The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 66: GOX Arm Lift, Plus Further Submergence into the Guide Columns Murk. (still being written)
And now that we've hung the
GOX Arm Support Strongback on the FSS, how 'bout we follow that up with the GOX Arm itself?
And we immediately get another
Renaissance Image, with a gang of four Union Ironworkers visible in the frame, plying their dangerous and dramatic craft, working smoothly together as a team,
getting it done.
I never grow tired of photographs like this one. It's imagery like this that is best suited for
putting you there, watching from close range as work that you yourself know
you'll never be able to do unfolds before your very eyes.
I wish I could identify even
one of these people, but no... I cannot.
Their
names are lost to me.
But
they themselves are not.
Click on the picture. Bring it up full-size.
Have a look at the ironworker closest to us in the frame, kneeling down.
He's got his left hand on the clevis end of the big turnbuckle that's attached to the spreader beam on its top end.
But he's not
looking at it.
Instead, he's focused solely upon the Lifting Lug, and you'll notice that the holes in the turnbuckle clevis are matched in size with the hole in the Lifting Lug.
Now look at his gloved right hand. In conjunction with the other ironworker who's holding the top end of the turnbuckle (and there's
something about where he fits in with this gang that tells me he's an
apprentice), he guiding the turnbuckle to the location where he can take the Connecting Pin which he's holding that gloved right hand, and slip it through the holes and then secure it, establishing a firm
connection between the turnbuckle and the GOX Arm Truss which he's kneeling down on.
And with his eyes
completely off of that turnbuckle, he's trusting both his own sense of feel,
and the apprentice who's got both hands on it,
and the crane operator, to prevent something from, in some way (and yes, it
happens),
bashing the living hell out of him should that turnbuckle suddenly
move in an unexpected way.
Now look at the ironworker who's standing straight up, farthest right in the image. And his right hand is on the spreader beam.
Which is
close by the apprentice's
face.
And his left hand is on a
different turnbuckle, and that one is hanging loose, completely free to
swing around, and if it was to
hit someone... well... whatta ya figure that turnbuckle, just the turnbuckle itself, without any of the shackles or connecting links that are attached to it,
weigh?
A hundred pounds?
Maybe
only seventy-five?
Now let it swing around.
Just a little bit.
Not much at all, really.
Now let the shackle that's attached to its lower end do a little crack-the-whip flip and
catch you on the exposed left side of your jaw, just below your hardhat.
Whatta ya suppose a thing like that
might feel like?
Whatta ya suppose a thing like that might
do to you?
Now look at the rest of this Lifting Sling. Spreader beams, swedged wire rope end loops with thimbles on them, connecting links, shackles, connecting pins, turnbuckles,
allofit.
It's
completely loose and free to flop around wherever gravity and human interaction might take it.
Whatta ya supposed the
the very lightest component in there might weigh? Probably one of the connecting pins. Five pounds? Ten?
And before this photograph was taken, it was all
loose pieces that needed to be put together, before the whole thing could then be put to
work, by attaching it to whatever is that needs
lifting.
Those wire rope slings with the swedged and thimbled end loops. Those spreader bars. Those shackles. Those pins. Those connecting links. Those turnbuckles. Somebody's
fingers needed to be
in there, assembling that stuff.
And the crane operator's controlling the
hook that's urging all of it... up off the ground, bit by bit.
And stuff wants to occasionally sort of
pop into a new location as it all gets urged upward. The Lifting Sling and
The Thing Being Lifted, coming together
piecemeal, components sometimes kind of taking a
jump as they do so. And it all needs to be
lifted and moved and positioned, by fits and starts, so as it can continue to get
assembled, piece by piece, part by part, coming together one component at a time.
And as
that's going on...
...
fingers...
...
hands...
...
arms and legs and heads and necks...
...are all
in play.
And no single owner of any finger, any
neck, can be aware of all of it, nor control
all of it, even if they
are aware...
...and all you can do is to try and snatch away,
in time, whatever body part it might be that has suddenly
come into play in an
unexpected way.
And
that's what you're staring right at here in this photograph.
This is
serious business.
Renaissance Grade serious business.
Stick your
finger out and lay it on the table.
