Comment by snakeyjake

>Every Saturn 5 was successful

>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure

Subassemblies that made up Saturn V went through several hundred (inflation adjusted) billion dollars' worth of iterative failure before the Apollo program was announced.

The only reason it WAS announced was all of the iterative failure that had been paying off.

The day JFK uttered "shall go to the moon in this deck-aid", the F-1 engine had already been exploding and failing for three years.

My memory is hazy, from a brown bag I went to at work 15 years ago, but they blew up around 50 F-1s before one worked right.

And while the Saturn isn't an upgraded Jupiter it is EXTREMELY closely related to Jupiter and Jupiter had a shit-ton of failures before they got it right, turned around, and used all of that knowledge to build Saturn.