Into The Cavern

View upwards to the ceiling of the Vehicle Assembly Building. The white "H" shaped structure is a 250 tonne bridge crane used to lift shuttle elements into place. This photo was taken from a level near the top of the shuttle's external tank, which was nowhere near the top of this 160 metre tall building.

We now walked into this cavernous building through this door that elsewhere would have earned awestruck comment for its enormous size, but here seemed piffling compared to the rest of the building.

There was no time to properly take in this wondrous view, as we were hurried to a security check room in the centre of this 160 metre high building. Yes, I know that many of Melbourne's buiildings are taller than this, but you don't get to stand in the middle of them and look straight up!

We traded our KSC media badges for building passes, much as miners do when logging in for a work shift. Duct tape was issued to allow us to secure watches and string to tie around the ears of our glasses. This was to avoid the risk that we would inadvertently drop something. Even a pair of glasses could seriously injure folks if dropped from the awesome heights afforded in this building.

Then we made our way along a short corridor to the lifts. And what lifts! A transparent wall through which I could look out at the adjacent crawler transporter, up at the grey mobile launch platform and even higher up at the white, black and orange shuttle stack.

No time to get the camera out, because suddenly we were ascending at astonishing speed. Up past the caterpillar tacked odd shaped Crawler Transporter. Up past the grey rectalinear Mobile Launch Platform. Up past Atlantis' red covered main engines. Now level with the Atlantis'bulbous Orbital Manoeuvring System pods.

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