LONDON: For five decades a 6.3-million pound behemoth of a machine, like a baseball diamond perched atop tank treads, has moved NASA rockets from their hangars to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. Now the two Crawler-Transporters, stalwart workhorses of the American space program, is getting its first major upgrade.
Maxing out at just a mile an hour, the crawlers hauled the iconic Saturn V used in the Apollo missions on the eight-hour trip from the vehicle assembly building. They carried Skylab, the first US space station. They moved every space shuttle on all 135 missions. Not bad for a machine that debuted the year after the Ford Mustang. “How many Mustangs do you see on the road today,” says John Giles, the deputy project manager for the crawlers. “They’ve all gone by the wayside.” But his crawler-transporters are still at work.
At least they will be—after some tinkering. They’ll get new, stronger steel, and new roller bearings, brakes, and gearboxes. NASA engineers will replace the hydraulic system that lifts and lowers the platform when the rockets get loaded on. By the time the work is done at the end of the year, the agency will have put $50 million into the machines.
Tesla driverless system to use updated radar technology
WASHINGTON: Electric carmaker Tesla announced Sunday it was upgrading its Autopilot software to use more advanced radar technology. In a...