Your
own finger.
And now consider...
What might it feel like if that finger were to suddenly, unexpectedly,
without the least bit of warning, get crushed by a piece of cold steel that could easily weigh as much as
your car?
What might the sensations be, were you to look down, immediately after the sound of
a sudden event, and see that
your finger
was no longer there?
Assemble a group of
ironworkers. Twenty or thirty should do. And count the number of fingers. Are there ten times as many fingers as there are
ironworkers?
You run pretty good odds of winding up with a number that is somewhere
less than ten times the number of ironworkers.
And
consider the odds...
With your
own finger.
Ironworking is
the Real Deal, and it's not for
just anybody.
Ok. Enough of that. What are we looking at here, anyway?
We're looking at the end of the
GOX Arm that bolts on to the
Strongback which we lifted, back on
Page 63.
Part of the Upper Hinge, with one of its two Connection Plates is visible, and you can see the bolt holes in the Connection Plate where the bolts that attach the Hinge to the Strongback will be inserted and torqued down. Out of frame, below the lower left corner, the Lower Hinge is not visible in our photograph.
And as for the Arm Truss itself, we're only seeing just a small bit of it where our ironworkers are working the Lifting Sling.
The large white duct which runs along the top of the Arm supplies heated GN2 to the "Beanie Cap" (that's what
everybody called it, although its proper name was the GOX Vent Hood) so they could blow it down on top of the External Tank to prevent ice build-up where the
LOX Vent was, which you're seeing in the VAB, inside of Extensible Work Platform C, on the Second Level,
highlighted on 79K05424 sheet S-6.
The LOX in the External Tank
boiled off and became
GOX at a temperature of 297 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and
it was cold as hell, and if they just let that go, up there at the top of the tank where the vent was, it would seriously chill the outside surface of the tank, and then ambient Florida air, complete with a level of humidity that would occasionally cause you to wonder why there weren't
fish swimming through it, would form
ice on those chilled surfaces, and then that ice would build up into large and substantial objects, and during the pummeling everything started taking at liftoff it would get knocked off the Tank and
fall, and it posed a severe threat to the Orbiter's Thermal Protection System, so...
GOX Arm.
And, just as a reminder, GOX is
pure O2. Pure
oxygen. Which is one
hell of a
fire hazard, and is not something you want to be dealing with
at all if you can avoid it, and so they
diluted that pure O2 with GN2, and thereby reduced/removed the
fire hazard up there at the very tippy top of the External Tank.
There's times when it seems like
everything out here constitutes some kind of fire, or explosion, or toxicity, or violently-corrosive, or somedamnthing
hazard, and for that reason, the whole place is just
riddled with the sorts of
remediations you find that you
must implement for stuff like that, and of course these remediations are the sorts of things you will see
nowhere else in your experience, and it makes the place kind of...
...different.
The fear of ice build-up damage to the Orbiter's TPS was a
serious one, and in fact,
this exact scenario played out with Colombia, and destroyed it during re-entry, except that it wasn't
ice, it was
foam. The stuff they used to insulate the ET, which fatally damaged the TPS on the leading edge of Columbia's Left Wing.
Nobody had any idea that the goddamned
foam could do such a thing. Foam. Light. Soft.
Foam. Turns into something
vastly different once you begin climbing into the sky and
accelerating through the dense lower atmosphere.
Completely different thing.
And seven good women and men were
killed because of it.
I rant and rave and make jokes about everything, but down at the bottom, down underneath it all, the infrasonic thrum of
life and death never goes away, and we can never forget that it's always there.
This is a
harsh business.
And it's unforgiving like a motherfucker, and it's terrifyingly
patient about that unforgivingness.
I suppose, before we go any father, that it would behoove me to give you a link the NASA documentation that gives us a technical-enough overview of the whole
Space Shuttle External Tank Gaseous Oxygen Vent System.
Maye stop here and read that whole document. In addition to the text, there's some excellent illustrations in there too, including what appears to be one of the (more) original versions of the isometric view of the whole system, up at the top of the FSS, which we already saw in our look at
79K24048 sheet M-350.
