The delicate task of carrying a space shuttle doesn’t tend to draw much attention. The three and a half mile trip takes seven hours. But a couple of weeks ago, as the massive crawler made its last journey to the launch pad with the last space shuttle “stack” on top, workers at NASA brought their families to watch. It was like a rehearsal for the final launch, but in super slow motion. (Top speed is 1 mile per hour.)Talk of the American space program’s many recent endings — from space shuttle launches (there’s only one left, remember) to the Mars Rover (it lived longer than it was expected to) — often misses the closing of untold smaller chapters. Thousands of jobs have already vanished, leaving dreams of future spaceflight on the floors of factories from California to Arkansas. The local tourist economy built around space shuttle launches is all but dead. NASA is selling off equipment as fast as it can.NASA hasn’t said yet what it plans to do with the crawler when the shuttle program is said and done, but driving it away will not be an option. Nothing in the NASA catalog is as large. The 6 million pound, $14 million vehicle — the first was constructed in the early 1960s to handle the first Apollo-Saturn missions, the second came later — was the brainchild of engineers from an industry that knew something of heavy equipment: mining. Marion Power Shovel, the company that built it, began making industrial equipment in the 1870s, eventually shifting into large earth moving machines for the mineral extraction industry. (The company closed in the early ’90s.)Most rockets in the world are transported horizontally, then lifted up at the launch pad. When NASA asked for a way to carry a rocket vertically, Marion came up with cross between a flatbed truck and a tank that would be as wide as a four lane highway, including a wide median in the middle. The steering wheel inside the driver’s cab is small and red, like the kind you’d find on a go kart. But what it turns is the largest self-powered land vehicle in the world.At a full weight of 18 million pounds, it inches toward the launch pad with an efficiency of only 32 feet per gallon, in a slow and delicate process that allows no room for error. And it’s slow: this week’s trip took seven hours. Still, a large crowd gathered along the specially fortified track to watch the last ride. It just so happened that Space Shuttle Endeavour was making its last landing that night, another reminder that this particular final procession wasn’t just a giant one-float parade, but a funeral march too.
Advertisement
Advertisement