The Crawler Transporters (known as Hanz and Franz) tear up the gravel at a top-speed of 2 mph. But did you know that the driver has to wear a seatbelt? Yep, it's true. Learned about that from Bill Pouge's book Space Trivia (check out Space.com's Daily Space Trivia), though I think I may have heard it somewhere else once, too.
Discovery on Franz. Or it Hanz? One of the two, anyway.
Anyway, I found this funny, so I asked the NASA PAO about it. I got a response today and thought y'all might want to hear about it:
Kandy T. Warren wrote:I am sorry it has taken so long to answer your question but I couldn't
find anyone who knew specifically why the driver of the
crawler-transporter must wear a seat belt other than it is just standard
operating procedure for any person in a moving vehicle to wear a seat
belt.
Kandy Warren
KSC Public Inquiries/Contact Center Manager
321-867-7711
321-867-2692 fax [email protected]
Go figure.
Last edited by Benji on Thu Feb 19, 2004 9:44 pm, edited 2 times in total.
I just realized... Kandy Warren is a manager! This got all the way up to the public inquiries manager! I don't know why I find that so funny, but I guess if she couldn't answer it, her staff wouldn't have been able to, either.
You can clearly see the gravel crawler ways leading to pads 39A and B.
So work with me on this one: There are two crawler vehicles, each with two operator booths which have one seat each and therefore one seatbelt each. This is a total of four seatbelts. Now, a standard seatbelt costs about twenty dollars. We know how the government likes to overpay, though ($50,000 hammers, etc), so we can figure about $75,000 per seatbelt or $300,000 to outfit both crawlers. Given NASA's tendency to replace things frequently, that comes out to about $300 million dollars for the rest of the Shuttle's estimated operating lifetime. The solution to NASA's budget problems: No more seatbelts on crawlers! And that's how we meet (financially, anyway) the President's goals for space. Now if we could only figure out how to land on the Moon...
I work with NASA Quest. (http://quest.arc.nasa.gov) We answer questions from the public on behalf of NASA. Somtimes if we get a strange odd-ball question we can forward it to a list of our experts, people who actually work in specific divisions at NASA. It is pretty neat how the process works, but even the simplest question - like seatbelts on the crawler can stump many people!
