The outrageous plot of NASA hiring a group of miners for a space mission may remind you of a certain Hollywood movie, but back in the mid-1960s when the space organization was trying to reach the moon, they did, in fact, look towards coal miners and their tools for inspiration. Back then, NASA had just completed designing the Saturn V, the behemoth of a rocket weighing nearly 3,000 tons that would take the first men to the moon, but they had yet to figure out how to deliver this monstrous rocket from the assembly building to the launch pad.
For the safe movement of the crawler-transporter together with its precious cargo engineers designed a unique roadbed, as wide as an 8-lane freeway from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch pad, a distance of about 4 miles. Each of the dual trackways, separated by a median strip, consisted of a foundation of compacted sand, followed by a meter-thick layer of crushed aggregate, topped by a blacktop sealer. The crawlerway could support loads in excess of 58,000 kilograms per square meter
