The Vehicle Assembly Building
The gigantic home of NASA's massive moon rockets
On August 2, 1963, construction began on what would become one of the largest buildings in the world, the Vertical Assembly Building. Later renamed the Vehicle Assembly Building, it would be the central hub of the Space Center. The Mercury-Redstone, Mercury-Atlas and Gemini Titan II stacks were all being assembled on their launch pads. But assembling and preparing the proposed Saturn boosters, which were far bigger, would be far more complex. Doing it inside the Vertical Assembly Building would make that task easier, and protect the boosters and the ground crews from Florida’s climate, especially tropical storms and hurricanes.
The design was breathtaking. It would be a box, 526 feet tall, 716 feet long and 518 feet wide. The base would cover eight acres. It would need to withstand winds up to 120 miles per hour.
Construction began with the building’s foundation. 4,225 steel pilings had to be driven in down 164 feet to the bedrock.
The construction phase was marked by serious accidents. Five men were hurt, two of them seriously, when concrete on the third-floor deck collapsed in June of 1964. A month later, a contractor from the American Bridge and Iron Company fell to his death from the 46th level.