Marion won the NASA contract and the crawler-transporters were assembled in 1965-66 for under $15 million and ended up being worth billions over their 50-year service life. He reminded NASA that his company had years of experience building large shovels, giant strip mining machines, and dragline machines going back to the Panama Canal and Hoover Dam projects. Dwyer, then Vice President of Marion Power Shovel Company, was instrumental in Marion Power Shovel obtaining the NASA contract. They are driven by 16 electric motors that are powered by four V16 diesel engines capable of moving the crawler forward at 1-2 miles per hour. The approximately four mile trip takes about six hours to traverse. Each vehicle has eight tracks, two on each corner each track has 57 shoes, and each shoe weighs 1,984 pounds. Their original goal was to build a system capable of moving extremely large structures, several miles, in a reasonable amount of time.Įach crawler-transporter is massive - weighing 6 million pounds and measuring 131 by 114 feet the height from ground level to the platform can adjust from 20 to 26 feet. While the Bucyrus-Erie machine’s undercarriage sparked the design concept for the crawler-transporter, the Crawler Transporters which were eventually built were a Marion creation - the work of the talented Marion Power Shovel engineers. If that engineer had driven a few more miles, he would have been equally in awe of the Marion Mountaineer in operation at another nearby mine. The shovel–that he described as having a platform as big as a football field, with tracks 8-feet high, and diesel engines in each track–was the Bucyrus-Erie Big Hog. The idea for a crawler-launcher platform started when a NASA engineer visited his father’s farm near Paradise, Kentucky, and observed a giant strip mining shovel in operation. They also transported the Apollo rockets and, thus, began the voyage which resulted in Neil Armstrong, from nearby Wapakoneta, Ohio, becoming the first man to walk on the moon. These enormous tracked vehicles were originally used to ferry the Saturn rockets between Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building and the launch pads. Marion, Ohio, in no small way, was part of that historic mission.īetween 1964-66, the former Marion Power Shovel Company designed and built two crawler-transporters – formally known as Missile Crawler Transporter Facilities – for NASA. July 16, 2019, marks the 50 th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch.
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