The 140,000-acre John F. Kennedy Space Center is the principal launch site for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Here I am going to talk about the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building and its environs.Except for certain restricted areas, the KSC reservation is designated as a national wildlife refuge. Canaveral National Seashore lies within the refuge area. These are open to the general public during daylight hours except when rocket launches or launch preparations are in progress. Not a good idea to be around when they are launching a rocket, it can get a bit hot!
The Vehicle Assembly Building or VAB for short, and believe me its the only short thing about it, stands 525 feet tall. It covers 129, 428, 000 cubic feet (3,6664,833 cubic meters) and is the worlds third largest building! Rumour has it there are clouds inside! It was originally built to accommodate the massive Saturn V, but has been adapted for the more diminutive space shuttles. It should be pointed out that these things were built standing up! Hence the reason for the massive building!
Before the advent of the Space Shuttle, spacecraft such as Apollo (Apollo 7 to 10, no lunar landings, then Apollo 11 to 17, which landed men on the Moon) lifted off from here; after that another five Apollo missions, four flights to Skylab the first United States space station, (first unmanned, then three manned with crews of three in each); and the Apollo/Soyuz Test Project mission (the link up of three U.S. Astronauts and two Soviet Cosmonauts) lifted off from Florida.
The primary launch at the Kennedy Space Centre is now Launch Complex 39. The tour of Launch Complex 39 includes a drive past Pad 39A, one of two pads at KSC capable of launching Space Shuttle vehicles. A mound located between Pads A and B provides visitors with a good vantage point from which to photograph both launch sites. When a launch takes place there is that much noise which (if let loose) would cause damage to the tower due the vibration the noise produces, that they have to dump 300,000 gallons (1.1,000,000 litres) of water onto/into the pad just seconds before the launch!If you are really lucky, and I considered myself to be very lucky, you may see a Space Shuttle on the pad. So how lucky was I that day to see not one, but two shuttles sitting on the pad and coming back from one of those pads a crawler-transporter! 
The transporter is so damn big and heavy it has a maximum speed, when not carrying a spacecraft of two miles per hour! Not exactly a high performance vehicle, but stunning none the less to watch and admire for its sheer engineering spectacle, weighing in at a mere six million pounds (that's 2,727 metric tons)!
The transporter is so damn big and heavy it has a maximum speed, when not carrying a spacecraft of two miles per hour! Not exactly a high performance vehicle, but stunning none the less to watch and admire for its sheer engineering spectacle, weighing in at a mere six million pounds (that's 2,727 metric tons)!
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