And as a small "oh by the way" note about that drawing, look in the title block and next to the "DRAWN" entry beneath "SIGNATURES" you'll see "G. VANGUILDER" and Glenda E. VanGuilder worked in the PRC/BRPH trailer there at the Pad, and she was always a pleasure to be around, relaxed, easygoing, very detail-oriented, possessed of a sweetly-impish smile, and always going a little above and a little beyond with her efforts. A fair amount of her stuff would be initialed instead of properly signed or named, and I always liked that little "G.E.V." wherever I encountered it because it also stands for Billion Electron Volts, and that's a pretty good whack of energy when you get down into the sub-atomic realm, and Glenda was full-aware of that end of things too, and it was just a nice little touch she'd put on stuff, with a slyly-knowing look and a twinkle in her eye.
And after having read all of the
Space Shuttle External Tank Gaseous Oxygen Vent System document, (you
have, haven't you?), we can see that the whole
system was exceedingly complex, and had to deal with a zillion different things (some of which being quite outré) in sequence, and simultaneously, and sometimes both of the above, and to just
look at the damn thing, you'd never in your life guess just how goddamned
complicated and difficult it was.
And the Vent Hood constituted its own whole little (well, not so little at all, actually) world, and for today's lift, that thing is nowhere to be seen, and we'll eventually lift it, and hang it on the end of the Arm, but not today, ok?
For now, the Arm and Hinges will be more than enough, and just you wait till I tell you the story about those goddamned
Hinges.
You. Will. Not. Believe. It.
I myself wrote what came to be called "The Pitchfork Letter" out at the Pad because of what wound up happening with those goddamned Hinges, and I distinctly recall being
very surprised, sitting at my desk in the Ivey Steel home office building on State Road 3 (it's still sitting right there), when Wade, my boss Dick Walls, and John Monday (who was another one of Ivey's Project Managers at the time, and who had done and seen
much, going all the way back to Project Gemini... and some of
those stories... but I digress and I'm not gonna go there right now),
all agreed that we should submit that letter
as written.
Dick would often instruct me to create documentation, and he knew that sometimes I would do so
with feeling, and then once done, he'd review it, and cut all the Hot Pepper parts out of it, and then submit it to whoever it was directed toward in cleaned-up form. And I think he did that to take advantage of my mental state when I got fired up over something (
see my previous remarks about "anger", maybe, to understand that a bit more), because once I had
lit up, I tended toward an exceeding
thoroughness about things, and missed little in so doing. It was almost
never suitable for submission as "official" paper, but it always included
everything and Dick was happy to see
everything get included, even as he snipped away all of the
caustic parts, and we both worked really well in this mode, and it was always fun for me to cook this stuff up because... fuck all if I know, but it was (and still is)
fun, and isn't that enough anyway?
But this time, things had gotten to a point where
everybody was sick and disgusted with how our wonderful piece of
Government Furnished Equipment, the GOX Arm, had been dealt with (or, more precisely, had
not been dealt with) by the
cognizant authorities, and they all read the damn letter, looked back and forth at each other, and at me, exchanging a few words as they did so, and then they all said, "Send it."
Which we did.
I wish I had a copy of that letter, but alas, I do not.
It only wound up costing them forty-thousand dollars, as I recall, but the level of hate and discontent which was generated that caused us to have to
write the damn thing in the first place, was worth waaay more than that.
But they only give you for time and material, and hate and discontent are not covered in the contract, so... that's all you're getting from us, like it or lump it.
But let's not go there yet, not right now, ok?
Let's get this thing up in the air and see if we can get it bolted to the tower first, ok?
That's when all the fun with the Hinges came jumping out of the tall grass directly at us with bared fangs, anyway. Prior to that, nobody ever suspected a thing (well...
Rink had his doubts, and actually, so did a lot of other
ironworkers, and I even managed to get my fingers the teenciest little bit dirty with it too, but dammit...
not yet).
Our GOX Arm was reworked
Apollo equipment, originally furnished and installed as "a" Swing Arm on one of the Mobile Launchers back in the 1960's.
And I put quotations around the word "a" because the very few drawings I have of any of the Swing Arms gives me to wonder if it was constructed out of the parts from more than one swing arm.
