I read recently that the first and second stages of the Saturn Vs crashed downrange into the ocean. Has anyone ever heard of them being detected by sonar?
They're probably in a million pieces on the seafloor... surely the S-II upperstages are since they surely broke up and partially burned up due to their extremely high velocity and reentry from high altitudes...
The S-IC first stages were moving at a pretty good clip as well when the Saturn V staged, and at pretty good altitude. There were a set of retro motors located under the fairings which fired at staging to pull the S-IC "backwards" away from the S-II interstage just before the S-II J-2 engines fired up. These totally blew away the fairings. Also I read that the heavy weight of the F-1 engines on the S-IC caused it to re-enter "backwards" when it came into the lower atmosphere, which would have caused the thing to break up aerodynamically so they said. The S-IC had NO chutes or drag retarding of any kind (beyond it's own atmospheric drag and any induced by inadvertant tumbling) and so when it hit the water at several hundred MPH, what was left to settle on the seafloor was probably "not much". The F-1 engine powerheads probably stayed in one piece (as they did with Columbia) though the bells were probably blown apart in the impact, and probably the "X" beam the engines were mounted to on the bottom of the stage came though in some mangled twisted manner in one or a few large pieces-- the rest though was probably mainly shredded aluminum scattered into a debris field on the seafloor.
There was a report of a transport ship or tanker having some S-IC bits land on the deck after the Apollo 11 launch IIRC... just chunks of metal, mostly.
When I stand beside that HUGE HONKIN' S-IC at JSC, though, I wonder what the splash of that big sonuvagun hittin' the ocean woulda looked like though...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcKX4wCcU5k
Well, not
THAT big... OL JR
