[Az-Geocaching] RE: Vehicle of choice

[Jim Scotti]

Thanks Brian,
    Sounds like it gets about 37 feet per gallon - I thought 8 gallons per
foot sounded a bit steep.....  
    BTW, the crawler maintains its payload perfectly upright even while
crawling up the slope of the launchpads.  Quite a feat of engineering.  It's
impressive to watch - I saw the rollout for the very first Space Shuttle
launch.  The shuttle on the crawler just creeped along and during the time
that the crew for that flight (John Young and Bob Crippen) talked to the
crowd the spacecraft and crawler moved slowly along behind them - you could
just barely see it moving and it traveled maybe 1000 feet or so while they
talked.  That was in December 1980.

Jim.

On Mon, 18 Oct 2004, Brian Casteel wrote:

> After some google action, I came across this:
> 
> Explanation: NASA's Crawler-Transporters are the largest tracked vehicles in 
> existence. Although the crawlers pack over 5,000 horsepower, their top speed 
> is less than two kilometers per hour when fully loaded. Eleven people are 
> needed to drive a single crawler. Diesel fuel mileage is about 350 liters 
> per kilometer (less than 0.007 miles per gallon). The crawler's function is 
> to move NASA's space shuttles -- complete with launch platforms -- from the 
> Assembly Building to the Launch Pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA. 
> Two of these massive machines have operated since the Apollo era and have 
> now crawled over 4,000 kilometers, all the while keeping their contents 
> perfectly upright. In this picture a crawler transports the shuttle Columbia 
> to the pad prior to its March 1st launch on the latest Hubble Space 
> Telelescope Servicing Mission.
> 
> Based on these figures, it looks like the Crawler uses 924.7 gallons of fuel 
> to cover the approximate distance of 6.21 miles.  Sounds like some of 
> today's oversized, underutilized status symbols.  :)
> 
> Brian
> 
> Team A.I.
> 

Jim Scotti
Lunar & Planetary Laboratory
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721 USA                 http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/