Not only is the Vehicle Assembly Building way cool, but watching a shuttle be ever-so-slowly brought out to the launch pad along the rail is extremely neat.

Signed,

Major space junkie
who will probably love Phantom Menace tonight
just for its special effects even if the dialog
and acting are flat... ;->

Posted May 16, 2002 8:13 AM by Laurie Mann

Not a rail -- a road. Just a very wide gravel (!) road.

Posted May 16, 2002 9:00 AM by Erik V. Olson

And the VAB is cool, but not as a building. I've seen bigger, taller and wider -- though I'm still torn to declare whether the VAB is the tallest two story building, or the tallest one story building with an unusually well furnished basement.

No. It's not the scale of the building that scantifies the place -- it's the scale of the works done there.

Posted May 16, 2002 9:02 AM by Erik V. Olson

I suddenly have a story image of someone, at some indeterminate future date, entering the long-abandoned VAB and being caught in a rainshower.
Where do people get their crazy ideas?

Posted May 16, 2002 11:36 AM by John M. Ford

What a great find! If only a similar page offered mpeg or QuickTime videos of those views...

Best,

John F

Posted May 16, 2002 12:37 PM by John Farrell

I think any build cavernous enough to have clouds form in it is inherently cool. But that's just me :)

Posted May 16, 2002 4:40 PM by Scott Janssens

Erik, I hadn't heard "scantifies" before. I assume it's the opposite of "magnifies"?.

Gravel as a roadbed makes perfect sense to me. It won't break, being already broken; it stabilizes under pressure; and the local rains will run through it and away.

Mike, I don't know which warehouse you use, but it's prime product.

When I was very young, I once saw a rainstorm a couple of feet on a side. My mother had just finished cooking pancakes, and ran the hot pan under the tap to cool it down. There must have been a stream of cold air coming in at the top of the window over the sink, because the cloud of steam that went up from the pan hit that area and was instantly turned into a rain of fine droplets, strongly backlit by the window and perfectly clear.

I was dazzled, of course. It had looked exactly like one of those elementary science textbook diagrams of how rain happens. I had no idea how improbable it was.

Posted May 17, 2002 9:13 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

It was a typo. "Sanctifies."

Posted May 17, 2002 1:21 PM by Erik V. Olson

Scantification is to the development of intimate apparel as saltation is to vertebrate evolution. At least that's the impression I get from the Huxley's Secret catalog.

Posted May 17, 2002 3:48 PM by John M. Ford