Florida Picture Gallery, Crawling to work

This is a shot from the Observation Deck looking at STS106 Atlantis on Pad 39A. (This is about 4 miles away). That's as close as civilians can get when a shuttle is on the pad. The road in the foreground is the the "Crawlerway" . It looks like a 4 lane divided highway in this shot but it's really a 15 feet deep gravel road. The gravel at the surface is fairly large, pieces about the size of a cigarette pack. The crawler has one of it's huge tank like tread on EACH lane. The fully assembled shuttle with boosters and external tanks sits on a platform supported by 4 huge tread. The trip from the "Vehicle Assembly Building" (VAB) takes over 5 hours to go 1.3 miles.

However, one day back when Sandi worked at KSC they had the main road closed, (The small road at the bottom of the picture with the truck on it was closed.) and Sandi had to drive to her workplace via the crawlerway. It works well for crawlers that stand 60 feet off the ground, but for a Mazda Miata that sits about 4 inches off the ground it was quite a challenge for her.