It's funny, when I looked at these space vehicles up close, how un-aerodynamic the rockets were, things bolted on the side, open corrugations, blunt noses, rough surfaces...I guess they are not going at high speed down low and/or they have sufficient thrust that it is ok....
Frank
One thing you have to remember is, when you're pushing a vehicle up to 33 feet in diameter through the air, a fairing sticking out 6 inches from the side isn't really any big deal... Plus, when you look at the entire vehicle, it sets up a shock wave as it goes supersonic and all that stuff is submerged behind that shock wave and the drag is from the shock wave, not the protuberances.
You also have to remember than the air drag creates a lot of heat-- the cork BPC on the Apollo Command Module was designed to protect it from the roughly 400 degree plus heat from atmospheric friction during flight through the upper atmosphere. All that heat is kinetic energy that has to be created by burning propellant to accelerate the vehicle through the atmosphere.
The energies involved in space launches are truly staggering.
What always amazes me standing there looking at the Saturn V at JSC is the fact that the thing is made of SUCH thin metal... Basically, millions of pounds of propellant in the tanks, much of it at anywhere from -290 degrees F down to -453 degrees F, moving through the air at supersonic and even hypersonic speeds... the tank walls, like a pneumatic tire, held firm by the pressurization of the tank contents within, the unpressurized sections held strong by stiffeners and reinforcement rings... The engines pumping these extremely cold propellants at tens of thousands of gallons a minute and many hundreds, even thousands, of pounds per square inch in pressure, even though some of them are hundreds of degrees below zero, then pumping those fuels into combustion chambers at up to several thousand PSI and burning at up to 6,000 degrees F on one side of an injector plate, while hundreds of degrees below zero on the other side of that plate about an inch away. I've read that the construction and design of the Saturn V was SO finely attuned to detail, that if every wire in the rocket was just 1/4 inch longer than designed, it would eat up all the payload capability of the rocket...
It's just amazing how it all came together and worked so well....
Later! OL JR
