Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!nrl-cmf!ukma!gatech!mcdchg!illusion!marcus
From: marcus@illusion.UUCP (Marcus Hall)
Newsgroups: sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Re: Shuttle Facilities ( was : Shuttle trips to the Moon )
Message-ID: <378@illusion.UUCP>
Date: 26 Jan 89 17:56:47 GMT
References: <40ebe2ca.298d@dl298d.engin.umich.edu> <2070003@hpcilzb.HP.COM> <2453@phred.UUCP> <7233@csli.STANFORD.EDU>
Reply-To: marcus@illusion.UUCP (Marcus Hall)
Organization: Magic Numbers Software, Bloomingdale, IL
Lines: 30

In article <7233@csli.STANFORD.EDU> jkl@csli.UUCP (John Kallen) writes:
>The VAB is *big*, but wouldn't whatver the Soviets use to stack their
>Energias be bigger?  Does anybody know anything about how they
>assemble, say, Buran?
>
>John.

The Soviets stack the Energia horizontally, roll it out to the pad on a
rail system, then erect it on the pad.  This is done whether or not it is
launching Buran or any other shuttle.  For shuttle launches, the shuttle
is set on top of the (horizontal) Energia.  They do not require buildings
the size of the VAB.

The VAB was built back when we were building real rockets :-)  If it were
built to fit the shuttle needs, it would have been much smaller.  The VAB
was designed to support a launch rate of 12 Saturn Vs a year.  It was built
with 4 high bays and the design allowed for adding 2 more if needed.  I
believe that the VAB was sized based on a guess of the eventual size of
the Saturn V (although it wasn't known as that at the time) and allowed
growth for the anticipated size of follow-on vehicles.  As it turned out,
the Saturn V was about as big as the VAB could handle and if the Nova had
been built it wouldn't have fit in the VAB.

For shuttle stacking, we use 2 high bays (while one shuttle is launched,
there is usually another SRB set being stacked, by the time that a shuttle
is mated to a stack, another is starting stacking operations).  The other
2 bays are used for storage.

marcus hall
marcus@illusion.UUCP