How NASA Drives The $144 Million Vehicle That Transports Rocket Ships | What It Takes

Too inefficient.

@@i3_13 let’s see u design soemthing better 🤣🤣🤣🤣

@@i3_13 that more eficient than lift a whole rocket in launchpad

@@i3_13 then redisign it will ya

Overengineered piece of crap
Could've just used 2 railway locomotives joined to do this job like ISRO
That's why ISRO is way more efficient

One big risk to be falling asleep behind a wheel

"That's equivalent to 17 football fields!"

To be fair that’s way faster than I could push it

@@DEWANGGOGTE xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxzzzz

🤣🤣

That’s why they let that 12 yr old girl drive it.

will it fit in my miata?

Kerbal space center?

@@tj9959 Kennedy

@@abaddon3863 you might have to do an ac delete at the very least :/

Can you find out the MPG? I can't find that stat anywhere.

I wanted to become an astronaut :(

@@doctorpanigrahi9975 I did too but sadly I never got the chance and I don’t think I’m smart enough 😔

Thats nothing compared to military spending 700 billion usd.

@@droidwest90 SpaceX doesnt have one

@@doctorpanigrahi9975 Requirements:
US, Russian, European, Indian, Chinese citizen, or you must be very lucky (for example, a Malaysian citizen was trained to become a astronaut because of a collaboration between Malaysia and Russia, he flew to the ISS onboard a Soyuz)
Decent eyesight
Healthy
Good piloting skills
High G-force tolerance
Good survival skills
A degree in something (Engineering, Aerospace etc.)
A lot of luck

Bsdk welcome

Hasn't been a very big market to drive development.

They would for sure be able to make an improved version from scratch nowadays, but why would they spend that much money when they all ready have 2 working ones that do the job fine?

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

@@tijnterpstra1986 I can think of one reason: if they needed crawler-transporters in another location.

Bro how else they gonna move that thing?

So 10 hours to do 4 miles means a lot of stops on the way?

@@smacksman1 I reckon the turns and slopes add to the time

@@smacksman1 I understand that 10 hours is the combined time to drive to the pickup point and then driving to launchpad (not including the loading time).

I wasn't surprised by 1mph, but I was surprised how _fast_ 1mph looks when you're up close to that thing.

@@epiendless1128 ikr😆

I rode a bike once

@@leatheljamie I rode in the back of a car once (I never learned how to ride a bike)

Be the most boring drive ever 😂😂😂

60 years. The 1960s were 60 years ago. The 1980s were 40 years ago. lol

🤣🤣

🤣🤣

If they were they wouldn't have been outsmarted by private space companies.

@@cplcabs Perhaps, but "Worked at NASA" always looks good on a LinkedIn profile.

@@wickywills well, about as good as 'worked at Boeing" which isnt good given both their histories of incompetence which cost people their lives.

@@cplcabs What's Britain upto these days, huh? Nothing useful, that's for sure.

@@rajuaditya1914 trading, sending arms, equipment and funds to Ukraine, sending funds etc to poorer countries, creating/inventing a load of stuff, contributing heavily to space industry and so much more. Your point?

@UCbx6J1s8Gq7cclqgMDNrH8A just about every large container ship is larger, along with supertankes and the like. The Pioneering Spirit crane vessel is currently listed as the worlds largest vessel by gross tonnage and also moves under its own power.

Neeeerd!🤓

@@nkvkc 🤡🤡

actually, the bagger 288 excavator is the largest self propelled land vehicle in the world

@MaybeItsBrandonMabe ok, I understand now, but u actually just copied and pasted a Wikipedia paragraph

Yes, and there should be potential for electrification too. The Alco and Cummins engines have a 5,000 gallon tank and use 1 gallon per 32 feet (approximately 165 gallons per mile)
according to a NASA fact sheet. With 4 miles one-way, that's 660 gallons to make it to the pad, 1,320 gallons round-trip.

train is the solution to all problems

It sounds feasible, but it's not. If the rail cracks, they have to replace that whole section of rail, though, which means that they got to get cranes in place, welders on standby, and if it's a curved rail section, it would have to have special presses, etc. It's literally more expensive and time consuming than letting it roll over rock. My dad's worked in the railroad industry for 31 years coming in August, and he's seen plenty of incidents happen due to just small cracks in the rail. Plus the rails would not be able to handle that much weight. A train can spread all that weight for more than a mile. But you place all that weight on just 131 feet... It's gonna squash it.

Why not build it where it launches? 😅
_(I know, sterile environment...)_

@@RyanStonedonCanadianGaming _gasp looking at starship_

The platform will lift slightly up and adjust the angle and height.