And we'll see if we can ferret out a couple of clues on this by looking closely at the Arm. I'm going to be using one of the subsequent images in this series as a stepping-off point to delve into the mysteries of how the Arm was constructed, and
what it might have been assembled from, so be on the lookout for that when it comes, ok?
These things were a bastard back then, and they remained so (or at least
this one did) while we had to wrangle it onto the FSS out at Pad B, 280 feet up in the goddamned
air.
And we've already dipped our toe into the dark and turbid waters of Umbilicals, just a wee little bit, with the OMBUU, and now we're going to just go ahead and take the plunge, head-first, ok?
Nobody ever expects Swing Arms to be the Certified Grade-A
BITCH that they are... but they
are.
Swing Arms deal with a wide array of
unpleasant substances depending on what and where they're being called into duty for (cryo, hypergol, extreme fire hazards, extreme explosives hazards, bizarrely-fussy electrical and mechanical hazards, devious and unforgiving structural considerations, you name it, 'cause there's
more), interfacing them with an
unpleasant object (the
rocket), and it all looks
rock solid, but in reality
none of it is, and it all bends and sways, and expands and contracts, and pushes and pulls, and latches and unlatches, and forcefully shoves
nasty stuff around at
high pressure through places where pipes
connect and disconnect, and it occasionally
leaks and sprays
terrible things into
terrible places, and spouts a volcano of flames and shock waves and vibrations, and jumps straight up into the sky with enough force to pick up a whole
apartment building, and just generally goes way the hell out of its way to
fuck you up if you're not taking every last bit of it into account, and...
Swing Arms.
Gah.
We're gonna need to interrupt this digression, and digress
even further, and we're gonna go
all the way back, back to a time when the
Recycled Nazi's at the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, were still
publicly proud of the work they did on the goddamned
V-2!
Ah,
those were the days!.
Here, check this thing out.
Check out "
UMBILICAL SYSTEMS V-2 TO SATURN V, by Umbilical and Disconnects Section, Ground Support Equipment Branch, Vehicle Systems Division, Propulsion and Vehicle Engineering Laboratory, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, October 1, 1963." and yeah, I had to include that
whole title there, because this thing is a piece of
solid gold, in a very dark and disturbing way, with NASA's imprimatur all over it, and it forms a
too-good connection with a past that maybe, just maybe, just a few of the
original participants perhaps should not have been
quite so proud of, and it serves well to reinforce my original proposition that down at the very bottom of things,
Rockets, at their very foundation, in their innermost soul, are unimaginably evil machines.
Take a gander at that illustration there on the third page of this thing.
This one.
That's a pretty goddamned
scary illustration, and it got inserted there, in the very beginning of this document,
gratuitously. For no real reason. Above and beyond the fact that somebody, or, more likely, somebodIES, was still very publicly
PROUD of the rocket in the illustration
which is rendered the largest!
The V Fucking 2!
"I aim for the stars, but sometimes I hit London."
Once again,
with feeling, Rockets, at their very foundation, in their innermost soul, are unimaginably evil machines.
Amen.
But.
Recycled Nazis or no, this document contains
much of interest to our present focus on
Swing Arms.
Ye gods! Life is so
very strange and self-contradictory. People! Whattayagonnado with
people?
Ok, back to the Swing Arms.
UMBILICAL SYSTEMS V-2 TO SATURN V takes us on a
very deep dive into the business of getting ferociously exotic and intractable
things inside (and outside) of
rockets, and we learn that it's been a
bastard, for everybody who's ever had to deal with it, from day one.
Right from the
outset, with the V-2, you find yourself reading these descriptions of things which are
extraordinarily deceptive insofar as they're written with that impossibly bland and bloodless
style favored by engineers (they've got reasons, but still...), and if you're not careful you'll just sail right on through it without...
...stopping.
...and
considering.
Just what in the name of all Holy Fuck was
going on with this stuff, out in the goddamned
woods somewhere, as it was being picked up, carried around, poured from here to there, and just generally being dealt with like you'd deal with a five-gallon bucket of water, using common plain old everyday
human hands...
And it really doesn't take much imagination
at all, once you've stopped yourself...
