December 4, 2011

Post date: Jan 2, 2012 8:23:01 PM

NASA has two massive Crawlers built in 1966 that take spacecraft from the VAB to the launch pad. The Crawlers have successfully transported all of the Saturn V moon rockets and space shuttles to Launch Complex 39. NASA recently announced that one of the crawlers is being retrofitted to transport the super-rocket Space Launch System set to launch in 2017. Each crawler weighs 5.5 million pounds and travels at 1 mph over a 4 mile gravel road to the launch site. When I visited NASA recently, I got lucky and saw the Crawler transporting the new Mobile Launcher Platform to Pad 39B.