fun crawler fact of the night

[brettjones]

Dirty Jobs is on tonight. One of the featured jobs is cleaning the massive crawler NASA uses to move the Shuttle from the prep hanger to the launch pad. The thing is absolutely huge. They said each track (4 tracks I think) includes 50 some odd shoes, each shoe weighs in at about a ton. I wonder how often they change shoes..

[Stan Disbrow]

Hi,

As I recall (I have not been to KSC for at least three years now), they've never changed anything associated with the tracks on those crawlers. They have under 50 miles on them and they don't go very fast (no spinning tracks there!).

Now, they did modify the platforms for the shuttles, having originally been for the Saturn series boosters, but I think the crawlers are the same as they were in the beginning. Note that the shuttles are a lot lighter than the S-V's were, so they have an easy job these days!

Stan