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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.
It came under the management of NASA in 1961, and was used for the construction of the S-IC first stage of the Saturn V rockets and the S-IB first stage of the Saturn IB rockets built by Chrysler Corporation. It is home to the first stage of the last-constructed Saturn V, SA-515, built by The Boeing Company.
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 ...
A single rocket launch is sufficient for inclusion in the table, as long as the site is properly documented through a reference. Missile locations with no launches are not included in the list. Proposed and planned sites and sites under construction are not included in the main tabulation, but may appear in condensed lists under the tables.
Robert D. Cabana, director of KSC, announces the signing of the LC-39A lease agreement on April 14, 2014.. In December 2013, NASA and SpaceX were in negotiations for SpaceX to lease Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A, after SpaceX was selected in a multi-company bid process, following NASA's decision in early 2013 to lease the unused complex as part of a bid to reduce annual operation and ...
Prior to the end of the bid period, and prior to any public announcement by NASA of the results of the process, Blue Origin filed a protest with the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) "over what it says is a plan by NASA to award an exclusive commercial lease to SpaceX for use of mothballed space shuttle launch pad 39A."
In early March 2011, NASA Headquarters announced that MSFC will lead the efforts on a new heavy-lift rocket that, like the Saturn V of the lunar exploration program of the late 1960s, will carry large, human-rated payloads beyond low-Earth orbit. MSFC has the program office for the Space Launch System. [34]
In March 2015, an Atlas V rocket carried NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission spacecraft, [108] [109] and a Delta IV rocket orbited the GPS IIF-9 satellite on behalf of the U.S. Air Force. [ 110 ] [ 111 ] The U.S. Air Force's X-37B spaceplane was carried by an Atlas V rocket in May 2015, [ 112 ] and a Delta IV orbited the WGS-7 satellite in ...