A Truly Large Building

This one is a bit different. This is the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC). The VAB was built in the mid 60s as a place to assemble the Saturn V rockets used for the Apollo program. The building is 526 feet tall, and was for nearly a decade the highest building in Florida. In fact, standing at the top of the VAB you are nearly 200 feet above the highest hill in Florida which lies at just 345 feet above sea level.

The building is so large that even with the massive number of fans and ventilators in the building, a particularly humid day can cause rain clouds to form inside the building. Since this photo does not really have much in the way of  a sense of scale, each of the stripes on that flag are the width of the lane on a road. If you laid the flag out on a football field, with one end on the end line, the flag would reach all the way to the 30 yard line at the other end of the field. If you laid this entire side of the building down, you could cover up six and a half full sized NFL fields including the end zones.

As I said, this was used first for the vertical assembly of Saturn rockets just as its name may suggest. Later, and in fact up until just last year it was used for the assembly of the space shuttle. The orbiters were processed in the smaller facility you can see to the left, aptly named the orbiter processing facility. They were then mated with their external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters in the VAB before being driven out to the pad on one of the crawlers.

Picture of a Picture

The International Space Station in all its glory. Since I have been posting pictures of it lately I figured that I could not hurt to post a picture of what it actually looks like. Since I have never actually been to space to take a picture of it, this will have to do. This is a mural/picture of it on a wall at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Below the mural are the flags of all the contributing nations. Quite the cooperative effort considering the past century of international relations...

To get an idea of the scale of the station, each of the bronze colored solar arrays is 39 feet wide and 115 feet long. They are huge. Interestingly, since there is still just a little bit of atmosphere at the altitude of the space station there is a tiny amount of atmospheric drag. This is what slows satellites down and the reason why they need to be boosted every so often to maintain their proper orbit. The solar arrays on the ISS are huge and produce a huge amount of drag. 

They can be rotated around to change their orientation, and this is used by NASA to manage these effects. Often the station uses the night glider mode of operation whereby they orient the arrays in the direction of flight whenever they are in the earths shadow. This reduces the drag by a lot. They can also do that for entire orbits, but that reduces the amount of power they produce. Another use for them is to intentionally slow the station. This was used primarily for shuttle missions to reduce the altitude of the station to make it easier for the shuttle to reach. 

Finally they can also be used as solar sails. They are all double sided. One is shiny and the other is not. The not shiny side can be turned toward the sun and just absorbs all the photons. If the shiny side is turned toward the sun, all the photons bounce off and transfer some of their momentum to the station, helping it maintain it speed and therefore altitude. 

All of these effects are tiny, but they have a huge impact over months and years. Given that the cost of lifting a single kilogram of fuel to orbit runs at about $20,000, any reduction however small in the amount of fuel needed has a huge impact on the financial impact of the station.

The Very Not Full Moon

That folks is, wait for it, a piece of the moon! The Apollo missions brought back a total of 842 pounds of moon, and at the Kennedy Space Center, they have a few little pieces on display. Most are encased like this one, but they do have this one little bit that you can touch. I touched it. It was awesome. I have touched the moon. Crazy stuff.