IN A WORLD WITHOUT CASTINGS Would NASA Be Able to Move Its Vehicles?


Even for NASA, moving vehicles at the Kennedy Space Center is a massive undertak- ing. But castings make it happen. Crawler transporters, which weigh around


six million lbs., have carried objects such as the Saturn IB and Saturn V rockets, Space Shuttles and the Ares I-X to their launch pads from the vehicle assembly building. T e crawlers sit on four crawler drive units, which have two tracks with a string of 57 crawler shoes linked together. T e track shoes were re-done over a


decade ago and cast via the vacuum forming process to form sand molds. T ey were pro- duced by ME Elecmetal, Duluth, Minnesota, which delivered over 1,000 of the castings that weighed 2,200 lbs.


20 | MODERN CASTING August 2016


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