Vehicle Assembly Building
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Vehicle Assembly Building
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Aerial view of the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center
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| Location |
Brevard County, Florida  United States
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| Nearest city | Titusville |
| Coordinates | 28°35′10.61″N 80°39′4.61″W / 28.5862806°N 80.6512806°WCoordinates: 28°35′10.61″N 80°39′4.61″W / 28.5862806°N 80.6512806°W |
| Built | 1966 |
| MPS | John F. Kennedy Space Center MPS |
| NRHP Reference # | 99001642 |
| Added to NRHP | January 21, 2000 |
The Vehicle (originally Vertical) Assembly Building, or VAB, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) is a building designed to assemble large space vehicles, such as the massive Saturn V and the Space Shuttle. The future Space Launch System (SLS) will also be assembled there.
At 3,664,883 cubic meters (129,428,000 cubic feet) it is one of the largest buildings in the world by volume. The building is at Launch Complex 39 at KSC, halfway between Jacksonville and Miami, and due east of Orlando on Merritt Island on the Atlantic coast of Florida.
The VAB is the largest single-story building in the world, was the tallest building (160.3 metres (526 ft)) in Florida until 1974, and is still the tallest building in the United States outside an urban area.
The VAB, which was completed in 1966, was originally built to allow for the vertical assembly of the Saturn V rocket for the Apollo program and referred to as the Vertical Assembly Building. In anticipation of post-Saturn projects such as the Space Shuttle program, it was renamed to the Vehicle Assembly Building after the Apollo program, and was used for the shuttle's external fuel tanks and flight hardware, and to mate the Space Shuttle orbiters to their solid rocket boosters and external fuel tanks. Once assembled, the complete Space Shuttle was moved on the Mobile Launcher Platform and Crawler-Transporter to LC-39 Pad A or B.
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