Crawling Toward the Moon

As spacecraft travel, this was surely the slowest trip on record--nine hours to cover all of 3 1/2 miles. But as it moved from NASA's Vertical Assembly Building to launch pad 39-A at Cape Kennedy last week, the mammoth Saturn 5 rocket, an engineless version of the vehicle that will take the first U.S. astronauts to the moon, crawled through an impressive catalogue of superlatives. This was the largest rocket in the world, emerging from the largest building in the world, to travel on one of the largest self-propelled land vehicles in the world. And the colossal enterprise was completed without a hitch; it was final proof that giant rockets can be assembled and checked out under controlled in door conditions before being hauled into position for launching.

Shortly after dawn on the day of the rollout, a 456-ft.-high door in the Vertical Assembly Building slid slowly open. Inside the eight-acre, 52-story structure, the locomotive-size diesel engines of a giant crawler-transporter thundered into life. Positioned underneath the 36-story Saturn rocket and its umbilical tower-which were supported on six steel columns--the 2,750-ton crawler then gently raised its platform until it had lifted the rocket and tower. Then it ponderously moved its 6,000-ton cargo through the door, over a concrete apron that had been slicked down with 200 Ibs. of soap, and onto an eight-lane rock-paved "crawlerway" that led to the launch pad.

At speeds varying from I/10th to 1 m.p.h., the crawler inched along its steel treads while its 16-man crew co ordinated its activities through an intercom system. The angle of the crawler platform was constantly adjusted so that Saturn would never tilt more than 4 min. of 1DEG from true vertical. After negotiating a curve and a 3DEG slope leading to the launch pad, the crawler successfully delivered its cargo and workmen began bolting the umbilical tower and the Saturn 5 to the pad, getting the huge pair ready to train both ground crews and astronauts. When the crawler next emerges from the assembly building with a cargo, it will be carrying a complete and checked-out Saturn 5 scheduled to be shot into sub-orbital flight early next year.

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