Wednesday October 24, 2007 - NASA KENNEDY SPACE CENTER: I guess I had a "lucky" bus tour... our bus was diverted past Pad 39A inside LC-39 just one day after the launch of Discovery. We only had the chance to stop at a stop sign, then we moved on because of security rules so I had to take these while the bus was moving.
The photo on the upper left is a NASA aerial photo. Click on any photo for a larger view.
The entire complex is amazingly huge. The distance from the VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building) to Pad 39A is nearly 3.5 miles! The VAB itself is the largest 1-story building in the world, standing 525 feet high, 716 feet wide, and 518 feet wide. It encloses 129,428,000 square feet covering 8 acres!
Notice the enormous size of the launch pad. Look for the vehicles just below the mobile launch pad! During the Apollo days, the LUT (or launch umbilical tower) was nearly three time as high as this structure!
The crawler-transporter is gigantic.... each "shoe" on the crawler weighs 1 ton! The entire transporter weighs 6 million pounds, has 8 tracks (2 on each corner) with 57 shoes on each track! The road it travels is 9 feet deep of river rock to support the weight of the transporter and the vehicle. The crawlers have been used since Project Apollo, for every Space Shuttle mission, and will be used for Project Constellation to transport the Ares rockets to pads A and B.
