During the Cold War, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center boasted four armored personnel carriers, all M113s, and they represented one of the rarest variants of one of the most manufactured armored personnel carriers in military history.
The M113 APC
The M113 is a beast that is not as well-known as it deserves to be. Manufactured since 1960, the American-made vehicle has served in the militaries of at least 44 countries. The United States still has north of 10,000 of them, mostly in storage. Dozens of countries still use it actively. Egypt and Iran still manufacture variants of it. It first saw combat in Vietnam but is trading fire in the Russo-Ukraine War and the current Israeli invasion of Gaza.
There have been more than 80,000 vehicles manufactured in more than 40 variants.
It would be like if your grandpa was a Golden Gloves boxer as a kid and still gets in the occasional bar fight to keep his skills up (and hats off to your grandpa if he actually meets that description).
But four of those armored personnel carriers served with NASA. That means the NASA variant of the M113 was actually rarer than Space Shuttles, because there were six Space Shuttles manufactured, and four of them still exist in museums.
Why does NASA need an APC?
What makes it even more weird is that the M113s didn’t serve in a security role. They were part of rescue services, and it makes sense pretty quickly once you hear the plan.
Basically, we have, unfortunately, lost astronauts in technical tests and during mission launches. Three astronauts died in a January 1967 test of the Apollo 1 capsule while it was filled with pure oxygen. And, more famously, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded less than two minutes after takeoff, claiming the lives of seven astronauts.
NASA knows that setting massive fires under enormous pods of rocket fuel and oxidizer is dangerous, and the actual deaths of astronauts on test pads or just above them have reinforced that problem.
And so NASA wanted an armored vehicle that would enable rescue crews to do their best to save astronauts, either right after an explosion or during an active fire.
So if other firefighters can mount jet engines to a tank hull and use the resulting monstrosity for fighting oil fires, what’s wrong with a few APCs between friends?
The M113 is just built different
The M113s have enough armor to shake off most debris, offer some protection from hot fires just because of how long it would take heat to make it through the thick skin, and drive on treads that would allow it to drive over any wreckage.
“We want to give the astronauts, close-out crew, and ice inspection team the comfort to know that when called, we are going to be there no matter what happens,” Battalion Chief David Seymour of the Kennedy Space Center Fire Department said in 2011.
NASA painted the APCs to mark them as emergency vehicles. One M113 had a thick white layer on its outside that, according to some speculation, was asbestos paste or plates. Remember, there was no asbestos ban until 1989, and even that was largely overturned. So there’s an even chance that at least one NASA M113 chalked up a kill or two. The rest just got white paint, which seems safer.
The paint job evolved until the switch to MRAP vehicles for the 2017 launches. The final paint job was mostly yellow, the same bright shade of yellow used on many emergency vehicles.
End of an era for the NASA M113s
Luckily, the M113s never had to pull a crew away from a rocket explosion. The switch to MRAPs makes the whole thing a little less exciting for someone who has ridden in MRAPs, but the MRAPs are 10 to 20 percent faster.
The best part of the rescue plan isn’t the armored vehicles, though. It’s how the astronauts get from the tower to the vehicle.
If astronauts make it onto the tower and then have an emergency, they’re supposed to take a ride in a basket down a zip line to 1,300 feet away to meet the armored vehicles that will race them away. Obviously, no one wants an emergency on the launch pad, but a photo of someone going from an exploding launch tower, down a wire, and into a waiting armored vehicle would make a hell of a Tinder profile photo.
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