In 7 tax dollar per person, this so worth

The rail system seems like it would be cheaper than the crawler long term

@@kenji-san4681 Rail makes more sense imo

Rails can't handle the weight of massive rockets like these. Look at the dry mass of Soyuz vs the dry mass of SLS. If the numbers I'm quickly looking at are right, just one of those white boosters on the side of SLS weigh twice as much if not more than Soyuz.

@@aarong.4691 Sure they can if you developed a larger rail system.

@@Skiller71Studios sure but that would probably be just as expensive as it would be a custom track that would need servicing for the smallest of defects. Someone with family in the railroad industry in another comment was saying how for just the smallest cracks you need to replace that section which means cranes, welders, etc all on standby. Vs just letting it roll on rock which is pretty cheap. NASA doesnt have the budget to develop an entire new train track system rails etc A lot of the smaller rockets that can be supported by normal rails are carried on rails. ULA's Atlas V does this for instance (rolled out vertically as well) but it is a much smaller rocket.

stupid design, why not to use rails instead?

@@german_novotiable cuz the launchpad is on an inclined plane. These are some of the best engineers on the planet, so ig they know better than us.

@@xynyde0 they know better how to use the budget very well.... obv corrupted

@@german_novotiable Well the budget is nothing compared to what the army gets... Are you telling me that these folks who work day and night to send these ships out in the space are corrupted? If they were, they wouldnt be in the space industry in the first place. Its one of the last places a corrupt bureaucrat would come looking for money.

@@xynyde0 obv not engineers, but theirs bosses yeah

Number one state sponsor of terrorism? The one that supported 9/11?

Just in my lifetime I've seen the price of sending a crew to the ISS decrease by an order of magnitude. Also, turnaround time is less than a third of what it was in the 90's-the Space Shuttle took several months of repair and preparation in between missions, whereas the Falcon 9 takes only a few weeks. In the near future we could very well have rockets which can make multiple trips to orbit in a single day

@@nameismetatoo4591 It's funny because NASA created a re-usable rocket in the 90's that was able to be reused in as short as 26 hours...which is monumentally better than what SpaceX can dream of right now. Unfortunately, politics got in the way and the program was scrapped in favor of the shuttle.

We also have self landing rockets

@@Alex_Aramayo And reusable spacecraft.

And ULA

The 'future' has been since the sixties, ya numpty.

About a lake Ontario

Yes

125.7 U.S. gal/mi according to Wikipedia

It chugged so much fuel that they needed refueling area's strategically placed along it's route to where they can refill if it would run low which it often did because it goes so slow and the amount of power it had made it very thirsty for fuel.

@@benlee4940 soviet union use train

Nasa didnt make it!. A crane company did. Elon uses preexisting machines on wheels that travel over 30kph empty

@@genebohannon8820 That is correct but those engineers have maintain them for over a half century.

That's what she said?

@@lionelhuts875 yeah

Probably intentional tbh, less controls/more automation = less chance of driver error I’d imagine

I would think NASA is a big proponent of the K.I.S.S. design principle.

@@KenMochii the crawler has like 70000 individual components lol

@@saeedthwalhath they we're talking about the cabin controls

It's not inspiration bro
Only these things can carry it 😅

The whole program in the 1960s was 3 billion dollars an Apollo era NASA engineer told me. This is back when a 4bd 2 bath house was $15,000-17,000 in suburban Washington DC. A full sized Chevy was around $1400. That's how much they've stolen from us with inflation over the years. I think 144M would be about right for today. This is in money pre-Biden's inflation.

Those days there is no left-left specialist or right-leg specialist. Now each part will be sold separately because of the greedy corporate mentality of people. Maybe if they build one it would be $1440.99 million only without tax.

@@mars-cs4uk Eh
Honestly i feel like greedy companies may have a different idea from their eyes
I just had that thought
Hm
Who knows

Hi, you say you actually went into the VAB? We also have done the full tour, but no way was we allowed into the VAB! Yes we were there in 2006, when the Shuttle was on launch pad 39 A, and also another one inside the VAB, we were shown Inside the building that was assembling the various units for the ISS, and also the Apollo building, where a Apollo 5 rocket is stored lying full length of the building, the site is vast, and we started at 11.30 am, but still didn't see everything by 5.30 pm!

I think it’s the price it cost to build the crawler back in the 60s, including RnD adjusted for inflation. So probably around $20 million 1960s dollars.

You must feel blessed!

@@Beun007 Idk about blessed, it was mind blowing to see it in person though. It wasnt moving or had anything on top of it at the time and it's still massive

@@Beun007 Feel blessed because he saw an inefficient waste of material?

@@samueltaylor9935 yeah the entire manned-spaceprogram hast just been a massive giant useless unproductive moneylaundering scheme. None of it produced anything in 60 years aside from satellites(produced on land and shot into space) that is useful to any of us. I dont even know what satellites are really useful for as Phones use Celltowers and I dont live on a secluded Island

That's what she said!

We are building the same but with max clock speed of 2mph.

