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The Vehicle Assembly Building (originally the Vertical Assembly Building), or VAB, is a large building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, 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.
Months before a launch, the three stages of the Saturn V launch vehicle and the components of the Apollo spacecraft were brought inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and assembled, in one of four bays, into a 363-foot (111 m)-tall space vehicle on one of three Mobile Launchers (ML).
LC-39 pads A and B were completed by October 1965 (planned Pads C, D and E were canceled), the VAB was completed in June 1965, and the infrastructure by late 1966. The complex includes: the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), a 130,000,000 cubic feet (3,700,000 m 3) hangar capable of holding four Saturn Vs. The VAB was the largest structure in the ...
Launch Complex 39B (LC-39B) is the second of Launch Complex 39's three launch pads, located at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida.The pad, along with Launch Complex 39A, was first designed for the Saturn V launch vehicle, which at the time was the United States' most powerful rocket.
The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 directed NASA to, where practicable, reuse Space Shuttle and Constellation program parts and contractors. To fulfill this, manufacture of the first two SLS core stages was initially award in 2012 under a modification (number 96) of the existing Ares Stages contract to The Boeing Company.
NASA currently uses crawler-transporter 2 to transport the Space Launch System with the Orion spacecraft atop it from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39B for the Artemis missions. Early in 2016, NASA finished upgrading crawler-transporter 2 (CT-2) to a "Super Crawler" for use in the Artemis program. [10]
The Mobile Launcher Platform-1 on top of a crawler-transporter. A mobile launcher platform (MLP), also known as mobile launch platform, is a structure used to support a large multistage space vehicle which is assembled (stacked) vertically in an integration facility (e.g. the Vehicle Assembly Building) and then transported by a crawler-transporter (CT) to a launch pad.
SA-500F was assembled in the Vehicle Assembly Building where it was mated to S-IC-F on March 28 and S-IVB-F the next day. SA-500F was completed in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), tested for stability against swaying in the wind, [35] and rolled out to the launch pad May 25, 1966, on Mobile Launcher-1 (ML-1). S-II-F/D arrives at MSFC.