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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).
Among the unique facilities at KSC are the 525-foot (160 m) tall Vehicle Assembly Building for stacking NASA's largest rockets, the Launch Control Center, which conducts space launches at KSC, the Operations and Checkout Building, which houses the astronauts' dormitories and suit-up area, a Space Station factory, and a 3-mile (4.8 km) long ...
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 end result is a layer of foam insulation 3.0 cm (1.2 in) thick on the LH 2 tank, with certain areas covered by up to 5.1 cm (2.0 in) of insulation. [25] Spray-on insulation is also applied to two of the dry elements, the intertank and the forward skirt. This process takes place before they are internally outfitted with hardware. [22]
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been stuck in space for months longer than expected, and will not return to Earth until at least March 2025 at the earliest, NASA indicated.
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.
Block 1 variant of SLS rocket SLS with the Orion capsule stacked in the Vehicle Assembly Building, March 2022. SLS/Orion is assembled by stacking its major sub-assemblies atop a mobile launcher platform inside the NASA Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). First, the seven components of each of the two boosters are stacked.