NASA’s Mobile-launcher Platform-2: a structure involved in the Apollo and the S.rhythm S.launch missions: is in the process of demolition. Incredibly, the space agency is freeing itself from the big platform to make space for parking spaces, such as collectSpace reports.
In a matter of weeks, Mobile Launcher-2 or MLP-2 will no longer be there.
Built over Fifty years ago, NASA’s historic launcher participated in such notable missions as Apollo 12 and 14 (both manned missions to the moon), Skylab (forerunner of the International Space Station) and each inaugural Srhythm S.salvo launch by Columbia. More doubtfully, MLP-2 was the platform from which its Challenger launcher arrived, tragic flight in 1986. In total, MLP-2 participated in more than 50 launches from 1968 to 1968 2011. Then, yes, a lot of history was added to this huge 160 feet long and 135 feetof width t, 25 foot-cut structure (for more details on MLP-2, including a list of all NASA missions in which he participated, be sure to check out this extensive fan page).
Com Robert Pearlman of collectSPACE reports, NASA made the decision to demolish the platform for too banal a reason.
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Given its history, “one might expect MLP-2 to be withdrawn as a museum artifact,” Pearlman wrote, or that “it could continue to have some purpose, as they have and are the other two mobile launch platforms inherited from Apollo and the shuttle doing “. But, as Pearlman Scott Tenhoff, project manager for the demolition of MLP-2, told the space agency, it is getting rid of the platform “because we run out of parking spaces.”
Oof.
As Pearlman rightly points out, NASA has two similar platforms, MLP-1 (formerly ML-3) and MLP-3 (formerly ML-1). Built between 1963 and 1965, these three platforms were mounted for the Saturn V, Saturn IB and Saturn INT-21 rockets (the latter never flew). After Apollo, the structures were transformed, renamed, and used for the Space Shuttle Program.
But NASA is entering the Artemis era and the old platform can’t bear the weight of NASA’s next megarocket, the Space launch system, nor an umbilical tower to support its launch, according to collectSPACE. To that end, NASA completed a new platform in 2018 he called ML-1 and began the construction of a second, to be called ML-2, last year. This is a huge amount of huge hardware that leads to the decision to dismantle MLP-2.
Neither MLP-1 nor MLP-3 (pictured above) are currently planned to be demolished, and MLP-1 is currently being used to prepare the tracking routes (the paths used by mobile launchers to the launch pad) for the next Space launch system. As NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems explained in a recent paper tweet, MLP-1 will ensure that the “road is strong enough to support the weight of the next @NASAArtemis I launch ”, which could happen at the end of this year.
The demolition process is expected to take about a month. Working contractors, Brevard’s Frank-Lin Services, use excavators with hydraulic shears to cut the platform section by section until it’s finished, Tenhoff told collectSPACE.
Before dismantling Mobile Launcher-2, NASA had done so he asked around if anyone had an interest in saving bits of the gigantic structure, including the Smithsonian. No one answered.
It’s easy to be cynical with all of this, especially with the whole parking lot, but sometimes you just have to move on. Hopefully some smart people will take away the important chunks, such as a license plate or something of similar nostalgic value. Storing this gigantic structure next to a museum is obviously not plausible, but it would make sense to show some of its parts. MLP-2 is too iconic to throw away and forget about.