At NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, engineers and contractors are blasting through a roughly $100-million interior redo like no other. Removing, reengineering and replacing a big chunk of High Bay 3's "guts" from within the historic, 50-year-old Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB—while at the same time making structural improvements to one of the largest structures of its kind in the world—is proving an epic undertaking for the builders delivering this giant leap in rocket assembly.
Driving the colossal rebuild is the need to better accommodate the nation's reemerging heavy-lift launch program, including NASA's new deep-space vehicle, called the Space Launch System (SLS)—which is similar in size to the Apollo/Saturn system that the VAB originally supported. The core challenge, though, is to engineer new assembly platforms with considerable vertical reconfigurability in support of not only SLS but other types of privately designed heavy-lift vehicles.