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Construction progress of the vehicle assembly building in August 1964.
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An aerial view in 1964.
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89,000 metric tons of steel went into the construction of the VAB.
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In 1964, a general aerial view of “Missile Row”, Cape Kennedy Air Force Station. The view faces north, with the Vehicle Assembly Building under construction in the upper left corner.
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In 1965, construction workers, NASA, and Corps of Engineers employees installed and autographed the last main beam above the Kennedy Space Center Vertical Assembly building.
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The VAB during construction in 1965, with the three mobile launchers for the Saturn V rocket.
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In May 1966, an Apollo / Saturn V facility test vehicle and Umbilical Launch Tower atop a crawler transporter drove from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Pad A.
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The Apollo 4 mission on the Tracked Transport Vehicle in 1967.
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The S-IC stage is being erected for the final assembly of the Saturn V launch vehicle for the Apollo 8 mission.
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And here is the VAB as you can see today.
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NASA’s Kennedy Space Center is now nearly six decades old: It was formally created on July 1, 1962 as a separate entity from the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. Construction started soon after.
At the time, the “Launch Operations Directorate” under Wernher von Braun and his team of German scientists was based in Marshall. But NASA leaders realized they would need their own facilities in Florida next to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. They then created a new “Launch Operations Center” on nearby Merritt Island. President Lyndon B. Johnson would rename the Kennedy Space Center facilities a week after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 in Dallas.
As plans for the Apollo Program were developed, NASA also soon realized that it would need a large building to assemble the Saturn V rocket that would power the Moon’s landing. Work began on what was then known as the Vertical Mounting Building (VAB), where the large rocket would be stacked in a vertical configuration before being deployed on the launch pad.
The 160-meter-tall building was completed in 1965 and completed in 1966. The construction photos of the VAB development (the building required almost 90,000 metric tons of steel) are as incredible as those of the finished building itself. But NASA officials wanted to clarify at the time that this building was not an end in itself. Rather, it was a means to an end.
“This building is not a monument,” said Kurt Debus, the German rocket scientist who supervised the construction of the Florida facility in 1965. “It is a tool, so to speak, capable of accommodating heavy launch vehicles. So if people are impressed by your greatness, you should be aware that greatness in this case is a factor of the rocket-powered transportation systems needed to provide America with ample capacity to do whatever it takes. national purpose in outer space. “
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Even before it was completed, the VAB name changed from Vertical to the vehicle assembly building because it was considered that the building could be used to launch vehicles other than Saturn V. And in fact it would, serving the space shuttle from 1981 to 2011. After returning to Earth, the space plane would taxi to the VAB for restoration after each mission.
After the shuttle’s retirement nine years ago, the cavernous building remained empty for a time. But as Debus pointed out in 1965, the building was built to serve the nation’s great rockets and would soon be called again. The VAB has four high bays, which will be used for various purposes over the next decade. One will be used to stack NASA’s large Space Launch System rocket, and one is currently used for Northrop Grumman’s Omega rocket.
The future of these two great rockets is far from certain: each one will only exist as long as the government pays the bill (NASA for the SLS rocket, the US Space Force for Omega), but as the rockets come and go, the VAB remains the same.
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