And you're
putting yourself in their shoes...
As they
tank that fucker up...
by hand...
With...
sodium permanganate?
And
hydrogen peroxide? (which was used
at concentration and bears
zero resemblance to any such-labeled fluid that you might purchase at a drug store)
BY HAND???
Those two goddamned things have the power to make
LOX look almost
benign by comparison.
Hydrogen peroxide, in particular,
at concentration (they were using 80 percent H2O2 with the V-2 if you must know) is goddamned
evil stuff, possessed of a ferociously bad-temper and a hair-trigger propensity for...
going off.
And don't just take
my word for it, ok? Go straight to The Source. Go straight to
IGNITION! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants, by John D. Clark, instead.
Here, I'll take you straight to the place where
Hydrogen Peroxide gets talked about in detail, on sheet 82 of the .pdf file, which is actually Page 66 of the book.
And yeah, that
back to back set of links to the same document oughtta be kind of
telling you something, and what it's
telling you is that you should stop reading
this thing, here and now, and do not pick it back up until you've finished reading, yep, here's a
third link to it,
IGNITION! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants, by John D. Clark. Go do that. Go do that
right now. Go read
the whole thing. It's beyond fantastic, and it is, every last bit of it,
real. Astounding stuff. Stuff that will take your breath away. The Best.
I only just this morning found UMBILICAL SYSTEMS V-2 TO SATURN V. Never seen it before. And I'm
reading it right now, and it's answering a
lot of questions I've accumulated over the years without even realizing it, and in addition to the by-implication terrifying verbiage it contains, it's also chock-full of really good illustrations (and that goes
treble considering it's an Ancient PDF, and the illustrations are clear and very complete, and it includes a
bunch that only deal glancingly with our present subject matter, but which are
excellent, in and of themselves, on totally separate and distinct grounds), and I highly recommend you give it the time it is so very worthy of, if only just to marvel at some of those illustrations.
You'll be all the way down in there to sheet 105 (page 106, they skipped over page 2 of the numbering system in the beginning for some reason), before you get to anything at all which bears any kind of resemblance to the stuff we're dealing with out on Pad B. It wasn't until they got into The Big Stuff, with the Saturns, before they began needing the kinds of Swing Arms that everybody takes for granted nowadays on Large NASA Rockets.
And our Swing Arm in that illustration,
Figure 4-29, Swing Arm Assembly SA-3, -4 (Block I), is our first encounter with a properly-horizontal
steel truss, which swings away from the vehicle via the use of a set of hinges bolted to the Umbilical Tower (which itself is a newish sort of thing with these larger rockets), complete with an
Access Platform (which we're
also going to be seeing a lot more of, and not only with our GOX Arm). That said, compared to
what's coming, it has an almost "light" look to it. It's getting there, but it's not quite one of the brutes they hung on the side of the LUT to service the Saturn V. Or the FSS to service the Space Shuttle. But we're getting there, and the basic design sense of this thing is what we're going to be working with from here on.
So ok. So there's a
lot of shit going on with Swing Arms, and they only really came into their own with the Saturn V system, and it was one of those Arms (dammit, I wish I knew
which one) that got repurposed for our present task out on Pad B.
Got all that?
Ok. Fine.
Let us proceed.
And now I've walked around the south end of the Flame Trench from where I was located on its west side when I took the previous photograph, and then back north just past the crest of the Flame Deflector which you see part of there in the bottom left corner of this image, to where I can frame the entire arm in a single photograph, shortly before it begins its upward journey to the top of the FSS.
There is a
lot going on in this photo, and I'll do what I can to cover those items which are well-displayed in it, and hopefully I won't miss anything significant.
We'll start by pointing out that
the Hammerhead Crane (which has a very distinctive-looking yellow load block and hook) is what's being used for this lift, and that is
very unusual.
No ironworker that I ever met liked the Hammerhead Crane, and all of them considered it to be a large and over-elaborate
toy, unsuitable for any kind of serious lifting. The
sneer on Elmo McBee's face, when the Hammerhead Crane came up in discussion, remains with me to this very day, with a memory as crisp and clear as if it had only happened an hour ago.
They
all held it in very low regard, to one degree or another.
