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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, Flamebait) by Immerman on Tuesday April 04, @01:30PM
So NASA buys a record-breakingly huge (and presumably, expensive) custom transporter even larger than the one for Saturn V, in order to transport the smaller and lighter SLS, which will likely only fly a handful of times because it was already obsolete and insanely overpriced a decade ago.
Meanwhile in Boca Chica, SpaceX just attaches a rocket mount to the top of a handful of "off the shelf" self-propelled heavy equipment transport platforms in order to transport the considerably larger and more numerous and boosters - whose prototypes alone likely already outnumber the total number of SLS rockets that will ever be made.
I can't imagine *why* the traditional aerospace industry is having so much trouble...