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Rebuilding the Biggest Building by Astrobiology Magazine staffwriter
Hurricanes are examples of planet-scale storms best seen from orbit
Credit: NOAA
For one of the world's biggest buildings, before and after images captured the force of the storm. With its footprint the size of Texas, hurricane Frances had pounded Cape Canaveral over the weekend and left a natural scar on one of the world's manmade wonders.
Originally built for assembly of Apollo/Saturn vehicles and later modified to support Space Shuttle operations, the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) is often referred to as the only enclosed space big enough for interior clouds to form. But when a hurricane looms off the Florida coast and dark clouds gather to drench the beaches, the novelty of forming interior clouds loses some of its charm.
It is not the tallest, just one of the more spacious. Its high-bay area is 525 feet tall (more than 45 stories high), while its low-bay area is 210 feet tall. The VAB occupies 8 acres of land, making it the largest in volume (129 million cubic feet). The volume is like half the height of the tallest skyscraper, but then with that same tower turned on three axes, with nearly equal height, width and depth. When open, the T-shaped door alone is more than 40 stories tall.
When constructed in the 1960's to stack the Saturn rockets--each about the size of an aircraft carrier if stood up vertically--the VAB came to symbolize big-scale thinking. In addition to sheltering the Apollo rockets, it could accomodate rollbacks of a shuttle during the predictable fall hurricane season. In total, six skyscrapers could fit inside what is the landmark against an otherwise flat Florida marsh lacking an urban skyline. But from its outset, if NASA needed a building to shelter a moon rocket, then a group of construction engineers would conceive hoisting the biggest one of its kind.
