Stacking the Space Shuttle

On our quest to land astronauts on Earth's moon we built the most massive and most powerful rockets to reach our goal. Assembling such vehicles require a specialized building where it all comes together. At NASA's Kennedy Space Center the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) was built for this purpose. The architects and engineers of the Apollo Program designed the VAB with plenty of built-in adaptability to fit the bill for America's three decade long Space Shuttle program, as well. To the aerospace industry, the term "stacking a rocket" is used to describe the indoor process of final assembly of all the stages, payload and components that make up a launch vehicle. In this presentation, we will see the various steps taken to stack a typical Space Shuttle prior to its launch.

Speaker: Faride Khalaf