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The Path to Space

Support is the real mission in preparing a team to maintain NASA’s famed crawlerway.

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From the days of the first U.S. men in space, to the Apollo program which landed man on the moon, to the 135 launches of the shuttle program, pictures and video of a rocket being moved from its assembly building to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center have never failed to impress. While the focus is generally on the massive mobile crawler/launch platform and the payload they are carrying, there’s no denying that the crawlerway on which they travel played a huge role in the success of any of those missions. Without its ability to withstand weights in the tens of millions of pounds — and do so with only a miniscule deviation in attitude — the move could not be achieved. So, when NASA and the Kennedy Space Center decided to self-perform maintenance of that crawlerway, their expressed need was simple: “a road grader and associated guidance equipment.” That request, however, meant that the new maintenance team charged with that task needed to acquire familiarity with the machine as well as some solid total station knowledge and LPS-based machine control skills. Making that happen was a collaborative effort between key organizations, leading to an assurance that the crawlerway will be in better shape than ever. Not just the right stuff — the perfect stuff.

Changing Tactics

Maintenance of the crawlerway had, in the past, been subcontracted to an outside construction firm. However, in preparation for the upcoming Artemis moon exploration program, NASA made operational changes, one of which was opting to retain control of that task. Essentially starting from square one with an in-house crew, the organization had to first procure the equipment needed to tackle the job. It was that outreach that caught the attention of Curtiss Dorr, a member of the governmental sales team for Topcon Positioning Systems.

 

“We constantly monitor the RFPs (requests for proposal) that are released by the various branches of government and this particular one stood out for a couple reasons,” said Dorr, Topcon’s Senior Government and Strategic Business Development Manager. “One, it was a very high-profile contract, and two, while NASA was specific in what it was needing — even naming equipment brands — they also added an “or equivalent” qualifier. That phrase told me that, with the right effort and collaborative team, we could be the answer they need.”

 

Confident that Topcon could easily meet the machine control facet of NASA’s request, Dorr considered the next logical step: contacting the distribution partner to provide the motor grader.

The choice of whom to partner with was made much simpler by the years-long relationship Topcon enjoys with Dobbs Equipment, an Orlando-based John Deere dealer with branches throughout the southeast U.S. According to Roger Croft, Dobbs’ general manager, after some back-and-forth discussions, working through the General Services Administration (GSA), they presented NASA with a bid consisting of a John Deere 670 GP motor grader and Topcon GTS 1201 robotic total station to provide the necessary LPS machine control solution.

New to the Game

The crawlerway around which all this effort center, is a 4.2 mile long path that connects NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building (where rockets are assembled atop a mobile launch platform) with Launch Pads 39A and 39B. Designed to support the mobile crawler and its varied payloads, it consists of a pair of 40’-wide lanes separated by a 50’ median. Despite its mission-critical role, the new team charged with maintaining the crawlerway — a task that calls for a full grading to tight, unforgiving, accuracies — had virtually no grading experience.

“Because this was all new to the operators, there was a good deal of training needed, and that aspect was handled jointly by Topcon and Dobbs,” said Croft. “Topcon sent Mike Gosnell, one of its application specialists whose forte is instruction on Millimeter GPS and LPS. And Jack Miller from our office worked alongside him to help familiarize the new crew with the John Deere 670 grader.”

According to Topcon’s Gosnell, the crew of operators took to the training surprisingly well.  “These guys are crane operators by trade and not familiar with earthmoving of any kind,” he said. “So they came into this with no GPS experience, no familiarity with machine control, no real knowledge of 3D technology in general. Despite that, they did great. I’d like to think it's a reflection of the thoroughness of my training, but I think it’s more that they're smarter than the average worker, and Topcon and Deere design their technology for user-friendliness. Different members of the crew seemed to embrace different facets of the training, with some really excelling at the machine operation while others took to the LPS side of things and the total station setup. Together, I’m confident that they will have the entire grading process down nicely.”

“More than simply a chance to provide a solution to NASA, this project was a great example of the value we place in OEM support; a commitment that’s at the heart of who we are as a company.”

— Curtiss Dorr

Keep it Straight

As one might imagine, the KSC crawlerway is far from the average surface one might encounter, say, in roadbuilding. Constructed of seven feet of crushed, compacted lime rock and topped with two additional feet of Alabama river rock, the crawlerway is designed to support the mobile crawler and its payload which together can weigh 26.6 million lbs. — the equivalent of 30 fully loaded wide-body Boeing 777s.

 

The training was anything but perfunctory; it was critical from a performance perspective, as grading accuracies for the crawlerway are, understandably, very tight. According to Croft, specifications demand that the uppermost material on the crawlerway — a 4-inch layer of river rock on the straight sections and an 8-inch layer on the curves — can't vary by any more than one inch.

 

“It’s easy to see why those specs are so tight,” he said. “We’ve learned that a tilt in the mobile crawler by as little as 2 inches in any direction causes a fail-safe system to immediately shut the massive vehicle down, possibly impacting the mission’s schedule. Obviously, to avoid that, they want to make sure that any deviation in grade is kept to an absolute minimum. Because the aggregate sizes are different and the material is so loose, one might think that it would be tough to get and keep a consistent grade. But it compresses nicely when driven on, which will allow them to get the 1” spec NASA is demanding.”

“There’s little denying the satisfaction we have in knowing that, with every rocket that rolls out of the VAB toward the launch pad, our technology will be contributing to the success of that launch.”

— Curtiss Dorr

Solutions Available

Looking at the KSC experience as a whole, Topcon’s Dorr said that the outcome was valuable in ways that are not obvious but will reap benefits long after the sale. 

“More than simply a chance to provide a solution to NASA, this project was a great example of the value we place in OEM support; a commitment that’s at the heart of who we are as a company. When an OEM gets an opportunity to quote a machine with technology that is not in their toolbox but is definitely in ours — in this case the GT-1201 robotic total station — we want them to know that they can contact our team for the ideal digital construction technology solution — and that we will back it with the necessary expert training/support.” 

The fact that Topcon was able to play a pivotal role in such a key project was not lost on Dorr or Topcon. “There’s little denying the satisfaction we have in knowing that, with every rocket that rolls out of the VAB toward the launch pad, our technology will be contributing to the success of that launch,” he said. “We’re sure that Roger and his team at Dobbs, the new operators, the governmental team at John Deere, etc., share in that pride. All the science aside, a rocket launch is, at its heart, a collaborative effort. It’s only fitting that our contribution to the space program was as well.” 

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