It took seven years (or 57, depending on how you count), but now it’s official: One of NASA’s Apollo-era rocket movers is the world’s heaviest self-propelled vehicle.
On Wednesday (March 29), Guinness World Records confirmed it by awarding the space agency a certificate Crawler-Transporter 2 tipped the scale (opens in new tab) 6.65 million pounds (3,106 tons) or the weight of about 1,000 pickup trucks.
That’s a record, Guinness said, but noted that it was set in the last decade.
“The weight of the car has increased As part of a round of upgrades (opens in new tab) which were completed on 23 March 2016,” Read the Guinness website (opens in new tab). “These upgrades, which include replacing two massive locomotive engines that power four sets of caterpillar tracks and strengthening various other systems, have brought the overall weight of the car to what it is now.”
Related: Meet NASA’s giant crawler-transporter 2 rocket mover
In fact, both of NASA’s crawler-transporters previously shared the record after they were built by the Marion Power Shovel Company in 1966. It was originally designed for Apollo carried the Saturn V rocket (opens in new tab) And their mobile platforms when they moved from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to Launch Pad 39A or 39B at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, the pair of giant tracked vehicles first weighed about 5.95 million pounds (2,700 tons).
Even lighter than the 700,000 lb (320 ton) Crawler-Transporter 2 weighs today, both movers were in a class of their own. Later developed, land-based vehicles were larger and more massive, but required external power sources to operate. The NASA twins (sometimes referred to as “Hans” and “Franz” after a bodybuilder skit popularized by Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon on “Saturday Night Live”) created all their own power.
In 1973, the two crawlers were repurposed to support the smaller and lighter Space Shuttle. At the end of that 30-year program, Crawler-Transporter 2 was selected to carry the much larger Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its mobile launcher platform that are now part of NASA’s moon-bound Artemis program.
“NASA’s crawlers were incredible pieces of machinery when they were designed and built in the 1960s. And the work they’ve accomplished over the past six decades for Apollo and the Shuttle and now Artemis makes them even more incredible,” said John Giles. NASA’s Crawler Element Operations Manager, A Statement released by NASA (opens in new tab). “Getting a Guinness World Records title is the icing on the cake for an extraordinary piece of equipment.”
The now-record-setting Crawler-Transporter 2 was recently used to deliver NASA’s Artemis 1 launch vehicle to the pad for the mission’s liftoff in November 2022. The crawler will later be used to support Artemis 2, NASA’s first mission to send astronauts to the Moon in more than 50 years.
While other externally powered vehicles hold the record for sheer size, Crawler-carriers are still impressively large (opens in new tab) A span the same size as a baseball infield (131 feet long by 114 feet wide or 40 by 35 meters) and a variable height that is a maximum of 26 feet (8 meters). Carrying an already heavy crawler due to its extremely heavy weight, the 4.2-mile (6.8 km) drive from VAB to the pad takes eight to 12 hours when traveling at about 1 mph (1.6 kph).
“Anyone interested in machinery can appreciate the engineering marvel that is the crawler transporter,” said Sean Quinn, NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems Program Manager.
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