@@PradhumnShandilya who is

why would we?

The launch pad sits on a hill, because that part of the coastline is a swamp and building things like the flame trenches into the ground is difficult. The hill means you can't use rails (incline is too steep). To make a rail system possible, they'd have to build the VAB at the same elevation as the launch pad, and build a dike between the VAB and pad. That may have been more expensive than building the crawler.
Rails also need more groundwork to spread the load.

@@h.dejong2531 finally someone speak English

@mclaine33 No dude , that would be efficient , what's wrong with you!? and build the VAB closer to the pad?! are you crazy????

@@h.dejong2531 I believe Russia use rails without issues.

@@cplcabs Yes, that's right. Baikonur isn't built on a swamp, so there's no problem digging a large pit under ground level, which means your launch pad doesn't have to be on a hill.

I'm so excited for Webb's first real pictures in summer. Great so see some new action in space exploration

@@mrsbelcher Even the test pictures look amazing.

The road isn't a straight line because there are multiple launch pads

I was thinking the exact same thing, why don't they use rails instead?

I’m pretty sure the Russian use somthing similar to large trains on tracks to move their rockets . Googling russian rockets at the moment doesn’t bring up what I’m looking for !

Yeah great idea, but I guess that it would require a large investment and introduce risks which nasa doesnt like. That’s why innovation often requires competition. They're stuck with a really old machine that requires 50 engineers to even run it haha

@@MrJellekeulemans Yes but also putting a rocket sideways to be transported can put pressure on places that we may not want pressure to be.. Transporting it vertically on the launch pad allows the rocket to be at maximum working capacity when it counts

Slow and steady wins the space race.

Spending money and giving jobs :)). They don't care about productivity.

@@arcturionblade1077 Win my ass. If there is no SpaceX, ISS will be into Putin and Soyuz. Spending a lot of moneys for obsolete technologies and stuffs are blocking innovation.

The actual wording was 5 years to upgrade and test the bearings. You need to stop thinking of large engineering systems as being the same as your everyday Toyota or Mazda. These things have been so well looked after they have been used for 57 years, and probably have another 50 more in them at least.

@@arcturionblade1077 Russia won the space race. They were the first to get into space and get a man into space. The US won (only just) the race to get to the moon

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The purpose of it is to allow the fully assembled rocket to move without ever having to be placed horizontally. Doing that by rail would put extreme pressure on a very small area

@@dontworry1302 is it not possible to distribute load on mutiple tracks?

@@sportsonwheelss The number of tracks that would be required to move the entire stack in one piece vertically would be so large as to make it less practical than a vehicle. Another concern may have been that the ground would not remain stable enough for tracks to be a viable solution since it is Florida.

Nah compare it to a big container ship and the emissions are next to nothing

Cars are worse

@Phub Bing Because if they spend too much money, they won't have more. For SLS they can always throw more tax money on that. SLS already costs more that developing and launching Falcon Heavy 40 times

It seems to be useless for SpaceX. Looks like time travel.

From what I can tell SpaceX uses ordinary trucks for road transportation and for getting to the pad they have it on rails being pulled by what looks to be an airport tug

Space X uses the crawler.

@@n3307v SpaceX don't use the crawler. The booster is transported to the cape by road, then integrated with the upper stage and payload. After integration it's moved to the launchpad by the Transporter Erector Launcher.
Only NASA use the crawler, they're the only ones using the Vehicle Assembly Building and crawler way.

It only sprays in front of the tracks as far as i've seen in this video

i mean you could also just make it a clean road like a Runway i guess that would be better. Then they dont have to spray any water

The engines used to drive the generators are 2 x 2,750 hp engines. They run 4 x 1,315 hp motors, one on each track set. 2 x 1,065hp engines drive generators that run the hydraulics, controls, steering etc.

@@benlee4940 in other words 1 mph is the fastest it goes. lol

@@heronn4las i think it can do 5

@@ZaHandle yeah, going flat out I think it can go over 5 but it is usually limited to a top speed of one mph

This technology is very outdated and NASA wasn't a government agency and it wasn't funded by the government.
The NASA Crawler has been around since the early start of Space exploration , the machine isn't modern at all there isn't no fancy hardware inside like computers and high tech stuff.

@@josephbennett3482 it is a government agency and is funded by the tax payer

Why aren’t you at nasa?!

.. they have probably already considered the possibility of building a straight road between sites. So there is probably a good reason why it's not praticle.

The launchpads have changed over the years and there are several. Oddly enough, concrete and steel experiences high wear and tear when a skyscraper sized rocket goes off on top of it.

​@@josezapata9674 That's a non-answer. The OP was not harassing anyone. You could've explained why straight line is not a workable idea, like Samson did above. Being edgy af has brought you 2 likes, that's great of course.

Holy shit dude!! You should work at NASA!