The historic steel platform from which the primary astronauts departed Earth to fly around and land on the moon now, itself, only has a limited time left on the planet.
Mobile Launch Platform-3 (MLP-3) (opens in latest tab), or Mobile Launcher-1 (ML-1) because it was known when NASA used it for the Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 lunar missions greater than 50 years ago, is about to be demolished, having recently been moved out of the Vehicle Assembly Constructing (VAB) to a close-by yard at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“MLP-3 has been moved out to the midfield park site and is awaiting demolition by a salvage contractor,” John Giles, engineering operations manager for the crawler-transporters and other large equipment in NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems program at Kennedy, said in an interview with collectSPACE.com. “[The work] ought to be starting inside two weeks.”
“Without delay, they are going through the technique of sampling every thing and ensuring there are not any hazardous chemicals left on board before they begin the salvage process,” Giles said.
NASA didn’t announce its decision to discard MLP-3. The platform sitting at its park site hinted at its fate, given the identical location was used to demolish MLP-2 (ML-2) in 2021 (opens in latest tab). At the moment, NASA’s plan was to store MLP-3 in High Bay 2 of the VAB, where it was for a few 12 months.
“It became an easy technique of, we ran out of room,” said Giles. “So last 12 months, probably about halfway through the 12 months, NASA and KSC [management] decided we weren’t using the entire VAB, so we were going to lease out certain areas.
“Various corporations applied for that lease, and it was determined by NASA that it could be given to Boeing,” he said.
Because the lead contractor for NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, Boeing is planning to make use of High Bay 2 to accumulate future SLS core stages. Currently that work is completed on the Michoud Assembly Facility outside Latest Orleans, but by shipping components to Kennedy, it may well streamline and expedite production of the towering boosters needed for NASA’s Artemis moon program.
“As soon as Boeing got here down and looked [the high bay] over, the very first thing they said is that the MLP needed to go; it was in the way in which,” said Giles.
Given the sheer size and mass of the mobile launch platforms — each weighs 8.23 million kilos (3,730 tonnes) and stands 160 feet long by 135 feet wide by 25 feet high (49 by 41 by 7.6 meters) — NASA can only move them using certainly one of their two Apollo-era crawler transporters (opens in latest tab), and so they can only be parked on the VAB, on the pad or the midfield site.
Assuming one other site may very well be identified, NASA checked out whether MLP-3 may very well be utilized by the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex to present the general public access to it as a tourist attraction, but that was not practical.
“It was deemed to be unsafe — too many places for people to get hurt,” Giles said.
NASA is aware of the history it’s destroying. Beyond getting used to launch Apollo 8 in 1968 and Apollo 11 in 1969, MLP-3 was also used to support the first flight of a Saturn V rocket (opens in latest tab) in 1967, the three crewed launches to the Skylab workshop in 1973 and the U.S. launch that was a part of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) flown jointly with the Soviet Union in 1975.
The platform was then modified to be used with the space shuttle and supported 33 more launches, including the primary docking of a U.S. orbiter to Russia’s space station Mir in 1995, the primary mission to the International Space Station in 1998 and the ultimate space shuttle launch in 2011.
With MLP-2 already scrapped and MLP-3 soon to follow, that leaves only MLP-1 (ML-3), which stays in use for servicing the crawlerway between SLS launches.
“There was an evaluation done after they [the three Apollo and shuttle-used MLPs] were all considered eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, after which in 2010, we followed the federal regulations required by the National Historic Preservation Act to contemplate the MLPs’ demolition,” Katherine Zeringue, cultural resources manager at Kennedy, told collectSPACE.
NASA compiled a Historic American Engineering Record, or HAER, detailing the platforms’ construction, engineering and use. That document is now held by the Library of Congress. There are not any preservation laws, though, that require NASA to carry onto its historic hardware, said Zeringue.
“NASA has an important record of adaptive reuse (opens in latest tab),” she said, “which is a preservation strategy.”
MLP-3 was briefly handed over to Northrop Grumman (opens in latest tab), which in 2019 planned to make use of the platform to support launches of its proposed OmegA launch vehicle. The corporate had begun modifications to the hardware when funding for the rocket fell through and the MLP was returned to NASA.
With no other users or uses, the space agency has turned over ownership of MLP-3 to Advon, the identical construction company that oversaw the demolition of MLP-2. Advon has hired Frank-Lin Services to perform the work, which is scheduled to be complete by the tip of the 12 months, if not earlier.
NASA did inspect the MLP and removed components — including lighting fixtures, doors and the crawler-transporter lift points — for his or her reuse with the Artemis mobile launchers (opens in latest tab) or elsewhere at the middle. It’s going to be as much as Advon, as the brand new owners of the platform, if additional parts are put aside for historic preservation or as memorabilia (opens in latest tab).
“I can inform you from having been on the crawler taking that MLP out to the park site, it was heartbreaking,” said GIles. “It’s absolutely [a situation of] you don’t need to need to do that. It’s just obligatory for the long run of the space center. We want the space.”
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