Portal:Spaceflight/Selected article/Week 50 2007

The Vehicle Assembly Building (originally Vertical Assembly Building), or VAB, is a very large building located at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, halfway between Jacksonville and Miami, and due east of Orlando on Merritt Island, on the Atlantic coast of Florida. It is one of the world's largest buildings (by volume) in third place. The VAB is the largest one story building in the world, and was the tallest building in Florida until 1974. The VAB was originally built to allow for the vertical assembly of the Saturn V rocket for the Apollo program. It is now used for housing external fuel tanks and flight hardware, and is the location of Space Shuttle orbiter mating with the solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank. Once assembled, the Space Shuttle is moved on a Mobile Launcher Platform and Crawler-Transporter to Launch Complex 39. (more...)