Vehicle Assembly Building

We built those down in New Orleans just like we did the C-5.

And then we finished building them and we'd put them on a barge, tie it to a tug with a 2,500 foot rope, one inch in diameter, and haul it down through the Gulf of Mexico, around the Keys and up the Atlantic Coast to the Kennedy Space Center and offload it and put it up on the eighth floor of the Vertical Assembly Building until we were ready to integrate it over on the other side of the aisle, as we called it, to get a stack ready to roll out to the pad.

I'd get on an airplane out here at Redstone Arsenal, NASA airplane, be about eight of us on board, and we'd land on the shuttle landing strip down in Florida.

And it's such a pretty sight to see as you come up on a runway that's three miles long, 300 feet wide I believe, and, uh, go get in our rental car and then go into work about 10 hours prior to a space shuttle launch.

Yes, it was a dream come true, and it remains a dream come true.

And just the – it was surreal because we worked literally across the street from the Vehicle Assembly Building.

You know, we were in something called Complex D.

And so I would walk outside each day and you would see the shuttle, the orbiter, you know, SRVs being moved around by the crawlers.

So it just depends on what stage in vehicle processing we're in.

You know, if we just stacked onto the SLS rocket, I'll be in the VAB, pretty much wherever the work is.

Quick decoder because he's about to say all of these.

SLS is the Space Launch System.

Orion is the capsule on top where the people ride.

The ICPS is the upper stage in between that gives Orion the push toward the Moon.

And the VAB is the Vehicle Assembly Building, which is the iconic building at Kennedy Space Center with the giant meatball on the side, and that's where all these things get stacked together.

There.

And then to the building where they assemble the rockets.

We're gonna stop right in front of the vehicle assembly building.

That's the tallest single story building in the world.

That's what I've heard.

There was no Artemis III, you know, six, seven months ago.

Now we've got the vehicle being stacked here at Kennedy Space Center and Vehicle Assembly Building.

The Artemis III astronauts are in training.

They just did water survival training.

i could see your cogs going you're like what's yeah

that's right so you you get a really good close-up view of the assembly building the vehicle assembly building and that is where the original um launch control was that you can still see the glass sort of um the the exterior of it

can't you yeah

I wouldn't have been able to have settled until I'd have thought of that.

And it's a team of people down in Kennedy.

And what they do is they're the ones who take all the pieces of the rocket and They assemble them down there in this really tall building called the Vehicle Assembly Building.

Then they launch it.

They're the ones who launch the rocket.