posted 04-29-2020 11:33 AM               

It was on March 24, 1975, when our nation's final Apollo/Saturn rocket and spacecraft (AS-210) were transported from the gigantic Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) along the rock-filled crawlerway to Launch Pad 39B, about a 4 mile trip lasting just under 7 hours.

Below is another astrophilately and memorabilia panel display that I thought would be fun in sharing — as a tribute — to one of the unsung heroes of the space race to the moon during the 1960's. It's a massive two-story mobile-tracked machine that crunches along over crushed river rock, usually never going over one mile per hour.

Known as the Crawler Transporter (CT), of which two were built costing about $14 million apiece by the Marion Power Shovel Company in 1965, made the trip about 300 times carrying on top and transporting everything from the first Saturn V rocket for the Apollo 4 (AS-501) mission in 1967 to Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-135) for the last shuttle flight in 2011. But even before Apollo 4, there had been a Saturn V "rollout" — for the very first time — using a facilities "pathfinder" fit-check test vehicle, known as AS-500F, in May 1966, and with the same test vehicle being transported back to the VAB for the first "rollback."

Yet that creation, 131 feet long and 20+ feet high, has turned out to be so well-designed that it is one of the few major pieces of Apollo-era technology still in continue use for human spaceflight. Each CT is a perfectly level platform, a flat top, built atop a vast infrastructure of heavy steel support that is the size of a baseball infield area. The twin CT's are powered by 16 electric traction motors fueled by 4 V16 diesel engines. When in operation, a crawler consumes 150 US gallons of diesel fuel per mile.

The CT, though modified again after the shuttle program, is still the largest self- powered land vehicle in the world with 8 tracks per vehicle containing 57 shoes per track. Each tread shoe weighs almost a ton, wow!

During the Apollo/Saturn program, a mobile crawler weighed just over 6 million pounds, equal to 1,000 pickup trucks, that could transport 14 million pounds to the launch pad, or the weight of 20 fueled 777 jet airliners. It took at least 14 highly trained engineers and technicians to operate a CT during an Apollo/Saturn rollout from the VAB to either one of two launch pads.

Depicted in the display are the only known "carried" Apollo/Saturn launch vehicle and spacecraft postal covers and cards. They can be seen at the lower level of the panel with two different cover types and a postcard showing both sides. But don't laugh! While two of the three covers, seen at the far-left of the panel, seem primitive or crude by their "simple" printed cachets, well — they are, since the rollout cover event for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) was my very first cachet cover design attempt as a first year college student.

While attending the rollout as a NASA invited guest, I can recall quite well thinking to myself that rollout covers had been placed aboard Mobile Launcher-1 with a 223-foot tall Saturn 1B rocket, its three-man Apollo spacecraft and tucked-away Soyuz docking module, were all sitting atop the crawler and mobile platform as the journey was getting underway early that morning.

Several stamped covers, along with three postcards, were placed aboard Mobile Launcher-1 (ML-1) and stored inside an equipment cabinet on the "B" instrumentation level. They had been placed inside ML-1 a couple days earlier and made the entire 7-hour long trip starting at 8 a.m. with a "first motion" and ending about 3 p.m. on March 24, 1975. The covers were not able to be retrieved from ML-1 until the next day and were posted at KSC on the 25th.

One of the top CT/ML instrumentation workers, a veteran of every rollout from the Apollo/Saturn era, took the covers aboard and signed each one afterwards. To the best of my knowledge, they're the only "carried" or "placed/located aboard" covers for an Apollo/Saturn space vehicle rollout, ever.

Just about all of the items displayed pertain to AS-210's rollout in March 1975. The color photos of the Saturn 1B rocket going to its pad and with the astronaut crew of Stafford, Slayton and Brand were photographed by Cecil Stoughton, the official White House photographer for President Kennedy's administration. Stoughton, a big space fan, was on photo assignment by Marion Power Shovel Co. in Ohio for the ASTP mission, builders of the twin CT's and one of the largest manufacturers of earth moving equipment and machines.

Among the invited guests for the final Apollo/Saturn rollout was Apollo 7 astronaut Donn Eisele, who was wearing one of the Marion's "Dig In, Do It Better!" pinback buttons. The exhibited button, seen here on Slayton's right side, is the same one actually worn by Eisele on the last-ever Apollo/Saturn rollout day. At that time in 1975, Eisele was a sales manager for Marion and attended the rollout as a company representative at the space center. He flew on the first manned Apollo spaceflight in Oct. 1968, the first Saturn 1B that carried US astronauts into space.

posted 04-30-2020 09:28 AM               

Well, actually, in asking about my first space "printed" cachet cover production
in March '75 (but I did do rubber stamp cachets earlier though), in looking at that very simply black and white ink illustration when I was just out of high school, it makes me rather sad than in comparison to all the high-tech graphic print and computer work now available. There was also a missing element that would tell someone it's not for the Apollo-Soyuz rollout. Can you see what's missing? But overall, I guess it's not a big deal, as I was very young.