The power generated by five of these engines was best conceptualized by author David Woods in his book How Apollo Flew to the Moon—"[T]he power output of the Saturn first stage was 60 gigawatts. This happens to be very similar to the peak electricity demand of the United Kingdom."[ emphasis added]That's 60 million kilowatts. One horsepower = 745.699872 watts. One horsepower is 550 lb-ft.
Substituting terms in the equations yields 60 billion watts divided by 746 watts per hp equal 80,428,954,424 hp. Substituting again to get lb-ft: Multiply 550 lb-ft times 80,428,954,424 horsepower gives an astronomical 44,235,924,932,976 lb-ft of power. But the thrust is only 7.68 million pounds.
That means only 1.74 e-7 th of the power produced gets translated into thrust.
Less than 2 ten millionths of the power produced is translated into useful work!!!
It requires a lot of fuel to produce the relatively minuscule amount of work to get the beast off the ground.
That fuel has to be lifted itself. No wonder the payload fractions are so low. With all that fuel to lug around, the thing can't get out of its own way.
Hard for me to believe that this is the best we can do.
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