"So last year, probably about halfway through the year, NASA and KSC decided we weren't using all of the VAB, so we were going to lease out certain areas. "It became a simple process of, we ran out of room," said Giles. At that time, NASA's plan was to store MLP-3 in High Bay 2 of the VAB, where it was for about a year. The platform sitting at its park site hinted at its fate, given the same location was used to demolish MLP-2 (ML-2) in 2021. NASA did not announce its decision to discard MLP-3.
The steel structure is set to be demolished to make room for NASA's Artemis program hardware. NASA's Mobile Launch Platform-3 (MLP-3) at the midway park site at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
"Right now, they're going through the process of sampling everything and making sure there are no hazardous chemicals left on board before they start the salvage process," Giles said. "MLP-3 has been moved out to the midfield park site and is awaiting demolition by a salvage contractor," John Giles, engineering operations manager for the crawler-transporters and other large equipment in NASA's Exploration Ground Systems program at Kennedy, said in an interview with. Mobile Launch Platform-3 (MLP-3), or Mobile Launcher-1 (ML-1) as it was known when NASA used it for the Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 lunar missions more than 50 years ago, is set to be demolished, having recently been moved out of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to a nearby yard at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The historic steel platform from which the first astronauts departed Earth to fly around and land on the moon now, itself, only has a limited time left on the planet.
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