A shuttle hanger?
Published on Mar 6, 2007 at 5:12 pm.
3 Comments.
Filed under NASA, space shuttle.
On the news yesterday, I heard a reporter say that the Space Shuttle Atlantis was being rolled back to a hanger for repairs. That is a bit inexact. The Atlantis had been sitting at launch pad 39A last week in preparation for the STS-117 mission. A severe thunderstorm hit the Kennedy Space Center, with high winds and blowing hail. The hail damaged the foam on the Space Shuttle’s external tank, the ice ramps, and some of the shuttle’s heat shield tiles. The damage was more extensive than could be repaired at the launch pad, and some of the areas damaged could not easily be reached from the gantry at the pad. So, a Crawler Transporter picked up the shuttle’s Mobile Launch Platform, with the Space Shuttle sitting on it, and carried over three miles back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), where repairs will be made. “Rolling back to a hanger” does little justice to this operation. 
First of all, the Atlantis isn’t rolling anywhere (I know that the NASA term for this is “rollback”), rather it is being carried. Secondly, calling the Vehicle Assembly Building a hanger is just about as much an understatement as calling the White House simply a federal building with living space.
The Vehicle Assembly Building was arguably the largest building in the world when it was built in the 1960’s to support of the Apollo program. The giant Saturn V rockets could not be assembled and left at the launch pad like the smaller rockets, so a special building was built to stack their components. This building was built about three miles from the launch site in order to protect it in the event of a catastrophic failure of the launch vehicle during liftoff.
The VAB is HUGE. It covers 8 acres. It is 525 feet (160 meters) tall, 716 feet (218 meters) long, and 518 feet (158 meters) wide. It took 65,000 cubic yards (49,700 cubic meters) of concrete, almost 89,500 metric tons of steel, and over 1,000,000 square feet (101,000 square meters) of aluminum panels for siding. Over 4200 steel pilings 14 inches (0.4 meters) in diameter were driven 160 feet (49 meters) into bedrock to support the building. Calling something like this simply a hanger seems a bit understated.
The interior of the structure is divided into four high bays, and a low bay. The high bays have cranes capable of lifting and stacking shuttle components and moving them from place to place within the structure. The shuttle orbiters, external tanks, and solid rockets are attached to one another in high bays 1 and 3. High bays 2 and 4 are used to checkout the external tanks when they arrive at KSC. High bay 2 can also be used as contingency storage for an orbiter if needed, and high bay 4 can be used as a contingency handling of solid rocket boosters. The low bay is used for engine maintenance and some component assemblies. This is truly an amazing building, and made more so because of its adaptability and continued use over four decades.
-Astroprof
(Images courtesy of NASA)
A Ler…-- Rastos de Luz on March 7, 2007 at 4:13 am: 1
[…] “A shuttle hanger“, no Astroprof’s Page. […]
Ed Davies on March 23, 2007 at 11:35 am: 2
It’s not a “hanger”. It’s a “hangar”. With an “a”. Not an “e”. Even thought they hang bits of the stack in it.
Astroprof on March 26, 2007 at 6:20 pm: 3
Oops. You are correct. That is one of those errors that I tend to make all too often, and spell check doesn’t catch! Thanks for pointing that out.