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Factoids

• Jeff Ashby, a U.S. Navy captain who flew on his first shuttle flight on July 22-27, 1999, was a 15-year-old dishwasher when Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
• Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne Propulsion & Power, a United Technologies company [NYSE:UTX], built 30 engines that were used on the Saturn V rocket. 5 F-1 engines for the first stage, 5 J-2 engines for the second stage, 1 J-2 engine for the third stage, 1 engine used in the LM for ascent, 12 reaction control engines, and 6 small "ullage" motors that were used in the second and third stages to settle propellants prior to ignition of the J-2 engines.
  

  Media coverage was extensive (Copyright, Look Magazine, used by permission)
• The possibility of a micrometeoroid as big as a cigarette ash striking the command module during an 8-day lunar mission was computed as 1 in 1230. If a meteoroid did strike the module, it would be at a velocity of 98,500 feet per second. The probability of the command module getting hit was 0.000815. The probability of the command module not getting hit was 0.999185.
• The heat leak from the Apollo cryogenic tanks, which contained hydrogen and oxygen, was so small that if one hydrogen tank containing ice were placed in a room heated to 70 degrees F, a total of 8-1/2 years would be required to melt the ice to water at just one degree above freezing. It would take approximately 4 years more for the water to reach room temperature.
• The gases in the cryogenic tanks were utilized in the production of electrical power by the Apollo fuel cell system and provide oxygen for the use of the crew.
• When the Apollo spacecraft passed through the Van Allen belts on its way to the moon, the astronauts were exposed to radiation roughly equivalent to that of a dental X-ray.
• The command module offered 73 cubic feet per man as against 68 feet per man in a compact car. By comparison, the Mercury spacecraft offered 55 cubic feet for its one traveler and Gemini provided 40 cubic feet per man.
• The angular accuracy requirement of midcourse correction of the spacecraft for all thrusting maneuvers was one degree.
• If your car gets 15 miles to the gallon, you could drive 18 million miles or around the world about 400 times on the propellants required for the Apollo/Saturn lunar landing mission.
• The Saturn V launch vehicle contained 5.6 million pounds of propellant (or 960,000 gallons).
• When the Apollo spacecraft reentered the atmosphere it generated energy equivalent to approximately 86,000 kilowatt hours of electricity - enough to light the city of Los Angeles for about 104 seconds; or the energy generated would lift all the people in the USA 10-3/4 inches off the ground.
• The fully loaded Saturn V launch vehicle with the Apollo Spacecraft stood 60 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty on its pedestal and weighed 13 times as much as the statue.
• During its 3.5 second firing, the Apollo Spacecraft's solid-fuel launch escape rocket generated the horsepower equivalent of 4,300 automobiles.
• The engines of the Saturn V launch vehicle that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the moon had combined horsepower equivalent to 543 jet fighters.
• The Apollo environmental control system had 180 parts in contrast to 8 for the average home window air conditioner.
• The Apollo environmental control system performed 23 functions compared to 5 for the average home conditioner. The 23 functions included: air cooling, air heating, humidity control, ventilation to suits, ventilation to cabin, air filtration, CO2 removal, odor removal, waste management functions, etc.
• The 12-foot-high Apollo spacecraft command module contained about fifteen miles of wire, enough to wire 50 two-bedroom homes.
  

  Lots of folks saluted the mission (Copyright, VW of America, used by permission)
• The astronaut controls and monitors the stabilization and control system by means of two handgrip controllers, 34 switches, and 6 knobs.
• The Apollo command module can sustain a hole as large as 1/4 inch in diameter and still maintain the pressure inside for 15 minutes, which is considered long enough for an astronaut to put on a spacesuit.
• The boost protective cover protected the command module from temperatures that reached 1200 degrees during the launch phase.
• The power of one Saturn V was enough to place in Earth orbit all U.S. manned spacecraft previously launched at that time.
• The F-1's fuel pumps pushed fuel with the force of 30 diesel locomotives.
• Enough liquid oxygen was contained in the first stage tank to fill 54 railroad tank cars.
• The five F-1 engines equaled 160,000,000 horsepower, about double the amount of potential hydroelectric power that would be available at any given moment if all the moving waters of North America were channeled through turbines.
• The interior of each of the first stage propellant tanks is large enough to accommodate three large moving vans side by side.
• The Saturn V's second stage construction was comparable to that of an eggshell in efficiency, the amount of weight and pressure constrained by a thin wall.
• Total amount of propellant (fuel and oxidizer) in the Saturn V launch vehicle, service module, and lunar module was 5,625,000 pounds.
• The ratio of propellant to payload in Saturn V was 50 to 1. The main computer in the command module occupied only one cubic foot.
• While an automobile has less than 3,000 functional parts, the command module had more than 2,000,000 not counting wires and skeletal components.
• The command module used only about 2000 watts of electricity, similar to the amount required by an oven in an electric range.
• The honeycomb aluminum used in Apollo's inner crew compartment was 40-percent stronger and 40-percent lighter than ordinary aluminum.
• The tanks that held the cryogenic (ultra-cold) liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen on the Apollo spacecraft came close to being the only leak-free vessels ever built. If an automobile tire leaked at the same rate that these tanks do, it would take the tire 32,400,000 years to go flat.
• There are approximately 2-1/2 million solder joints in the Saturn V launch vehicle. If just 1/32 of an inch too much wire were left on each of these joints and an extra drop of solder was used on each of these joints, the excess weight would be equivalent to the payload of the vehicle.
• (Many of these factoids are from the Apollo Spacecraft News Reference, provided by Ed Dempsey.)

Additional Reading

• Click here (PDF) to read a chronology of events at North American Aviation's Downey plant in California. This chronology is on the Apollo era at the NAA Space Division from 1960 to 1975 and was compiled by Boeing engineer Ken Elchert.
• Want to learn more about some of the Apollo accomplishments in chronological order, then click here (PDF) to read a series of articles on the Apollo, Skylab and Apollo/Soyuz projects compiled and written by Ken Elchert for the fiftieth anniversary of North American Aviation in Downey.
• Here is a link (PDF) to a presentation with loads of statistics and data about the Apollo program as compiled by Boeing engineer Ken Elchert.