OUTDATED: Apollo: Mobile Launch Pad Exit out of Vehicle Assembly Building (Blender Animation)
After Stacking the major spacecraft components on the Mobile Launch Platform (MLP), one of NASA's crawlers drives into the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) (High Bay 1 of 4 in this animation). The crawler aligns to 4 jack points underneath the MLP and then lifts it off of 6 pad support stanchions. One jack point is constrained from moving in any horizontal direction with 4 hydraulic cylinders. Another jack pad is constrained in only the left/right direction while another jack pad is only constrained fore/aft. The last jack pad is not constrained at all. This allows the pad to somewhat float within the constraints of each jack pad due to metal expansion. This effect is the worst when driving out of the VAB with part of the pad in the shade and the rest in the sun.
Crawler notes:
Contractor: Marion (Marion Logo on the cabs. Logos were replaced
later with NASA logos)
Engines:
2 x 2,750 hp V16 ALCO 251C diesel engines driving 4 x 1,341 hp
generators for traction
2 x 1,065 hp engines driving 2 x 1,006 hp generators powering
auxiliaries (jacking, steering, lighting and ventilation)
Transmission: 16 x traction motors, 4 per corner.
Length: 131 ft
Width: 114 ft
Weight: 6,000,000 lbs
Speed: 2 mph unloaded; 1 mph loaded
Tracks: 6 tracks with 57 shoes per track. Each shoe weighs 1,984 lb
crawler animation notes:
cab windows and instrument panel as well as the engineering spaces
are not period realistic nor current. It is more from the space shuttle
era whose drawings were better available.
Jacking, Equalization, Leveling (JEL) system: 4 vertical hydraulic cylinders per truck which allows the crawler to pick up the MLP and allows it to drive up the incline at the launch site while keeping the MLP level.
Mobile Launch Platform:
contractor:
platform/tower: Ingalls Iron Works
swing arms: Hayes International
weight: 8,230,000 lbs unloaded
animation depiction: This is ML-3 which was first used for Apollo 4. This animation is for Apollo 15 which did use ML-3.
Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB)
Located at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It is the eighth largest building by volume in the world. It has 4 high-bays which allow the stacking of 4 Apollo spacecraft simultaneously. The building was constructed in a manner to allow constructing a taller roof if needed and the concrete foundation was laid to allow the construction of two more high-bays.
Animation notes:
Animation done in Blender 4.2.3 with all models built by me.
Models have much more detail than my previous videos. Unlike my previous models, these use a lot of instancing and arrays which allowed me to reduce the vertex count significantly.
Used 30 FPS for rendering
Used the lower quality EEVEE engine to reduce render times