Just as an enemy is more dangerous to a retreating army, so every trouble that fortune brings attacks us all the harder if we yield and turn our backs.
The Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB, at our Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is the only facility where assembly of a rocket occurred that carried humans beyond low-Earth orbit and on to the Moon. For 30 years, its facilities and assets were used during the Space Shuttle Program and are now available to commercial partners as part of our agency’s plan in support of a multi-user spaceport. To celebrate the VAB’s continued contribution to humanity’s space exploration endeavors, we’ve put together five out-of-this-world facts for you!
1. It’s one of the largest buildings in the world by area, the VAB covers eight acres, is 525 feet tall and 518 feet wide.
Aerial view of the Vehicle Assembly Building with a mobile launch tower atop a crawler transporter approaching the building.
2. The VAB was constructed for the assembly of the Apollo/Saturn V Moon rocket, the largest rocket made by humans at the time.
An Apollo/Saturn V facilities Test Vehicle and Launch Umbilical Tower (LUT) atop a crawler-transporter move from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) on the way to Pad A on May 25, 1966.
3. The building is home to the largest American flag, a 209-foot-tall, 110-foot-wide star spangled banner painted on the side of the VAB.
Workers painting the Flag on the Vehicle Assembly Building on January 2, 2007.
4. The tallest portions of the VAB are its 4 high bays. Each has a 456-foot-high door. The doors are the largest in the world and take about 45 minutes to open or close completely.
A mobile launcher, atop crawler-transporter 2, begins the move into High Bay 3 at the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) on Sept. 8, 2018.
A model of Northrop Grumman’s OmegA launch vehicle is flanked by the U.S. flag and a flag bearing the OmegA logo during a ribbon-cutting ceremony Aug. 16 in High Bay 2 of the Vehicle Assembly Building.
Whether the rockets and spacecraft are going into Earth orbit or being sent into deep space, the VAB will have the infrastructure to prepare them for their missions.
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Nearly all of the dozens of Indigenous languages in British Columbia are threatened with extinction but, according to a local First Nations organization, the tide is turning as more and more young people learn the languages.
Aliana Parker, language programs manager with the First Peoples’ Cultural Council on Vancouver Island, said the “huge amount of effort” to revitalize the languages appears to be paying off.
“There has been 150 years or more of policies that have deliberately aimed to extinguish these languages and, because of that, all of the Indigenous languages in B.C. have severe threats to their vitality,” Parker said.
“But we have great hope that the trend is reversing.”
B.C. is home to 34 distinct Indigenous languages, from seven different language families.
The languages within a linguistic family could be as similar as Italian and Spanish, Parker said, but languages from different families can be as different as Korean and English.
According to the First Peoples’ Cultural Council’s report, though, about 78 per cent of the people learning the languages are under the age of 25.
“Language revitalization is very complex work and it won’t happen overnight but there’s a lot that is being done,” Parker said.
Nightbeast’s reputation precedes it with two claims to
fame that have little to do with the actual content of the movie. It’s
most notable for having a score co-composed by a 16-year-old J.J. Abrams
(credited as Jeffrey Abrams), who went on to make a couple of popular science fiction flicks of his own. Just recently, it was featured in Mandy
as the eccentric movie that Nicolas Cage’s character watches. Beyond
all that, however, Nightbeast serves as the epitome of a lost era of
regional horror filmmaking for the home video market.
Written
and directed by Don Dohler, the 1982 creature feature is a loose redux
of his earlier film, The Alien Factor. The Baltimore-based cult Z-movie
maker coined the phrase “blood, boobs, and beast” as the three elements
necessary to sell a film. He practices what he preaches, as Nightbeast
delivers all three in spades - and not much else. It’s far from a good
picture, but there’s an incontrovertible charm to its do-it-yourself
ethics and homegrown aesthetic. Through the barrage of unintentional camp, every frame
is genuine.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
