New NASA Launch Facilities To Top Out

Human exploration of the stars is set to further expand with the construction of a massive new launch pad being built at Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral.

The huge 119 metre tall structure has been designed to work primarily as a mobile launching platform for the new Ares rocket although it will also be able to support future rocket systems too.

The structure has been designed as a mobile launcher that will allow the rockets to be moved around the site before being hooked up and fired off into deepest space. It includes not only the mobile launcher, a skeleton-like metal structure to launch the missiles from with its multiple platforms for support personnel to operate from at various heights up the rocket, but also the umbilical tower. This will accommodate the control and command centre and fuel storage that will make the Ares rocket capable of operation independence from the main NASA mission centres to the south.

At the same time NASA are having the tower structure on the LC-39b site demolished meaning that the Ares launch area will be the only one to now contain anything tall.

The entire project is being built by Hensel Phelps to the NASA mission requirements which is due to top out imminently with the last part of the structure lifted up on top today. The construction workers are drawing on past Scandinavian pagan traditions and will erect a kumquat tree on the roof to commemorate the topping out.

Even if the Ares programme is cancelled in favour of privatised solutions, as numerous anonymous sources at NASA keep suggesting, the new launch facilities will continue to be of use to NASA once they are eventually complete.