B ig. Really big. Really quite big. Numbers and photographs don't really describe how massively big this place is. It's one of the largest buildings in the world. If you had four or five Statues of Liberty lying around, you could put them all in here and still have elbow room. In all, the Vehicle Assembly Building encloses 129,428,000 cubic feet of space. And what does NASA do with all that space? Why make space shuttles, of course. There are actually four bays in the building. They accomodate space shuttles, the external fuel tank, and solid rocket boosters. Shuttles moving in and out of the building go through doors 456 feet tall. 1976 - To mark the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution, a huge American flag was painted on the side of the building. It took 6,000 gallons of paint. The flag is 209 x 110 feet.
8 November, 2001: Surface-to-air missiles are installed around Kennedy Space Center to protect the shuttle fleet.
5 September, 2004: The Vehicle Assembly Building is damaged by Hurricane Frances.
