Vehicle Assembly Building
The Vehicle (originally Vertical) Assembly Building, or VAB, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) was used to assemble and an American manned launch vehicles from 1968-2011. At 3,664,883 cubic meters, it is one of the largest buildings in the world by volume. The building is at Launch Complex 39 at KSC, halfway between Jacksonville and Miami, and due east of Orlando on Merritt Island on the Atlantic coast of Florida.
The VAB is the largest single-story building in the world, was the tallest building in Florida until 1974, and is still the tallest building in the United States outside an urban area.
Read more about Vehicle Assembly Building: History, Construction, Capabilities, Exterior, Future
Famous quotes containing the words vehicle, assembly and/or building:
“How strange a vehicle it is, coming down unchanged from times of old romance, and so characteristically black, the way no other thing is black except a coffin—a vehicle evoking lawless adventures in the plashing stillness of night, and still more strongly evoking death itself, the bier, the dark obsequies, the last silent journey!”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)