50 YEARS AGO... THEY OPENED THE BIDS

Some people wonder what happened to the original Launch Complexs 37 and 34? Well, here it is in a nutshell. On February 10, 1972 the GSA opened the bids that they had requested for the demolition of the launch towers and steel fixtures at the former Saturn I and Saturn IB launch pads. These structures had not been used for active flight vehicle operations since October of 1968 when Apollo 7 departed LC-34. If not constantly painted and serviced the salt air causes the steel to rust and decay. By 1971 it was determined that the sites were useless and much of what equipment may be considered good for later purposing was stripped away. All that remains was considered to be worth nothing more to the U.S. Government. So, assorted scrap dealers were invited to bid on buying and removing all that remained.

The highest bid was just $58,000.

That's exactly $386,854 on February 10, 2022.

It took only a matter of a couple of months for the launch towers and service gantries as well as the two steel launch pedestals at LC37 A and B to be demolished and hauled away. When I visited there a year later, only the concrete structures remained.

Now... you may be thinking how short sighted it was to rip down and scrap these historic sites. Why were they not preserved as monuments?

The cold hard fact is that although historic events took place on Cape Canaveral, it is an active Air Force station and NOT a museum. Additionally, these sites were erected to serve a very specific purpose... and that was NOT to be a museum. They were developed for testing and perfecting cold war weapons and Apollo hardware... PERIOD. Once that job was finished, so were the launch sites. There were no federal tax dollars to maintain the structures so the rusting towers actually became a safety hazard. These sites were never intended to be monuments to the space program and thus were not designed as such and could never serve that purpose.

It's only by public out-cry that LC-34 remains as we see it today. And it is only because SpaceX got it at a huge discount price that parts of LC-37 are still around.

Scrappers are exactly that. They don't see things in terms of historic value at all. Rather they only see things in terms of scrap market value. 

Who knows... the frame of the bike you raced around on as a kid may just have been formed from parts of the two launch towers that were melted down and recycled for just $58,000. Mine was a Fuji from Japan... heck, that scrap may actually have gone that far.