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NASA's Crawler Transporter 2 was originally designed to carry Saturn V rockets during the Apollo program nearly 60 years ago. The aging giant recently got a much-needed upgrade for supporting the Artemis SLS megarocket, beating its twin vehicle for a world record.
On Wednesday, Guinness World Records presented NASA teams at the Kennedy Space Center with a certificate confirming that, at a whopping 6.65 million pounds (3 million kilograms), Crawler Transporter 2 is the world's heaviest self-powered vehicle, NASA announced in a statement.
"Anyone with an interest in machinery can appreciate the engineering marvel that is the crawler transporter," Shawn Quinn, program manager of Exploration Ground Systems, said in the statement. [...]
"NASA's crawlers were incredible pieces of machinery when they were designed and built in the 1960s," John Giles, NASA's Crawler Element Operations manager, said in the statement. "And to think of the work they've accomplished for Apollo and shuttle and now Artemis throughout the last six decades makes them even more incredible."
Due to how heavy the Crawler Transport is, the vehicle essentially crawls its way to the launch pad. It takes about eight to 12 hours for the rocket-carrying vehicle to drive the 4.2 miles (6.7 kilometers) from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch pad, going at a slow and steady speed of one mile per hour (1.6 kilometers per hour). It could take you a shorter time to walk that distance by foot.
Here's a crawler-transporter fact sheet [pdf]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday April 04, @12:07PM (1 child)
Can someone who can work with the units used (gallons, miles, whatever) figure out what its fuel efficiency is in L/100km? I bet it'd get into the record books for that as well.
Current record holder that I know of is the M60 tank, which used as much as 1L per 100m. That's not 100km, that's 100m, i.e. 0.1km.
(Score: 2, Informative) by UncleBen on Tuesday April 04, @05:46PM
1 gal per 32 feet.
Gal=3.8 L, 32'=9.75m 4L per 10M? So approx 1 liter per 3 meters.
Given the scope of the task, this seems pretty efficient. Each tread link weighs 1 ton, the vehicle's structure is incredibly stiff, and it must manage all axes accelerations to such a fine degree that it blows my mind. And remember it has to pick up and place it's payload with sub-millimeter positional accuracy.