Continuing with items tagged as “engineering” from the HABS/HAER/HALS collection, that’s “Mobile Launcher One” from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Saturn V rockets were assembled on the platform on the left, and held steady and accessed from the tower on the right. Assembly took place indoors and then the whole thing slowly moved out to the launch pad. ML-1 was used for Apollo 4, Apollo 8, Apollo 11, three Skylab flights and the US half of Apollo-Soyuz. The base platform is officially the “launch platform” and the tower is officially the “launch umbilical tower.” I can say without a doubt that I have never and will never work on any structure with a name as good as “launch umbilical tower.”
Despite the rather glaring differences between the Apollo program and the New Haven Railroad, this structure is actually quite similar to yesterday’s catenary bridges. In both cases, the structural engineering plays a critical role to the proper functioning of the entire system, but no passerby would ever pay much attention to it because structure is there solely to enable the much more interesting vehicles – Saturn V rockets and electric locomotives, respectively – nearby. Again, the mechanical engineering aspects weren’t just more interesting, they were more challenging to design.
Structural engineering made up a lot of the heroic engineering accomplishments and myths of the nineteenth century: bridges, railroad stations with long-span roofs, towers… Even then, it was sharing the stage with mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering – to some degree before those terms we’re in common use – but it was a lot of what people thought of when they heard “engineering.” The last gasp of this may have been civil works like Hoover Dam in the 1930s. The great engineering achievements in popular memory since then have been elsewhere: vehicles, computers and networks, biomedical prosthetics, and other designed objects that in some way move. Pace George Ferris, structural engineers generally try to avoid having their designs move.
That said, the structural work on the launch umbilical tower is quite photogenic.
You must be logged in to post a comment.