Vehicle Assembly Building

This is a detailed model of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center, as it looked in 1969. Includes textures and some surrounding buildings, and a modest amount of interior detail. All doors, etc. are positioned and pivoted for animation.

Textures

Texture template is huge (4096x4096 many layered PSD file), please contact me if you are interested or need it.

History

The Vehicle (originally Vertical) Assembly Building, or VAB, is a very large building located at 28.586, -80.651 in NASA's Kennedy Space Center, halfway between Jacksonville and Miami, and due east of Orlando on Merritt Island, on the Atlantic coast of Florida. It is one of the world's largest buildings at third place, is the largest one-storey building in the world, and was the tallest building in Florida until 1974.

It was originally built to vertically assemble the stages of the Saturn V rocket for the Apollo program, where despite the building's huge height, the conducting rod at the tip of the Saturn V had to be removed to fit inside the building. It is now used for housing external fuel tanks and flight hardware, and the location of Orbiter mating (stacking) with the solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank to make up a complete Shuttle Transport System, called the Space Shuttle for short. Once assembled, the Shuttle Transport System is moved on the Mobile Launcher Platform and Crawler-Transporter to Launch complex 39.