The Pad That Sent Us to the Moon

Launch Complex 39A was poured in concrete on Merritt Island, Florida in the early 1960s for one purpose: to launch a 363-foot, 6.5-million-pound rocket called Saturn V. The pad's octagonal flame trench, six-million-pound mobile launch platform, and four-mile crawlerway were built to a scale that made every other launch facility in the world look modest. The crawler-transporter that carries rockets the four miles from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the pad weighs 6 million pounds itself and travels at 0.9 mph fully loaded. Pad 39A's first launch was Apollo 4 on November 9, 1967 — an uncrewed Saturn V test that shook the press grandstand 3.5 miles away hard enough to rattle Walter Cronkite's ceiling tiles loose. The first crewed launch from 39A was Apollo 8 on December 21, 1968 — the first humans to leave Earth orbit, riding to the Moon and reading Genesis on Christmas Eve. Then on July 16, 1969 at 9:32 AM EDT, Apollo 11 lifted off from this pad with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. Four days later, Armstrong stepped off the lunar lander onto the Sea of Tranquility. Eleven Saturn V Apollo missions launched from this pad, plus Skylab in 1973. When the Saturn era ended, Pad 39A was rebuilt for the Space Shuttle: STS-1 (Columbia, April 12, 1981) lifted off from here, as did 82 of the 135 shuttle missions, including the final flight of Atlantis on July 8, 2011. NASA leased the pad to SpaceX in 2014. On May 30, 2020 — nine years after the last Shuttle — astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken launched from 39A on a SpaceX Crew Dragon, the first humans to fly to orbit on a privately built spacecraft. The same concrete pad. The same crawlerway. Visible from KTIX (Space Coast Regional, 12 nm south); pilots flying the Florida coast can see the orbiter towers and lightning masts of 39A from 30 miles out, and on launch day from 100 miles out — the steam plume rises through cumulus and the boom hits a long second later. The most historic 3,000 feet in spaceflight.