We're taking off from the Kennedy Space Center, our multi-user spaceport.
I'm Yves Lamothe and we're cruising on the Crawler Transporter 2.
With us today is John Giles the Crawler Transporter Project Manager, here to tell us a little
bit more about the crawler. What exactly is the Crawler Transporter used for? We will
take the launch vehicles out to the pad and the ML and whatever anybody asks us to.
And we've been doing it for over 50 years. Everything that's launched from Pad 39A or B
rode out there on one of our two crawlers. So the crawler transporter is
massive and you said it goes at a top speed of two miles an hour. Is it because
of how heavy it is? How much does the crawl transport weigh? So the crawler
itself weighs about 6.6 million pounds, which is actually kind of small compared to,
we carry things that are 10, 12, 14 million pounds. So what we'll do is we'll
travel underneath something. We'll go underneath it, we'll pick it up like the
ML for instance with the launch vehicle on board, and we'll jack it up. We'll take
it out, we'll drop down to our cruising level and then we'll go out to the pad
on top of a specifically prepared crawlerway which consists of about a
foot of rocks and then below the rocks are about four feet of hydraulically
compressed limestone and then below that as many feet of sand that's been
compressed to support all of our weight. Another question is how do you see in
front or behind you with how big the crawler transporter is? So we will actually have
a team of about 20 personnel that go with us the whole way out there, that'll
either be on board or walking alongside, and everyone will be on radios and in
contact with each other and the driver will frequently say, hey somebody on the
other side of the crawler tell me how close I'm getting to this. So we have
eyes all over it. So one of the things that I've noticed is the pad, it goes
up a hill so to speak. So how does the crawler transporter handle bringing the
rocket up there without it tipping over? So the crawler has its own unique
leveling system on it and once it determines that we're
out of level we have a what we call a gel system which stands for jacking
equalization and leveling and it's basically a hydraulic system that once
it's told by the manometer system to level us, will actually make adjustments
and keep us at whatever level we want to be. So the incline going up to the pad is
about five degrees, so as we go up to it the crawler will actually articulate
five degrees so it keeps the ML on the launch vehicle on top. So here we are in
the engine room, what takes the crawler transporter for the point A to point B.
This is a very large engine seems quite complex. What are the specs on it? So this
is an original engine that came out of a locomotive back in the 1960s that's why
you see Alco here, American Locomotive Company. Same engine that would have
rolled a locomotive down the tracks back then. It's V16 turbocharged, two thousand
seven hundred and fifty horsepower. So with an engine this size, how many
gallons of gas does it take to operate it? It takes a lot of gallons. We run on
diesel not gas. We carry our own onboard gas with us. We have two separate tanks
and they carry a total of 5,000 gallons of diesel fuel. 5,000 gallons, now how many
miles per gallon does the crawler transporter get? I'd like to say we get lots of miles
per gallon but it's really only 32 feet per gallon. What exactly is this room
used for? So we're standing in the control room and this is where the
engineers will sit while we're rolling and we'll have three to four engineers
in here and they'll all be monitoring these different screens and on these
screens the engineers will see things like hydraulic pressures and the
leveling system and steering and engine output and just everything we would need
to control the crawler from in here. So this is the crawler transporter driver's
cabin. Now is there any specialized training required to be able to drive
the crawler transporter? There is a lot of specialized training and it probably
takes at least a year to a year and a half upon
job training and driving the crawler to be able to be certified. Now if you
don't tell anyone, will you let me take it for a ride?
I'll let you sit in the chair but I don't know if I'll be able to talk
anybody into letting you take it for a ride though. So maybe after a year of training?
We'll start you in the next training class.
Well John, thank you so much for coming out and sharing some information
with us about the Crawler Transporter. Once again, I'm Yves Lamonthe from the
Kennedy Space Center, our multi-user spaceport.