Excellent Space Shuttle Assembly Photos

Impressive, but if you want to see complex vehicle assembly on a deadline, try 11 pm Christmas Eve at my place.

An amazing presentation. We just spent 20 minutes looking at it with my 6 year old. I saved it for the future. Thank you very much.

Jeff,

Great stuff - thanks! I saw Atlantis stacked in the VAB (main engines removed, leaving one hell of a hole), and will never forget it. The first shock was getting off of an elevator to see a stucco wall - the tank. Pictures being as available as they are now, it probably won't surprise many of you to know that all of tiles are numbered (which makes sense since no two are alike, IIRC). It caught me off guard at the time.

We eventually worked our way up to the crew cabin level, and had a great view of the orbiter, tank and boosters, and the struts between them. The stack looked too big to fly, and the crew cabin way too small to take into a hard vacuum followed by re-entry.

Remember the tiny looking tube running down the side of tank? It isn't so tiny. The mobile launcher is worth a tour on it own. There is enough electronics in there to make me wonder how they get it all working at one time, though that is probably not necessary. I hear the pad is worse.

Bill

Thanks for the link. It's excellent.

I've been all over the VAB over the years. Those are excellent pictures but they simply can't do it justice. No pictures can. That building is flat out huge but there isn't anything in the pictures that will allow you to scale it in your mind because you can't see enough of it in a picture.

Standing in the main aisle it is hard to figure out how the shuttle will get from there to the other side of the wall in the assembly area. Then looking up till your neck hurts, you see a "door" that is so high up you can easily miss it. That "little door" way up there is big enough to pass the shuttle through standing on end! It is so far up it doesn't look very big from floor level. The "forklift" that installs the SSME is pretty huge too.

The station parts are pretty big as well. Some of them (modules and solar array launch packages) fill the Shuttle bay. The station itself is getting bigger with every assembly launch. It is a magnificent technical accomplishment.

When people were working on Y2K running around worrying about database crashes ending life as we know it (which didn't happen) I used to tell folks who asked what I was doing about it "I'm not doing anything, I'm working on Y5B".

Some of them got it, some didn't.

Fitch

Hey somebody (anybody) help!! I couldn't figure out from the picture where the 'payload goes'. It looks huge (there are people standing near the bottom). Does it get attached to the shuttle? Does it get shoved up the shuttles butt? Do any of the pictures show where/how the payload gets attached?

Thanks,

Ivan Vegvary

i happened to come across this and thought jeff would like it.

and this is in the "assembly" vein.

i don't have powerpoint on my machine.

I saw it getting built in the early 1960s when I'd be down at Canaveral for launches of the smaller rockets of those days. I believe the building was completed around 1965.

Over the years I've heard that the VAB is such a tall "one story building" that without deliberate prevention means, clouds can form near the ceiling and rain falls inside.

I don't know if that's an urban legend or not, and cites on the web have it both ways.

Jeff

On Sun, 18 Nov 2007 17:47:04 GMT, with neither quill nor qualm, "William Wixon" quickly quoth:

I wonder how she perfected those particular muscles... I'd give odds she can spin her tassles in opposite directions, too.

Very cool. The fuel injection and plug wires stumped me, though. It was unclear how they were handled in the vid.

Grab a free copy of OpenOffice off the Sun site. It has a free equivalent program.

-- After all, it is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the irritating details of outer life. -- Evelyn Underhill

Inside the shuttle payload bay.

Fitch

All is well with the world - Fitch is back on RCM! Gerry :-)} London, Canada

Good to see you back Fitch!

Steve R.

Thanks guys.

Fitch