Come the year 2001, the first Delta IV rocket, the first major redesign in U.S. rockets in 20 years, will take off from Cape Canaveral's new Launch Complex 37b. The new unmanned rocket will burn cleaner, cost less, have fewer parts, and generate more thrust than its predecessors. It also will be the first on Florida's Space Coast to be assembled horizontally and then raised vertically onto the concrete launch structure.
Undergirding the completely rebuilt Launch Complex 37b is a concrete structure so complex that the concrete contractor's project superintendent spent 3 weeks building a scale model to understand it. Just to build it, workers for the concrete subcontractor, Baker Concrete Construction, had to practically become rocket scientists themselves.
