Want to Drive a Rocket to the Launchpad? This 24-Year-Old Does It for NASA!

“We are like the Kennedy Space Centres Uber for Rockets.”

You may have never thought about it but somehow, someone has to get space rockets from where they are made to where they are launched. This is not some act of magic but a well-planned event that involves a machine capable of moving a skyscraper-sized spacecraft safely from the assembly shack to the launch pad.

Breanne in her ‘office’.

The task of doing this now falls to a twenty-four-year-old named Breanne Rohloff, who is an engineer for NASA contractor, Jacobs. She has the task of driving the 6.5 million pound crawler-transporter the 4.6 miles from the assembly sheds to the launchpad at a not so blistering speed of one mile per hour. The Crawler rides on 4 massive caterpillar treads (aka tank tracks), is 35 metres wide, 40 metres long and about 8 metres tall, and is billed as the heaviest heavy-lift vehicle in the world.

It is big!

There are two crawlers called Hans and Franz and they both date back to the Apollo era in the 1960s when they were originally built to move the Saturn V that eventually took mankind to the moon. Now, more than fifty years later, the crawlers will be used to transport NASA’s Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft to the launchpad and perhaps poetically they could well be used to transport NASA’s Artemis mission, which will see a human crew back on the moon real soon.

Before any of this happens, though, engineers like Breanne will be spending hours undertaking routine maintenance to ensure there are no problems on the way to the launchpad. Of course, our sponsor X-1R know quite a bit about the Launch Crawlers as they have been tasked with providing lubricants as part of the NASA preventative maintenance programme since 1996.

X-1R’s involvement with the launch crawler has proven that X-1R products are the best on the market and earned them the accolade of “Certified Space Technology” and a well-deserved place in the Space Technology Hall of fame, the only lubricant to have earned this distinction.

Breanne got the space bug when she was young watching the Space Shuttle launches. As she went through school, her interest grew and she ended up at the University of Central Florida reading Engineering, which finally got her a place working at the world-famous Kennedy Space Centre.