Its maximum lift capacity of only 25 tons severely limited what it could handle, and that maximum lift capacity only extended out to 50 feet from the center of the Crane's rotation (and of course it's sitting in the exact center of the FSS, so you can knock
20 feet right off the top of that,
at a no-margins bare minimum just to get to the edge of the checkerplate on the FSS Roof), and beyond that, it was only good for 10 tons, and
that maximum Lift Radius was only 85 feet, and really,
if you wanted to lift anything substantial, and if you wanted to lift it some place other than more or less right up the side of the FSS, you were out of luck with the stupid Hammerhead Crane, and you can see that here on a very doctored-up version of 79K14110 sheet V-9. The ironworkers everlastingly held it in bemused contempt, and
never considered it for use when doing any kind of real work.
But of course, to a man with a new hammer, many things look like nails in need of pounding, and Boeing/TTV (and I suspect more than just a few in NASA and elsewhere too) now had themselves a great big old FSS with an
operational Hammerhead Crane on top of it, and here comes along the perfect nail in need of
pounding in the form of the GOX Arm, and they
wanted to do the GOX Arm Lift with their Hammerhead Crane.
As I recall, Ivey wound up more or less letting them do it that way,
as a favor, and I'm not sure if there was any kind of
add to the contract with it or not, but it was
stupid, and it was a pain in the ass, and any money that might have been saved by not using a real crane was more than offset by the significant amount of additional time and effort it took to make this lift, coordinating everything with all of the various
entities that came in through the door unannounced with the use of the Hammerhead Crane, but it wasn't actually
undoable, and to jolly them along in the interests of keeping peace in the family, Wade relented and told them, "Yes, we'll let you guys use your Hammerhead Crane for the GOX Arm Lift," and that's what wound up happening.
And you go back and look at that doctored-up version of V-9 again, and you compare that with the photograph of the whole Arm sitting on the ground above these words, and you can see that it's down there on the Pad Deck butt-up-against the MLP Utilities Interface Platform (And what do you suppose, in labor hours and
crane time, getting the stupid Arm perfectly positioned on the Pad Deck so as the even-stupider Hammerhead Crane could even pick it up in the first place might have cost, hmm?), and yes, the lift point really does fall inside of that 25 ton lift capacity radius, but...
...not by much.
And twenty-five tons is 50,000 pounds, and our Space Shuttle External Tank Gaseous Oxygen Vent System document tells us that the Arm, with Hinges, weighs in at a total 35,100 pounds (and I'm pretty sure that includes the Vent Hood, which we did not lift this day, so you get a little extra breathing room with that), so... ok.
Go ahead and pick it up with the Hammerhead Crane if you want to. We'll be happy to accommodate your desires to prove your White Elephant can at least do
something, although since the GOX Arm is the lightest of the bunch, you're not gonna be able to lift any of the
other Arms with it, and we'll take care of that for you later on, using a
real crane, ok?
Use of the Hammerhead Crane demanded use of Boeing/TTV
personnel and in the photograph, you're seeing one of the ironworkers, with his eyes directly on the Hook, giving hand-signals to the crane operator, telling him to swing left, as the rest of the gang wrangles the rigging, working to get everything on those slings hanging from the two spreader bars, without losing any fingers in the process, I might add.
But since we're using the fucked-up Hammerhead Crane, our ironworker is completely
invisible to the crane operator(s), who is/are up on top of the FSS
inside of the Crane (no windows) at the
control console(s) which are shown in 79K10338 sheet A-25, so the hand-signal is actually going to one of the TTV guys who's down there with his boots on the Crawlerway next to the Arm, talking into a goddamned
walkie talkie, in a communications
daisy chain, that I'm
sure could never introduce the least additional problem or hazard into things, nor could it ever wind up taking four times longer than it would if our ironworker was simply hand-signaling to a crane operator
who could see him.
But nope, that's not how it gets done with the Hammerhead Crane, and this little vignette is emblematic of how things
multiply when you find yourself having to go at them in less than
fully-efficient ways, for whatever weirdly political and social reasons that have caused you to have to do it in some kind of awkwardly-
suboptimal manner.
So... ok.
