Vehicle Assembly Building

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Image:Vehicle-Assembly-Building-July-6-2005.jpg

The Vehicle (originally Vertical) Assembly Building, or VAB, is a very large building located at 28.586, -80.651 in NASA's Kennedy Space Center, halfway between Jacksonville and Miami, and due east of Orlando on Merritt Island, on the Atlantic coast of Florida. It is one of the world's largest buildings at third place, is the largest one-storey building in the world, and was the tallest building in Florida until 1974.

It was originally built to vertically assemble the stages of the Saturn V rocket for the Apollo program, where despite the building's huge height, the conducting rod at the tip of the Saturn V had to be removed to fit inside the building. It is now used for housing external fuel tanks and flight hardware, and the location of Orbiter mating (stacking) with the solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank to make up a complete Shuttle Transport System, called the Space Shuttle for short. Once assembled, the Shuttle Transport System is moved on the Mobile Launcher Platform and Crawler-Transporter to Launch complex 39.

The VAB is 525 ft (160 meters) tall, 716 ft (218 meters) long and 518 ft (158 meters) wide. It covers 8 acres (32,500 square meters) and encloses 129,428,000 ft³ (3,664,883 m³) of space.

One indicator of the building's scale is that each of the stars on the American flag painted on the building is 6 feet (1.8 m) across and the stripes are large enough to drive a tour bus on. The flag was added in 1976 as part of United States Bicentennial celebrations. The VAB's interior volume is so vast that it has its own weather system—"NASA employees report that rain clouds form below the ceiling on very humid days"[1]. The building implements four large air machines (four cylindrical structures west of the building) to keep moisture under control. To get around, employees occasionally travel within the building via bicycle.

Being in Florida, the building has been constructed to withstand many hurricanes and tropical storms. The most extensive damage ever recorded occurred during Hurricane Frances in September 2004, when about 1,000 10 × 40 foot (3 × 12 m) aluminum panels were blown off the building, resulting in about 40,000 ft² (3,700 m²) of new openings in the sides. This came only three weeks after Hurricane Charley caused significant but less serious damage, estimated to cost about $700,000. Damage caused by these hurricanes is still apparent going into 2006.

It is expected that, starting in 2010, after the retirement of the Space Shuttle, the VAB will transition back to processing of the heavy lift launcher derived from the Space Shuttle and used for the return to the Moon in 2018.

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