CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: While NASA considers competing bids to take over a shuttle launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, it added three mobile launch platforms to its list of excess equipment available to private industry, officials said on Tuesday.
Ideally, NASA wants a commercial launch company to take over one or more of the massive steel platforms, which were originally built in 1967 to support the Apollo moon program's Saturn rockets. The 25-foot (7.6-meter) tall platforms were later modified for the space shuttles, which flew from 1981 until 2011.