Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

Describing the scale of his creation, Buchanan used to suggest that his listeners imagine the infield of a major-league baseball diamond being cut out and made into a platform. Then they should imagine the platform, elevated on its monster treads, moving along a track for three miles. Now all Buchanan’s listeners had to do was imagine the elevated baseball infield moving along a track for three miles carrying two-thirds of the Washington Monument on top, coming to a five-degree slope, and then climbing it. Last of all, they must imagine that as the assembly climbs the slope, the baseball infield is hydraulically jacked so that it remains level throughout the climb. That was the crawler. It was a marvel for which Buchanan was honored with some of the most prestigious awards in the engineering fraternity, but the ways in which it was a marvel are for the most part too technical to be appreciated by anyone except other engineers. For the lay reader, perhaps this is enough: During its voyage from the V.A.B. to the launch pad, including its climb up that five-degree slope, the tip of the Saturn, 363 feet above the platform, never moved outside the vertical by more than the dimensions of a basketball.