NASA's Massive Rocket Transporter Is Officially a Record-Breaking Big Boy
NASA’s Crawler Transporter 2 was originally designed to carry Saturn V rockets during the Apollo program nearly 60 years ago. The aging giant recently got a much-needed upgrade for supporting the Artemis SLS megarocket, beating its twin vehicle for a world record.
On Wednesday, Guinness World Records presented NASA teams at the Kennedy Space Center with a certificate confirming that, at a whopping 6.65 million pounds (3 million kilograms), Crawler Transporter 2 is the world’s heaviest self-powered vehicle, NASA announced in a statement.
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“Anyone with an interest in machinery can appreciate the engineering marvel that is the crawler transporter,” Shawn Quinn, program manager of Exploration Ground Systems, said in the statement. “This crawler captured the attention of the world during the Artemis I mission when it carried the rocket and spacecraft that will send our astronauts to the Moon to the launch pad.”
But where would the Crawler Transporter 2 be without its original sidekick? In 1965, Crawler Transporter 1 and 2 made their debut together, transporting NASA’s rockets to Launch Complex 39 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The pair were later nicknamed Hans and Franz, two bodybuilder characters from a popular Saturday Night Live sketch, according to Collect Space.
In 2012, Franz, or Crawler Transporter 2, started undergoing a major makeover in order to support NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket designed to transport humans to the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years. After its glow-up, the vehicle put on some extra weight. It went from being a thickly built 5.95 million pounds to a record-breaking, super thicc vehicle at 6.65 million pounds—the same weight as 1,000 pickup trucks.
“NASA’s crawlers were incredible pieces of machinery when they were designed and built in the 1960s,” John Giles, NASA’s Crawler Element Operations manager, said in the statement. “And to think of the work they’ve accomplished for Apollo and shuttle and now Artemis throughout the last six decades makes them even more incredible.”
Due to how heavy the Crawler Transport is, the vehicle essentially crawls its way to the launch pad. It takes about eight to 12 hours for the rocket-carrying vehicle to drive the 4.2 miles (6.7 kilometers) from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch pad, going at a slow and steady speed of one mile per hour (1.6 kilometers per hour). It could take you a shorter time to walk that distance by foot.
The Crawler Transporter 2 successfully, and repeatedly, escorted the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule for their inaugural launch during the Artemis 1 mission in November 2022. Today, the crawler is being prepped for Artemis 2 (scheduled for launch in November 2024) by “replacing the ‘shoes’ on the two large tracks the crawler rolls on, performing corrosion control on the truck’s interior, and carrying the mobile launcher prior to stacking SLS and Orion top,” NASA wrote.
A Guinness World Record—and new shoes? Crawler Transporter 2 is killing it, and we can’t wait to see it slowly make its way to the pad once more.
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