Here are some of the biggest and most expensive things ever built.
Just wait until you hear about the MOST expensive project ever!
9 - Jeddah Tower
Jeddah tower was previously known as the Kingdom tower. It’s competing to own the title as the
world’s tallest skyscraper. When it’s finished it’ll beat Dubai’s iconic Burj Khalifa by 236 ft!
The tower is planned to be completed by the end of 2020,
although the COVID pandemic may cause some delay.
The tower is designed to be at LEAST 3,280 feet high. That’s at the length of NINE
football fields! The exact height is a secret until it’s finished,
something that’s customary for the buildings aiming to be the tallest in
the world. The cost for the construction is estimated at $1.4 billion dollars.
What’s going to be the main hotel at Jeddah tower? That’ll be the Four Seasons hotel,
as well as the residence. The building will have a whopping
59 elevators! But it’s not a surprise for a building this big. What’s more impressive is
that these elevators can take visitors up at a speed of up to 22 miles per hour! And no,
they don’t design the elevators faster or else the rapid change in air pressure could cause nausea!
8 - Antonov AN-225 Mriya Cargo Plane This plane is THE heaviest plane ever used! The
designation of largest airplane is difficult to use, because there are planes that are wider, such
as the Stratolaunch. And there are planes that have been longer, such as the Caspian sea monster.
This plane wasn’t meant to carry passengers just like its name suggests.
It can carry up to a whopping 280 tons of internal cargo! This plane holds the
world record for heaviest load ever flown. The official order to develop the plane came from
the Soviet Ministry of defense. This plane was named “Mriya”, which means dream in Ukrainian.
During the pandemic, this plane has been extremely important in flying huge amounts
of medical supplies all over the world. This plane delivered medical supplies
from China to other countries all over the world. Of course this plane isn’t important
just during a pandemic, but also to many disasters where help is needed.
This plane is capable of transporting objects once thought impossible to move by air, such as
150 ton generators. It’s become a giant asset to international relief organizations for its ability
to quickly transport huge amounts of emergency supplies during disaster-relief operations.
This plane is so big, trains can be loaded at the
front end through the opening of the plane’s “nose”! For example,
the groundbreaking frictionless Maglev train was flown from Germany to China!
7 - New Century Global Center
We’ve seen the world’s biggest tower in terms of height. How about the world’s
largest building in terms of floor space? One of the highlights of the city of Chengdu in Central
China is the New Century Global Center. The height isn’t all that impressive at 325 ft,
but the overall space it takes up is! The building is a whopping 18 million square feet! To imagine
how big of a space that is, imagine housing 20 Sydney Opera houses in one place! And the
Sydney Opera House is already huge! This building beats the previous title holder of floor space,
Terminal 3 of the Dubai International Airport, by half a million square feet.
This global center hosts the usual office space, hotels, and obviously shopping malls. But the
most interesting attraction is the waterpark. Residents of Chengdu probably never imagined
that they would one day go to the beach in their city. Chengdu is over 1,000 miles from the coast.
But thanks to the New Century Global Center, they don’t need to go far for the beach. Who
needs Thailand?! This 54,000 square feet of artificial beach is called Paradise
Island, and it has the biggest artificial waves in the world!
The craziest part? There are giant screens to show sunrises and sunsets!
6 - Bagger 288
When this machine first came out back in 1978, it was THE world’s heaviest land
vehicle! Coal mining is still widely used to generate electricity. And
coal miners have to use big expensive machines to shovel earth so that coal can be extracted!
And this $100 million dollar machine was designed exactly to do
just that. It’s one of THE heaviest land vehicles in the world and it’s called the Bagger 288!
It’s weight is a whopping 13,500 tons. That’s heavier than 8,600 cars
combined! But because of the large surface area of its 12 crawlers,
it really doesn’t leave prints deeper than the average human footprint.
To give you an idea of how big this thing is, the Bagger 288 is 705 feet long. That’s a little big
than TWO football fields! It’s 315 feet tall, and that’s taller than the Statue of Liberty.
Of course, there needs to be powerful motors in this machine to be able to move this amount
of earth on a daily basis. The horsepower it has is equivalent to around 160 cars!
5 - NASA Crawler
The world's largest land vehicle is designed to move
rockets and spacecraft from NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch pad,
and anywhere in between! And NASA built not just one crawler, but two!
The NASA Crawler weighs approximately 6.6 MILLION pounds. That's the weight of around 15 Statues of
Liberties combined! Originally, two crawlers were built, with each one costing 14 million
dollars. That’s actually kind of a bargain if you think about how big these things are!
