Merritt Island, Cape Canaveral, the home of the Kennedy Space Center, wasn't, when NASA acquired it, much of an island at all. An 88,000-acre swamp capillaried with gray-green water that was called home by alligators, manatees, dolphins, storks, wild pigs, tortoises and plagues of salt-marsh mosquitoes, it was as liquid as it was solid. The job of making it ready for service as a spaceport was handed to the Army Corps of Engineers. Fifteen thousand individual tracts of privately owned land were bought up, then dredged, drained, squeezed and packed with and before construction work began on launchpads, firing rooms and processing facilities. At the end of September, 1965, the workforce moved into their new buildings: a tableau of tan, beige and gray concrete modernism that, in a land devoid of trees, seemed to sit on top of a landscape rather than truly being a part of it.
At the heart of the complex was the Vehicle Assembly Building - the VAB. Founded on a hive of thousands of piles driven 160 feet down through the soft ground until they found the bedrock below, the VAB was, at the time of its completion in the midsixties, the world's largest building. A third bigger than the Great Pyramid and enclosing a greater volume that either the pentagon or nearly four Empire State Buildings, the giant iron-lattice cathedral seemed utterly alien on Merritt Island; a vast, pale corrugated box standing over fifty storis high that dominated the view from any direction. The scale of the VAB was to accommodate the towering Saturn V moon rockets, assembled vertically within a building that was large enough, on hot, humid days, to generate rain showers from beneath its ceiling, then stacked on top of a 2,700-ton caterpillar-tracked flatbed transporter that carried it to the launch pad three miles away, where the Cape met the Atlantic.
Low cloud and chill air hung over the Cape, when, at dawn on December 29, the huge doors of the Vehicle Assembly Building rolled open - a process that took forty-five minutes to complete. Around 8:00 a.m., the Shuttle stack emerged from the sanctuary of the high bay,, rolling slowly on the top of the crawler toward the pad along a track laid deep with crushed rock and river gravel - a three-mile journey on the back of a 5,500 horsepower machine as big as a baseball diamond that took ten hours to complete. By 6:30 that evening, as the sun went down behind the VAB, Columbia took her place on pad 39A, casting shadows that reached out toward the Atlantic.
Into The Black, The Extraordinary Untold story of the First Flight Of The Space Shuttle Columbia And The Astronauts Who Flew Her
Touchstone, c 2016
pp 237-238
Rowland White