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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).
The Vehicle Assembly Building lost 1,000 exterior panels, each 3.9 feet (1.2 m) x 9.8 feet (3.0 m) in size. This exposed 39,800 sq ft (3,700 m 2) of the building to the elements. Damage occurred to the south and east sides of the VAB. The shuttle's Thermal Protection System Facility suffered extensive damage.
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.
The vehicle was de-stacked in the VAB and the orbiter returned to Orbiter Processing Facility. The mission, STS-51E, was canceled and the orbiter was re-manifested with 51-B payloads. 4 1990-06-12 Columbia: STS-35: Inspection failure A hydrogen leak was detected in External tank (ET) umbilical. 5 1990-08-09 Atlantis: STS-38: Fuel leak
The Crawlerway is a 130-foot-wide (40 m) [2] double pathway at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It runs between the Vehicle Assembly Building and the two launch pads at Launch Complex 39 . It has a length of 3.4 and 4.2 miles (5.5 and 6.8 km) to Pad 39A and Pad 39B , respectively.
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.