judgment, the use of SI units would impair the usefulness of the report or result in excessive cost." https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19740007423/downloads/19...
Asbestos was used pretty much everywhere you wanted to contain heat. I recall watching videos of people with a fabric of it on their hands and a butane torch aimed at it, to show how effective it was. Usually in lectures that were explaining why it was used in applications like jets/rockets. :D
I am probably closer to one of the "mini-cult of adherents who worship it with near-religious fervor" than I'd like to admit, but I make a kind of pilgrimage to sit under and stare at the F1 engine at my local museum every now and then. It's very much wormed into my consciousness _without_ any asbestos or foil wrapping:
(Not my pic, just one I found on DDG that fits with my memory of it)
As a cultist, I recall a similar story to the Fogbank one about the fuel pumps for thoe F-1 motors. Apparently in spite of having all the docs, we still needed to reverse engineer them from museum pieces to find out how to build new ones:
Why was NASA working with ancient engines instead of building a new F-1 or a full Saturn V? One urban legend holds that key "plans" or "blueprints" were disposed of long ago through carelessness or bureaucratic oversight. Nothing could be further from the truth; every scrap of documentation produced during Project Apollo, including the design documents for the Saturn V and the F-1 engines, remains on file. If re-creating the F-1 engine were simply a matter of cribbing from some 1960s blueprints, NASA would have already done so.
A typical design document for something like the F-1, though, was produced under intense deadline pressure and lacked even the barest forms of computerized design aids. Such a document simply cannot tell the entire story of the hardware. Each F-1 engine was uniquely built by hand, and each has its own undocumented quirks. In addition, the design process used in the 1960s was necessarily iterative: engineers would design a component, fabricate it, test it, and see how it performed. Then they would modify the design, build the new version, and test it again. This would continue until the design was "good enough."
Further, although the principles behind the F-1 are well known, some aspects of its operation simply weren't fully understood at the time. The thrust instability problem is a perfect example. As the F-1 was being built, early examples tended to explode on the test stand. Repeated testing revealed that the problem was caused by the burning plume of propellent rotating as it combusted in the nozzle. These rotations would increase in speed until they were happening thousands of times per second, causing violent oscillations in the thrust that eventually blew the engine apart. The problem could have derailed the Saturn program and jeopardized President Kennedy's Moon landing deadline, but engineers eventually used a set of stubby barriers (baffles) sticking up from the big hole-riddled plate that sprayed fuel and liquid oxygen into the combustion chamber (the "injector plate"). These baffles damped down the oscillation to acceptable levels, but no one knew if the exact layout was optimal.
I mean... I know that the rockets that are on display don't have asbestos. That isn't my assertion. My assertion is that I could have sworn plaques and whatnot mention it.
Now... most of my memory for rockets is from when I did space camp way back in the mid 90s. So... Yeah, I don't have picture perfect memory of that.
This just feels like when I'm told that CS majors don't learn about the involvement of women in computer science. By and large, that is not totally accurate. It is accurate enough for the point, which is that there is sexism. But, as the software person in the room that went to college, I was almost guaranteed to be the only one that knew the names of the women that our education supposedly skipped on.
Given that’s the case, you didn’t need to include Asbestos in the title of the article to garner more clicks, as I’m sure you must have realised it would have done.
It's tongue in cheek. I write for myself and to reach out to/engage in dialog with interesting people. And to just add to the general sphere of human knowledge.
I wrote this because I couldn't find anyone else addressing it.
Forgetting the Thermal Protection System (that included inconel and asbestos) is a lot harder to read than Forgetting the Asbestos.
And I didn't think it would be a problem. Usually on HN, people read the article before commenting.
I understand your point and that of the person you're replying to, but I have two points:
1) I read your comment before the article
2) Despite feeling pretty familiar with the subject matter, I don't think I know what inconel is
It was you comment that led me to commit to reading the article, because I'm not interested in yet another article about asbestos but I am interested in the Thermal Protection System.
With respect, I was pointing out that the word asbestos has certain gravity that would have attracted clicks.
To suggest I didn’t read the article is in bad faith. I did read it, and quite liked it as it happens (I had no idea of the extra heat shields over the engines and how that detail had been lost to time). It just could’ve done without the clickbait title is all.
As the insulation was applied at the very last step, there aren't many photos of the final product. Add the presence of the cancer-causing asbestos, none of the existing displays and museum pieces show this vital component.
Because the museums don't reflect this fact, it doesn't exist in popular culture. And because it doesn't exist in popular culture, and that the people who built the Saturn V are dying off, we are largely in the process of forgetting what the most famous machine of the 20th century looked like.
The point of the piece is the forgetting. Not the asbestos.