and it was there, the complex 39, that the parts were assembled into a cube-shaped building huge, the Vehicle Assembly Building, 158 meters high, a building about as big the Merchandise Mart in Chicago placed over the Pentagon. Covering an area of 3.2 hectares, occupying a volume of 3,612,000 cubic meters, the Vehicle Assembly Building was constructed without windows, decorated the outside using huge concentric rectangles gray-green and gray anthracite gray ivory and gray-blue it looked like a block of wood painted by a sculptor, but he had more than fifty stories, it was also thought to walls a large store of gargantuan suburb built by an architect in mind disturbed. If its volume was the largest building in the world, the Vehicle Assembly Building, as we saw planted on the extent of the marshes filled Cape, a candidate should be well positioned for the ugliest building in the world. Where we came near the, was the finest specimen of architectural fungoides.
However, as soon as we entered inside, it was perhaps one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Erected to enable the simultaneous assembly of four vehicles Saturn Apollo to the Moon, so it was open enough to allow enough space for maneuvering cranes that qautre plunged by huge windows, each of these niches high enough to house the entire rocket (which was the author of thirty-six stories). As this in turn was based on a carrier, called a ramp, some size too, the doors of the four bays were therefore more than four storeys each and were quite high and quite wide, it was claimed, to pass between their leaves the UN building or the Statue of Liberty. Yet despite its size, the VAB was no decoration on the inside, it was rather a real shipyard, an assemblage of steel beams supporting the floors integers that could rise and fall, to then be able the slide as a desk drawer for steel to surround each rocket e-platform work. Since some of these platforms adjustable included three entire floors, inside the VAB was a complex of buildings within buildings, with entire buildings hanging ten, twenty and thirty floors above the ground. Since the sides were generally open platforms could watch other constellations of beams and buildings which stood inside the building and so high that it was, we could always see floor of VAB, sometimes forty stories below. One detail, however: it was always intériuer a confined space, and inside the building, the light provided by translucent panels rising from floor to ceiling was very pale, barely higher than the light inside a church or an old railway station. So we lost all sense of being in a familiar setting: it could be all up in the rafters of a bridge built under the dome of a vast underground city under construction, or on the scaffolding of a cathedral unfinished but monumental, magnificent in this dark, smoky in this tangle of crowded structures, widths and relics and volumes of empty space beneath a ceiling, with the show rockets causing huge hidden behind the network of platforms work. We did not know if it was still on its floor, a platform, bridge, a permanent or ephemeral fabric of this huge metal beams in constant motion, suspended walkways and cranes. There was a feeling of being behind the scene of an opera, the view was also complex, but since the floor could see the ceiling and the ceiling was more than fifty stories high. Watching the rocket's upper floors, or the highest level which would move the crew was exposed to study the extent of his own dizzy. Down, down, soul loss, while low, after a protracted decline was the floor of the building, forty floors below. The breath that were found in his chest rises from the depths of the abyss. And in a corner of the floor, like a stamp on the edge of a large envelope, there was a square bordered by a cordon of several cents ahead of the tourists gaping yellow cranes and girders battleship gray color.
Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer, 1969, 1970, ed. Robert Laffont for trad. 1971, 2009
