When NASA rolls its Artemis 1 moon mission out to the launch pad today (March 17), most eyes will be on the giant rocket gearing up for its first-ever flight. But the machine carrying it deserves some attention, too, for it's a marvel in its own right. On Artemis 1, NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket will send an uncrewed Orion capsule on a roughly month-long journey around the moon. The mission is expected to lift off in May or June, but the SLS-Orion duo will trek to the pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida today for testing, including a crucial "wet dress rehearsal" that will practice many of the procedures performed on launch day.
The Artemis 1 SLS stands 322 feet tall (98 meters) tall and weighs 5.75 million pounds (2.60 million kilograms). It will travel about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) during today's rollout, which will start at KSC's cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and end about 11 hours later at Launch Pad 39B. CT-2 is one of the two crawlers that were built in 1965 to support NASA's Apollo moon missions. They're two of the largest machines ever constructed; each is 131 feet long by 114 feet wide (39.9 m by 34.7 m) — about the size of a baseball infield — and weighs more than 6 million pounds (2.7 million kg). Like tanks, the crawlers drive on treads rather than wheels. Each crawler has eight treads, each of which consists of 57 "shoes." Each of those shoes weighs 2,100 pounds.
Credits:
https://www.space.com/nasa-artemis-1-rollout-crawler-transporter-2
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