NASA Vehicle Assembly Building

The NASA Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) was completed in 1966 at Cape Canaveral, FL, the home base of the U.S. space program.  At the time it enclosed the greatest volume of any building in the world, 129,480 million cubic feet.  It was a unique structure which served as an assembly place for the largest space rockets in the world and was an essential facility for the U.S. quest of landing men on the moon and many space probes to follow.  It also qualified as the tallest single-story building in the world because it was built to accommodate the assembly of rockets in their vertical position.  It continues to serve today and will be important to the new NASA Space Launch System (SLS).

Until only as recently as 2000, the VAB has been exceeded in volume by seven other structures in the world. The VAB was constructed for the assembly of the Apollo/Saturn V moon rocket, the largest rocket made by humans at the time. The last structural beam was positioned in the VAB in 1965. The interior construction, including the construction of the extensible work platforms, was completed in 1966. The building is located 3.5 miles from Launch Pad 39A and 4.2 miles from Launch Pad 39B. A pair of crawler-transporters, some of the largest machines ever to move on land, were used to carry the completed rockets to the pad. One of the largest buildings in the world by area, the VAB covers eight acres, is 525 feet tall and 518 feet wide. It is made up of 65,000 cubic yards of concrete and its frame is constructed from 98,590 tons of steel. It stands atop a deep foundation support base of 4,225 steel pilings driven 164 feet into bedrock.  Designed to withstand hurricanes and tropical storms the VAB survived during the severe storms of 2004.   

German-born Anton Tedesko, renown expert on thin-shelled concrete structures, was the structural engineer for the VAB.  His distinguished career also included designing bridges, and in 1998 the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering Foundation created the Anton Tedesko Medal in his honor.

In the VAB’s high Bay 3, several miles of Apollo/Shuttle-era abandoned copper and lead-shielded cabling were removed to make room for state-of-the-art command, communication and control systems to perform vehicle testing and verification prior to rollout. Ten levels of new work platforms, 20 platform halves, are installed in this high bay. These platforms surrounded NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and the Orion spacecraft missions, the first uncrewed flight test of Orion atop the SLS rocket in 2024.

The VAB also has the largest U.S. flag painted on the exterior of the south wall at 209 feet tall and 110 feet wide. It also encloses four vertical interior corridors, each with doors 456 feet high, some of the largest in the world.