Could you tell me a little bit about your background and how you came into this job?
I got really interested in space when I was young, just watching shuttle launches on the TV — it felt like astronauts were superheroes. And then that interest just kind of grew as I went through school. I went to the University of Central Florida for engineering, had an internship at the Kennedy Space Center while I was in school and I fell in love with it. Then I came out here to work on the crawler about two and a half years ago when I graduated.
I mean, it sounds exciting. It’s not something that most people ever get the chance to do. I’m kind of wondering what it’s like to drive a crawler, compared to driving a regular car or truck?
The first thing that hit me is we drive standing. And there’s a lot of different visual points that you’re checking. So in a car, you’re looking at the road in front of you, but on the crawlerway there are not a lot of reference points ahead of us. So we’re looking to the sides for different fixed points on the crawler in reference to the sides of the crawlerway. And so we’re keeping those in our viewpoint a lot.
The front right corner is where the cab is; it’s not in the middle. And so we’ve got one of our four sets of tracks directly below us, and one behind us. So a lot of times we’re checking where our front tracks are looking in reference to the front of the crawlerway ahead of us. And we’re also looking behind us to see how our rear tracks are tracking. Because the crawler steers from the middle, but we’re driving from the front right.
Meet the 24-Year-Old Who Drives NASA Rockets to the Launch Pad in a 6.5 Million Pound Crawler
Meet Breanne Rohloff, an engineer for NASA contractor Jacobs who moves rockets around at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in a giant crawler.
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