SPACE
“Overhead cranes inside can hold up to 325 tons and move massive objects with extreme precision”
Inside a rocket building factory
Space Shuttle Atlantis heading out of the door of the Vehicle Assembly Building, toward the launch platform
Take a tour around NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building and find out what role it played in the Space Race Located at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) helped to build spacecraft used in 135 missions from 1968 until 2011, and is set to do so once again. The lower structure of the building was long used for storing rocket components. A transfer aisle connects the sections and leads to a platform which takes vehicles to the launch pad. Overhead cranes inside can hold up to 325 tons and move massive objects with extreme precision. The first rocket assembled in the VAB was the Saturn V, which is still the largest of its kind ever made. Crawler transporters, which are some of the biggest machines ever to move on land, had to be specially engineered to carry the rockets to the launch pad. Vehicle construction ceased in the VAB after the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011. It was
opened to the public for tours around the spaceport to see all the NASA facilities. However, renewed production for future missions has closed the building to the public in February 2014 and it re-opened to begin constructing space vehicles again. Originally designed to assemble the Apollo and Saturn vehicles, the VAB will now be used to support 21st-century operations. As a result, work is underway to remove old Shuttle-era platforms and introduce ones suited to the new Space Launch System (SLS). The renovation will see a removal of 240 kilometres (150 miles) of Apollo-period cabling in order to update obsolete systems. The first SLS is due for launch in 2017 and will be even larger than the legendary Saturn V. It will be an unmanned Orion crew capsule, which will undertake missions to the Moon and even Mars.
© Alamy; NASA
The US flag atop the VAB is 64m (209ft) long and could fit a bus within its stripes!
046 | How It Works
WWW.HOWITWORKSDAILY.COM
