Throwing Away Pieces of History

Sell the bricks for $10.00 each to help pay for the repairs!

I'd have to agree with this one. These bricks saw every Saturn V launch except Apollo 10 and then 70 shuttle flights. They should be museum pieces, and some of them could be broken up and distributed in lucite as suggested.

Give them away as awards for the hard-working employees who launch the vehicle that damaged the pad!

Previous news reports said asbestos had to be cleaned up before pad repairs could begin. I'd hazard a guess the bricks are also contaminated.

I sort'a think ... just about every public school in the country would love to have one of those bricks embedded in a wall for the kids to see and touch. And since encouraging the next generation of scientists and engineers and explorers is supposed to be one of NASA's goals ...

Perhaps someone might suggest this to Mike Griffin?

HOW STUPID! They could sell every single one of them and raise a ton of cash.

Build a memorial using all the bricks to honor all who flown from there.

Retrachtiek has the right idea, but it needs "amplified".
Have astronauts autograph them, and sell 'em on eBay.
Sell the other ones through the KSC gift shop, plastic-encapsulated for $19.99.

And get a contractor that relines steelmaking furnaces in there to do the job the right way...you need a sprayable refractory material we called "Gunmix" to seal the brickwork and prevent water from getting behind the bricks.

My late father did that work for U.S. Steel for nearly 40 years.

They should be made available for outside paving stones, where the trace asbestos won't be a concern.

I would love to have a patio or driveway covered in those things.

I work for a contractor at NASA. Sometimes we get stickers and even little flags that flew on the shuttle. If one of those pointy haired managers came around and gave me a piece of a brick from the launch pad I would throw it in the trash.

Encase them in acrylic like the pieces of skylab, and sell them.

"I work for a contractor at NASA. Sometimes we get stickers and even little flags that flew on the shuttle. If one of those pointy haired managers came around and gave me a piece of a brick from the launch pad I would throw it in the trash."

That's a pretty sorry, disgusting attitude to see from anyone who works for the program. Is what what you do with the flown items you get?

Less anyone think our dear "Robin" is serious, consider her chosen moniker, the most mocked of the "Rude Mechanicals" in "A Midsummer Night's Dream". Like her character who attempted to portray moonshine, our own Robin's guise of an uncaring contractor has ridiculously failed.

It is probably not a bad idea to preserve some bricks, possibly hundreds. Keep in mind though that when they strip down the pads during "the gap" there will be plenty of pieces of launch pad to sell.

Give me a brick, I mean give me a break. Must we make a big deal out of every crumb of material that is used and then discarded by the space program. What is it that makes something worth of intervention, or even worthy of preservation and distribution? Granted that if someone will pay, that defines its value. But my view is, its just a brick.
Seems to me that saying otherwise implies that every trivial nut and bolt has transcendent value, and therefore NASAs transcendence lies in its trivial things, like bootprints on the moon. The National Cancer Research center doesn't embed used vials in plastic and sell them? They will be remembered by their cures for cancer, just as NASA will be remembered by exploration and science, not bricks.
Lets not major in the minors.

Please let us know if we can have a chance to buy one.

As ridiculous as it may be, I would throw the stupid brick away even though the Duke of Athens himself presents it to me.

"But my view is, its just a brick." -- mwfair

And you're certainly entitled to that view, but if by distributing these bricks to museums that are without the benefit of large space displays and/or schools that are without other space artifacts within reach, or even to the public so that they are seen and appreciated in offices and homes rather than lying in a landfill, and if by doing so it inspires just a handful more people in each community to take even a brief interest in space exploration history (as other artifacts of equally lower stature have), isn't that worth doing?

I can understand that to some, even perhaps many, the bricks are seen as nothing more than refuse, but as there are people who think differently and as there are ways to save them at little or no cost to NASA, why would anyone advocate against their being saved?

Robin, we get it. Go ahead and quit your job if you hate NASA so much.

Well, speaking as a NASA contractor, I'd love to have one of these bricks. And I wouldn't throw it away. I'd proudly display it in the living room.

However, I suspect my long-suffering wife, who has put up with an endless parade of oddball NASA mementos cluttering up the house, would never allow it. :(

I guess NASA doesn't regard pads 39A and B as sacred ground.

On a related matter: Were the FSS towers at both pads were made from the old Saturn launch towers.? If so, they will be scrapped and disposed when the new Ares towers are built. I wouldn't mind having a fragment from one of these towers.