| World / USA / Florida / Titusville, 21 km from center | Coordinates: 28°36'29"N 80°36'14"W |
The most famous of the two launch pads, LC-39A first saw action on the unmanned Apollo 4 mission in October 1967, in which an unmanned Saturn V rocket, the largest rocket in its time, was launched. The second unmanned Apollo-Saturn V test (Apollo 6) also occurred on this pad, in mid-1968. LC-39A saw the launch, commencing with Apollo 8 (December, 1968) of every single Saturn V mission, except for Apollo 10, which used LC-39B. The last Saturn V launch (as the two-stage Saturn INT-21) carrying the Skylab space station, occurred in May, 1973. Less than eight years later, the first flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-1) occurred, and has launch 23 more missions prior to the Challenger Disaster in 1986 (Challenger was launch from nearby LC-39B). LC-39A was also the pad used for the last flight of Columbia (STS-107), but unlike Challenger, which was destroyed during ascent, Columbia disintegrated over Texas during the reentry phase of the mission, and would have touched down at Runway 33 at KSC. Currently, LC-39A will handle the remaining Space Shuttle launches until the Shuttle's retirement in 2010, after which the pad will then be converted over for use as the primary launch facility for the Ares V rocket
Category: space shuttle
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