The Bagger 288 (Excavator 288), built by the German company Krupp for the energy and mining firm Rheinbraun, is a bucket-wheel excavator. More specifically, it is a mobile strip mining machine. When its construction was completed in 1978, Bagger 288 superseded NASA's Crawler-Transporter, used to carry the Space Shuttle and Apollo missions, as the largest tracked vehicle in the world at 13,500 tons. However, the Bagger is powered from an external source and is more correctly described as a mining machine which can be moved, while the crawler-transporter was built as a self-powered, load-carrying vehicle.