![]() “It has been used by several generations of engineers and technicians to move Saturn Vs, to move space shuttles, and now we’re gonna move SLS rockets.”ĭove is part of the Jacobs Engineering Group, an operations support contractor for the NASA Exploration Ground Systems program at Kennedy. “Since 1965, the crawlers have been here,” Dove said during a video interview from Kennedy Space Center at Merritt Island, Florida. “This is kind of the ultimate heavy equipment.” ‘It’s really like anything else-except it’s bigger’ ![]() “I’ve always been around a lot of heavy equipment,” Dove, whose father was a longtime service manager for Worldwide Equipment, told FleetOwner. Ten years later, he joined the crawler team. After the service, he got his engineering degree and was hired to work in Kennedy Space Center’s design engineering team in 1988. Sam Dove, a crawler-transporter engineer, grew up on a West Virginia farm around a lot of heavy equipment before joining the U.S. After a decade working with space shuttle payloads, he worked with expendable launch vehicles for 10 years before working in human spaceflight. Giles joined NASA out of college 33 years ago. If we’re not working, it’s a bad day for NASA.” “There’s no sunroof in the VAB-so we can’t launch out of there,” John Giles, engineering operations manager for development and operations for NASA’s crawler-transporters, told FleetOwner. This April or May, the crawler will roll underneath the mobile launcher constructed inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, pick it up, and slowly carry it and the Orion spacecraft about 4 miles to Launch Pad 39B for the maiden launch of NASA’s Artemis program, which will set the stage for the space program to return to the moon and farther-including Mars. This could be one of the most critical last-mile deliveries this century. That SLS is a mighty rocket-launch tower that weighs 11.3 million lb. Mobile Launcher 1 with the Space Launch System (SLS) atop it. This spring, 55 years after transporting its first rocket, NASA will use a strengthened Crawler-Transporter 2 to move its most enormous load yet: the 380-ft. There are few heavier pieces of equipment in the world than NASA’s two crawler-transporters, which first hauled Saturn V rockets to a Kennedy Space Center launchpad during the Apollo era of spaceflight. ![]() And lots of lubrication.Īnyone who works on heavy equipment knows the importance of a good preventive maintenance schedule. How has NASA kept a vehicle 80 times larger than a fully-loaded tractor-trailer running since the Johnson administration? A stellar maintenance program.
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