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The current floor space is approximately 600,000 square feet or 55741.8 square meters or .021522039 square mile. The state of Delaware is approximately 2026 square miles. Therefore, the size of the methane hot spot is around 94136.23 times the size of the Library of Congress.

Note that this leaves out the sizes of the Annex, built in 1930, and the Madison building, built in 1981. The Madison building is over 2 million square feet.

Not a tree, a rock, a cathedral, a road, a car, a plane?

You call that a mash-up? This is a mash-up:

The year is 315 AD, and the absolute despot of the western world, Caesar Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus has commissioned a Mission Acc^W^W triumphal arch to celebrate a battle his army* won for him three years ago. He orders that this arch be constructed in the style of triumphal arches of emperors long ago.

The only problem is that a century of warfare, overtaxation, hyperinflation, and neglect has driven the Roman middle class to extinction, along with its sculptors, masons, goldsmiths and painters. There is nobody left alive who knows how to build a triumphal arch! Yet you are a loyal imperial servant (capricious executions tend to breed a kind of loyalty), and you have to figure out a way to give the emperor what he wants.

What do you do? You build the basic framework of an arch. You take statues from the forum of Trajan and stick them on top of your arch. You chisel some ba-relief sculptures off of Hadrian's buildings, touch them up to look like your emperor, and paste them onto your structure.

At the end of the day, you show your emperor his "new" arch, and all is well. You go to bed that night and don't think anything of it, because it's routine and expected to cannibalize old monuments. If everyone does it, it can't be wrong, right? It can't indicate that your culture is terminally sick, can it?

* By that time the army had a huge portion of auxiliari^W mercenar^Wprivate security contractors. Italians go the war? That was so 100AD.

I work for an extremely successful software company (Google is one of our clients) - I work in a cubicle - The office is in Chicago's Merchandise Mart - for those of you about to rock, I salute you, but for those of you who don't know, the MM takes up two entire city blocks (which in Chicago means it's 1/8 mile x 1/4 mile), has its own zip code and is the largest commercial building in the world - Only 5% of the people who work in the building are fortunate enough to have an office on an exterior wall of the building (with a window!) - where the hell are they going to put everybody else? build offices out of the whole scenario? Perhaps I'm a sucker, but I'd rather work with my headphones on (like I would anyway) and have the company's money go toward the huge bonus I'll get at the end of every year for working hard than toward them re-modeling the interior of this building - work is just where I work to get money to do the things I do when I'm not at work - the cubicle (or "office" as I like to call it) is the least of my issues
I rate this article a 2 out of 5 - if the kid hadn't put his graduation year in the article, I still would have been able to guess his age just from his idealistic rant with little real substance - "don't work for a manager that's an idiot" - Brilliant advice, captain underpants! yes, it's true that it's difficult to work for someone you don't respect, but in the real world (aka, not in your high school honors class) you're going to work with people who are of different levels of intelligence, people with different types of analytical skills, etc. Calling everybody stupid just because you're, as mentioned in the article, 'disillusioned' is what we call (in the grown up world) "being a fucking baby" - which we normally follow with "grow up"

just to add on... the kennedy's also owned the merchandise mart up until a few years ago. for those that don't know, the merchandise mart was world's largest commercial space until the pentagon was built. http://www.aviewoncities.com/chicago/merchandisema rt.htm

The truth here is that so much money was getting tossed around at the time for rocketry that it was often a "Flavor of the Month(tm)" for names and designs. The reason why it was called Jupiter was because it was supposed to succeed the Saturn-class vehicles in terms of size.

The real reason they weren't use, like you mentioned, is that it wasn't really needed. Manufacturing facilities may have also been limited, but I seriously think that was not a major issue at the time. The Apollo project was in many ways like Hoover Dam, the Manhattan Project, or even the Great Pyramid in Giza in terms of manpower and resources devoted to getting it to work. It touched just about every single high-tech industry. I remember "putting on" the helmets used for Apollo 16, and that was with a very minor company that was only a sub-sub-sub contractor.

The number of people working for either NASA, related Air Force projects, or NASA contractors numbered in the millions, and represented more than 15% of the Federal Government in terms of spending... at one point getting very close to Defense spending in terms of the amount of money going out the door. And that was during the middle of a war in the USA (Vietnam). This is why I doubt having a factory to build the things was a problem, because a whole new factory would have been built from scratch had it really been needed. Virtually a blank check to get the rocket to the moon.

To talk about specialized facilities, I would say that the Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC is about as specialized as they come. It was built for the Apollo Program (not the Shuttles... although it was modified for the Shuttle program later). This is also where I was trying to point out that much larger rockets were intended to be built there. Not much additional work was done to accomodate the space shuttles, because it was built to deal with much wider rockets, like the full Shuttle and launch pad. Even the Saturn V had ample clearance above the Launch Escape tower, and the crane inside the building could handle a rocket about 100 feet higher.

Other facilities were also added to KSC to deal with the larger rockets, so it is obvious that at least at one point much larger rockets were intended to be launched from KSC.

BTW, thanks for the links to the Nova rockets. Seeing a Saturn V get dwarfed by the other rocket designs really gives a good scale to things. The Saturn V was really a 30-story sky scraper that was intended to fly, and those other vehicles just make me think more of trying to get the Chrysler Building into orbit.