#Crawler transporter drivers#
#Crawler transporter driver#

And with SLS (NASA’s most powerful rocket yet) it's going to be about 0.83. “It has the power to do two miles an hour, but you never want to do that because it is just too much for the crawler,” Dove explained. While a battered Yugo could run laps around the crawler, top speed is not the objective.

#Crawler transporter driver#

“The crawler can go so slow you can barely tell it's moving,” said NASA senior crawler systems engineer and driver Sam Dove. Each pair of tracks is called a truck and weighs in at one million pounds each (see photo below). You'll go slower when you're doing those things.”Īre we there yet? takes on new meaning with the crawler which inches along on four pairs of tracks. 3 miles an hour over the road or even slower depending on load and depending on where we are, whether we're in a turn, whether we're crossing one of our asphalt roads or whether we're going up the pad slope. 82 miles an hour,” said Rohloff who, like other crawler specialists, works for NASA contractor Jacobs. “Typically we're not going any faster than. A dial is carefully rotated to the desired speed to ensure a slow and steady pace for a vehicle that tops out at 26 feet in height and spreads out far enough to fill a baseball infield. NASATwenty-four-year-old Breanne Rohloff, the crawler’s youngest-ever and only current female driver, pointed out that while the giant machine is “very exciting to drive” it comes with unique traits that have to be mastered to ensure the successful delivery of a multi-billion dollar rocket.

#Crawler transporter drivers#

To help reduce fatigue, drivers are limited to roughly one hour of seat time each.

You have to be even more proactive,' Rohloff explained. 'If you have a really heavy load it steers a little slower. The youngest and sole female driver of NASA's crawler, 24-year-old Breanne Rohloff, said load impacts steering behavior. NASA’s Crawler-Transporter II, the massive rocket hauler which weighs in at 6.6 million pounds unloaded, comes with quite a learning curve that calls for a high skillset from both the driver and a team of specialists that go along for the ride at the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida. Driving the world’s largest vehicle? Even more so. Driving trucks and construction equipment can be challenging.