When NASA cleans their garage, they always end up with the largest yard sale in the world. The giant platforms in the photo above are just part of the shuttle-era equipment being removed from the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building.
The VAB was created in the late ’60s to assemble the entire Saturn V rocket vertically. That’s why it needed to be so huge. The structure is 218 metres long by 158 metres wide and 160 metres tall.
That’s an amazing 129,428,000 cubic feet (3,664,883 cubic meters) of space between those walls. By volume, it’s one of the biggest buildings in the world — so vast, in fact, that it has it’s own weather, with clouds on the top levels on humid days.
After the Apollo program ended, the VAB was remodeled to accommodate the space shuttle. The new equipment installed then included the platforms and cranes that are being dismantled now. After removing all this equipment, NASA will modernize the building with new structures and systems designed to work with their next generation of space vehicles.
[NASA]