On Wednesday, Guinness World Records presented NASA teams at the Kennedy Space Center with a certificate confirming that, at a whopping 6.65 million pounds (3 million kilograms), Crawler Transporter 2 is the world’s heaviest self-powered vehicle, NASA announced in a statement.
in 1965, Crawler Transporter 1 and 2 made their debut together, transporting NASA’s rockets to Launch Complex 39 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The pair were later nicknamed Hans and Franz, two bodybuilder characters from a popular Saturday Night Live sketch, according to Collect Space.
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| The Guinness World Record certificate. |
In 2012, Franz, or Crawler Transporter 2, started undergoing a major makeover in order to support NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket designed to transport humans to the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years. After its glow-up, the vehicle put on some extra weight. It went from being a thickly built 5.95 million pounds to a record-breaking, super thicc vehicle at 6.65 million pounds—the same weight as 1,000 pickup trucks.
Due to how heavy the Crawler Transport is, the vehicle essentially crawls its way to the launch pad. It takes about eight to 12 hours for the rocket-carrying vehicle to drive the 4.2 miles (6.7 kilometers) from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch pad, going at a slow and steady speed of one mile per hour (1.6 kilometers per hour). It could take you a shorter time to walk that distance by foot.
The Crawler Transporter 2 successfully, and repeatedly, escorted the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule for their inaugural launch during the Artemis 1 mission in November 2022. Today, the crawler is being prepped for Artemis 2 (scheduled for launch in November 2024) by “replacing the ‘shoes’ on the two large tracks the crawler rolls on, performing corrosion control on the truck’s interior, and carrying the mobile launcher prior to stacking SLS and Orion top,” NASA wrote.
Source: https://gizmodo.com
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