It's too bad we didn't continue to use and modernize the Saturn V over time, in conjunction with the Shuttle program. To rebuild it now you would basically have to start over since the personnel, rigs, group knowledge, are long gone.
Here's one thing I didn't know until I was reading
this article about NASA refiring one of the Saturn V main engines. Just the fuel pump on a main engine produced 31,000 lbs of thrust.
Quote:
Instead, the team decided to start with a series of firings on F-6049's gas generator. An engine like the F-1 is sort of like two separate rocket engines: one small, one large. The smaller one consumes the same fuel as the larger, but its rocket exhaust is not used to lift the vehicle; instead, it drives the enormous turbopump that draws fuel and oxidizer from the tanks and forces them through the injector plate into the main thrust chamber to be burned.
As with everything else about the F-1, even the gas generator boasts impressive specs. It churns out about 31,000 pounds of thrust (138 kilonewtons), more than an F-16 fighter's engine running at full afterburner, and it was used to drive a turbine that produced 55,000 shaft horsepower. (That's 55,000 horsepower just to run the F-1's fuel and oxidizer pumps—the F-1 itself produced the equivalent of something like 32 million horsepower, though accurately measuring a rocket's thrust at that scale is complicated.)
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