Air in the building can be completely replaced every hour. The building has air conditioning equipment, including 125 ventilators on the roof supported by four large air handlers (four cylindrical structures west of the building) rated at a total 10,000 tons of refrigeration (120,000,000 BTU/ hr, 35 MW) to keep moisture under control. To lift the components of the Space Shuttle, the VAB housed five overhead bridge cranes, including two capable of lifting 325 tons, and 136 other lifting devices. A central slot at the north entry allowed for passage of the orbiter's vertical stabilizer. The north entry that leads to the transfer aisle was widened by 40 feet (12.2 m) to allow entry of the shuttle orbiter. Each door is 456 feet (139.0 m) high, has seven vertical panels and four horizontal panels, and takes 45 minutes to completely open or close. There are four entries to the bays located inside the building, which are the four largest doors in the world. Despite this, it has received damage from several hurricanes (see below).Ĭapabilities A crane lowers Discovery toward the ET and SRBs in high bay 3 of the Vehicle Assembly Building for STS-124. Located on Florida's Atlantic coast, the building was constructed to withstand hurricanes and tropical storms. Altogether, 4,225 pilings were driven down 164 feet to bedrock with a foundation consisting of 30,000 cubic yards (23,000 m 3) of concrete. It was part of NASA's massive effort to send astronauts to the Moon for the Apollo program. Construction began with driving the first steel foundation piles on Aug. In 1963, NASA contracted Urbahn Architects to design and build the VAB. Construction VAB during construction (1965) with the three Mobile Launchers for the Saturn V rocket. The VAB was designated as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2020. Once the complete space vehicle was assembled on a mobile launcher platform, a crawler-transporter moved it to Launch Complex-39A or 39B.īefore the destruction of Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, NASA installed a sub-roof inside the VAB to deal with falling concrete debris due to the building's age. It was subsequently used to mate the Space Shuttle orbiters to their external fuel tanks and solid rocket boosters. In anticipation of post-Apollo projects such as the Space Shuttle program, the Vehicle Assembly Building was renamed on February 3, 1965. The VAB, completed in 1966, was originally built for the vertical assembly of the Apollo– Saturn V space vehicle and was referred to as the Vertical Assembly Building. The VAB is the largest single-story building in the world, was the tallest building (526 ft or 160 m) in Florida until 1974, and is the tallest building in the United States outside an urban area. The building is at Launch Complex 39 at KSC, 149 miles (240 km) south of Jacksonville, 219 miles (352 km) north of Miami, and 50 miles (80 km) due east of Orlando, on Merritt Island on the Atlantic coast of Florida. As of March 2022, the first Space Launch System (SLS) rocket was assembled inside in preparation for the Artemis 1 mission, launched on November 16, 2022.Īt 129,428,000 cu ft (3,665,000 m 3), it is the eighth-largest building in the world by volume as of 2022. The Vehicle Assembly Building (originally the Vertical Assembly Building), or VAB, is a large building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), designed to assemble large pre-manufactured space vehicle components, such as the massive Saturn V, the Space Shuttle and the Space Launch System, and stack them vertically onto one of three mobile launcher platforms used by NASA.
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