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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).
In this January 1966 image (restored today from a faded 4"x5" NASA transparency) these structures are brand new, and launch tower #1 is being moved by a crawler transporter to the VAB for erection of a "dummy" Saturn V facilities test vehicle, which will be rolled out to the pad later in the year, but not launched.
The Green Run campaign ended in May 2021, after a successful hot-fire test, and the first core stage was shipped to Kennedy Space Center and moved into the Vehicle Assembly Building, where it underwent further work ahead of integration as the core of the first SLS. [48] CS-1 lifted in the VAB for stacking ahead of Artemis I
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 firm will also explore different ways of constructing, operating and repairing a train network on the Moon, which will likely involve the development of robots capable of carrying out key tasks.
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Because Kennedy Space Center was to receive the retired Atlantis, Space Shuttle Explorer was removed from the KSC Visitor Center on December 11, 2011, and relocated to the Vehicle Assembly Building's turn basin dock adjacent to the Launch Complex 39 Press Site. [6] The move was performed by Beyel Bros. using a 144-wheel trailer towed by truck. [7]