Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39

Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39

Launch Complex 39 (LC-39) is a rocket launch site at the John F. Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island in Florida, USA. The site and its collection of facilities were originally built for the Apollo program, and later modified to support Space Shuttle operations. NASA began modifying LC-39 in 2007 to accommodate Project Constellation. Launches from LC-39 are supervised from the Launch Control Center, located 3 miles (4.8 km) from the launch pads. LC-39 is one of several launch sites that share the Eastern Test Range.

Launch Complex 39 is composed of the two launch pads, the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), the Crawlerway (the route used by crawler-transporters to carry Mobile Launcher Platforms between the VAB and the pads), the Orbiter Processing Facility buildings, the Launch Control Center (which contains the firing rooms), a news facility (famous for the iconic countdown clock seen in television coverage and photos), and various logistical and operational support buildings.

Read more about Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39:  Future Use

Famous quotes containing the words kennedy, space, center, launch and/or complex:

    The moment when she crawled out onto the back of the open limousine in which her husband had been murdered was the first and last time the American people would see Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis crawl.... She was the last great private public figure in this country. In a time of gilt and glitz and perpetual revelation, she was perpetually associated with that thing so difficult to describe yet so simple to recognize, the apotheosis of dignity.
    Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)

    It is not through space that I must seek my dignity, but through the management of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds.
    Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)

    When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
    and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
    in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
    with its store of food and little cooking pans
    and change of clothes,
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    Instead of seeing society as a collection of clearly defined “interest groups,” society must be reconceptualized as a complex network of groups of interacting individuals whose membership and communication patterns are seldom confined to one such group alone.
    Diana Crane (b. 1933)