The crawlers can hold up to 9,000 tons. That’s roughly equivalent to a whopping twenty
fully-loaded commercial airplanes! The crawlers carry the rockets and shuttles on a journey
of a little more than 4 miles from the NASA assembly building all the way to the launch pad.
It takes a highly trained crew of 11 people to drive the crawler!
And the crawlers are appropriately named. The crawlers move at
1 mile per hour when loaded and 2 miles per hour when unloaded.
These machines are pretty old, as they were built in 1965 to carry the 12 million pound Saturn V
rocket that took astronauts to the Moon. But just because they’re old
it doesn’t mean NASA won’t use them anymore. They’re expected to be used for another 50 years!
4 - Crane Vessel
Lifting heavy objects overseas is what crane vessels do.
The world largest offshore crane vessel is used for offshore construction which is
all about installing structures and facilities in marine.
And Singapore’s Sembcorp Marine
built the world’s largest crane vessel! Basically it’ll be used for setting up and decommissioning
offshore oil and gas rigs. How much did this huge crane cost? Just one and a half billion dollars!
It’s equipped with two cranes that can reach a height over 720 feet in the air.
That’s taller than the top of Singapore’s iconic boat-shaped Marina Bay Sands hotel!
The cranes have a combined lifting capacity of 20,000 tons, which is another industry record.
This crane vessel is called “The Sleipnir''. It was named after Norse God Odin’s eight-legged
stallion, something we’re gonna say makes a lotta sense. The vessel has accommodations
for 400 people and it also includes a helicopter pad and a swimming pool!
3 - Cern Particle Accelerator
The largest particle accelerator in the world is called the Large Hadron Collider or LHC for
short. The LHC is one of the most expensive scientific instruments ever built! And the
particles here are atoms. We’ll give you the short story here. Physicists want to study what happens
when these atoms smash together. So they invented machines that collide atoms at a very high speed.
Scientists want to get two high-energy particle beams to travel at the speed of
light before they collide. So they gotta move in opposite directions!
How do you get particles to the speed of light? Easy, you just need 1624 magnets! 1232 of them
are dipole magnets to bend the beams. Then the rest are quadrupole magnets to focus the beams.
Once they are close to colliding, another magnet squeezes the particles to increase
the chance of collision. It’s not that easy getting these particles to collide. Imagine
two people miles apart trying to throw tiny arrows at each other and trying to get the arrows to hit!
These superconducting magnets are a ring that’s 16.6 miles around.
The magnets are chilled to -271.3 degrees Celsius,
which is colder than outer space! This helps create 1 billion collisions per second!
So what’s the big deal with colliding atoms together in the LHC? Well, it’s basically
helping physicists understand more about the laws of physics by doing more and more collisions!
Different particle accelerators do different jobs. The one in Paris near the Louvre museum is used
for culture preservation, basically research on protecting the food we buy in grocery stores.
Another type of accelerator, called linear accelerators,
are used by hospitals to defeat cancer. Proton therapy directs a beam
right at the patient’s tumor. It only fires at that tumor so other healthy cells aren’t
damaged. This therapy was developed from the research done with accelerators!
Just how much was budgeted for the LHC? Roughly nine billion dollars and counting!
2 - Symphony of the Seas
This cruise ship measures at a little over a whopping 1,184 feet long,
and it’s the largest cruise ship in the world by weight!
She’s able to accommodate up to a maximum capacity of 6,680 passengers, as well as a
2,200-person crew. Yeah, right now it’s not that during the middle of a pandemic.
The Symphony o f the Seas is home to the tallest waterslide at sea,
the fastest Internet on the ocean, and more works of art than the Louvre has
paintings. It’s really a floating island with how big this ship is.
There are 16 decks for guest use, 22 restaurants, 4 pools and 2,759 cabins. Then there’s the kid's
water park, a full-size basketball court, and an ice-skating rink! There’s also a
ZIP LINE that’s 10 decks high! And we’re done. There’s a 1400 seat movie theater,
an outdoor aquatic theater with Olympic-height platforms, and two 43-foot high rock-climbing
walls! They definitely don’t want people to get bored on this ship!
There are also robotic bartenders on this huge ship. They’re at the Bionic Bar, which is also
on Royal Caribbean’s three other Oasis-class mega ships. Made by Italian firm Makr Shakr, these
mechanical mixologists can muddle, shake, strain, and serve cocktails just like any real bartender!
1 - International Space Station
The international space station isn’t really all that big. It’s only the size of a Football
field! But it’s literally the most expensive project ever taken on! The running cost is
quickly approaching $200 BILLION dollars, and it’s involved over 100,000 people in 15 nations!
Here’s what’s next!