NASA’s Mobile Launcher Platform-2 – a structure involved in the Apollo and S.tempo S.huttle missions – currently being aborted. Incredibly, the space agency is freeing itself from the massive platform to make way for parking spaces, such as collectSpace reports.
Within a few weeks, Mobile Launcher-2 or MLP-2 will no longer exist.
Built more than 50 years ago, the historic NASA launch vehicle was involved in such notable missions as Apollo 12 and 14 (both crewed missions to the moon), Skylab (a predecessor to the International Space Station) and every inaugural Stempo S.huttle launch except for Columbia. More questionably, the MLP-2 was the platform from which the Challenger shuttle made its final, tragic flight in 1986. In total, MLP-2 was involved in more than 50 launches from 1968 to 2011. So yes, there is a lot of history pasted on this colossal 160-foot 135-foot-broad, 25-foot-tall structure (if you want more information about MLP-2, including a list of every NASA mission it was involved in, be sure to check out this comprehensive fan page).
Like Robert Pearlman from collectSPACE reports, NASA made the decision to demolish the platform for a reason that is all too banal.
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Given its history, “MLP-2 could be expected to be retired as a museum artifact,” Pearlman wrote, or that “it might continue to serve a purpose, as the two other Apollo and shuttle mobile launch pads are doing.” But as Scott Tenhoff, project manager for the demolition of MLP-2, told Pearlman, the space agency is in the process of removing the platform “because parking is running out.”
Oof.
As Pearlman rightly points out, NASA has two similar platforms, MLP-1 (formerly ML-3) and MLP-3 (formerly ML-1). Built between 1963 and 1965, these three platforms were assembled for the Saturn V, Saturn IB, and Saturn INT-21 missiles (the last of which never took flight). 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 take the weight of NASA’s upcoming mega Space Launch System, nor an umbilical cord to support the launch, according to collectSPACE. To this end, NASA delivered a new platform in 2018 called ML-1 and began building a second, to name ML-2, last year. That’s a lot of massive hardware lying around, which led to the decision to dismantle MLP-2.
Neither MLP-1 or MLP-3 (shown above) are currently scheduled for scrapping, and MLP-1 is currently used to prepare crawl routes (the paths taken by the mobile launchers to the launch pad) for the upcoming Space Launch System. As NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems recently explained tweetMLP-1 will ensure that the “pad is strong enough to hold the weight for the coming @NASAartemis I’m launching, ”which could happen later this year.
The demolition process is expected to take about a month. The contractors Frank-Lin Services of Brevard use excavators with hydraulic shears to cut the platform section by section until it is no longer there. Tenhoff told collectSPACE.
Before the Mobile Launcher-2 was decommissioned, NASA had around early if anyone was interested in rescuing bits of the gigantic structure, including the Smithsonian. Nobody responded.
It’s easy to be cynical about all this, especially the whole parking lot, but sometimes you just have to move on. Hopefully some smart people will take away the important stuff like a license plate or something with a similar nostalgic value. Saving this gigantic structure next to a museum is of course unlikely, but it would make sense to show some of its parts. MLP-2 is just way too iconic to be thrown out and forgotten.