NASA’s Mobile Launcher Platform-2 – A Structure involved in the Apollo and Stempo SHuttle missions – are being demolished. Incredibly, the space agency is getting rid of the massive platform to make room for parking spaces, such as collectSpace reports.
In a few weeks, Mobile Launcher-2, or MLP-2, will no longer be available.
More than building 50 years ago, the historic NASA launcher was involved in such notable missions as Apollo 12 and 14 (both manned missions to the moon), Skylab (a forerunner of the International Space Station) and every first Stempo SHuttle launch except for Columbia. More dubiously, MLP-2 was the platform from which the Challenger shuttle made its final, tragic flight in 1986. In total, MLP-2 was involved from 1968 to more than 50 launches 2011. So yes, a lot of history has gripped this bumpy 160-foot-long, 135-foott-width, 25-foohigh structure (if you would like more information on MLP-2, including a list of every NASA mission it has been involved in, you can check out this extensive fan page).
Like Robert Pearlman of collectSPACE reports, NASA made the decision to demolish the platform for a reason that is too banal.
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Given its history, ‘MLP-2 can be expected to be retired as a museum object’, Pearlman wrote, or that ‘it could continue to serve a purpose as the other two Apollo and shuttle legacy platforms for mobile launches is and is doing. But as MLP-2 demolition project manager Scott Tenhoff told Pearlman, the platform’s space agency is getting rid of “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). These three platforms were built between 1963 and 1965 for the Saturn V, Saturn IB and Saturn INT-21 rockets (of which the latter never fled). After Apollo, the structures were transformed, renamed, and used for the Space Shuttle program.
But NASA is now entering the Artemis era, and the old-fashioned platform can not bear the weight of NASA’s upcoming mega rocket, the Space Launch System, nor a nail tower to support its launch, according to collectSPACE. To this end, NASA completed a new platform in 2018 called ML-1 and start building a second, which should be called ML-2, last year. There is a lot of big hardware lying around, leading to the decision to break down MLP-2.
Not MLP-1 or MLP-3 (pictured above) currently planned for demolition, and MLP-1 is currently being used to prepare crawl spaces (the paths that the mobile launchers take to the launch site) for the upcoming Space Launch System. As NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems recently explained tweet, MLP-1 will ensure that the “road is strong enough to support the weight for the coming @NASAArtemis I start, ”which could happen later this year.
The demolition process is expected to take about one month. The contractors doing the work, Frank-Lin Services of Brevard, use excavators with hydraulic shears to cut off the platform section by section until it is no more, Tenhoff told collectSPACE.
Before Mobile Launcher-2 crashed, NASA did so ask around if anyone is interested in rescuing pieces from the gigantic structure, including the Smithsonian. No one answered.
It’s easy to be cynical about all of this, especially the entire parking lot, but sometimes you just have to move on. Hopefully some smart people take away the important pieces, like a license plate or something of similar nostalgic value. Storing this gigantic structure next to a museum is obviously not acceptable, but it would make sense to exhibit some of the parts. MLP-2 is just too iconic to be thrown away and forgotten.