What else is going on with this photograph? What else can we see that might be worth a little bit of our time?
What's going on with those silvery tin-can looking things over there on the right side of the FSS at Elevation 80'-0"? That's them over there straight dead even to the right of the Hammerhead Crane Load Block, sitting just above where the color of the paint on the FSS goes from light gray to dark gray (and oh boy are we ever going to have fun with the fucked-up paint spec responsible for that color change, and the people who
inflicted it on us managed it, later on), partially obscured by the FSS Primary Framing Pipe diagonal that descends down to the FSS Side 1/4 Perimeter Column over there.
What
are those things?
There's a whole set of 'em, complete with silvery plumbing that snakes around in between them, and if you look close, you can see that the first cluster of that stuff, closest to the camera on the Side 1 edge of things, has
another set of 'em behind it, pretty well obscured back there in the shadows, but it's
there.
So what
is that stuff, anyway?
And
79K24048 sheet M-154 tells us that they're
scrubbers, and whenever you cross paths with scrubbers in a place like this, you'd best be wearing your cautious head, 'cause they're invariably associated with
hypergol.
MMH and N2O4 Scrubbers, to be exact, and that's the MMH (Monomethyl Hydrazine) one we're getting the best look at in our photograph, over on the FSS Side 1 edge of the tower.
Here's ya a little something to read for the Hydrazine Scrubber.
And here's something for the Nitrogen Tetroxide one.
Martin Marietta made 'em both, apparently.
And Hypergol, being
Hypergol, it's not bad enough that the stuff is as awful as it is, placidly sitting there in liquid form. Oh no, it's even
worse. It
travels. It fumes off as vapor, and will
come to you as quick as you might want to come to it (except that you
don't), and they need to
contain and
neutralize it once it has become
airborne, and they do that with these
Scrubbers.
Damn near
everything out here gets
purged on a regular basis. Cleanliness is not something you can compromise on with
any of this stuff, and even when your "contaminant" is the
same material you're continuing to push through the piping, you
still have to purge after any given fill, drain, or vent operation, or otherwise
you will lose control of your quantity or concentration levels, or the residual might decide to
do something on its own, and... it can get ugly in a hurry if luck (which is a thing
FORBIDDEN in this business) goes against you. That said, for a lot of stuff, it's enough to let the GN2 Purge Gas (or sometimes even
liquid nitrogen) you're running through the system simply vent or dump into the wider environment, and that's plenty good enough, and nothing catches on fire, or explodes, or kills all the birds, or the
personnel... But not with Hypergol. Nope. Not gonna work.
You're gonna need to tighten it up a couple of notches when you're dealing with Hypergol.
Whole big contrapted
deal with Hypergol vapors. Exceedingly non-trivial.
I'm figuring that they put these bad boys down here at the 80'-0" level of the FSS because it's sort of midway between where Hypergol comes up out of the Pad Deck at 53'-0" down at the base of the FSS, and where it branches across the Struts to supply (and drain) the RSS at 100'-0", but I really do not know any such thing as an actual fact. But if
I was gonna be putting Scrubbers out there somewhere, I might very well choose this exact same place, since it's as centrally-located as it is, sitting there with all the rest of the Hypergol Plumbing passing by at pretty close range.
Farther to the right from our "tin-can" scrubbers, you can see a snarl of crap extending out away from the FSS over toward the West Stair Tower and Elevator, and the top side of that snarl contains a pair of nicely-rectangular pipe supports, which are supporting one pipe that's behaving itself, and another pipe that takes a funny angle, partially obscured by the "normal" pipe, and this is actually a pretty good view of the Centaur LH2 stuff that was going in over there in that area, as we were lifting the GOX Arm, and you can see it in elevation view on
79K24048 sheet M-127D, and in plan view on
79K24048 sheet M-127C.
The Fill/Drain line is a slightly smaller diameter than the Vent line, and going from a side-by-side orientation of the two lines on the ECS Platforming, to an over-under orientation on the FSS, dictated that funny cocked angle that the Fill/Drain line takes. Why the over-under orientation on the FSS, I don't really know, but I've got a feeling that they did not have room over there on Side 4 for side-by-side, so in order to save space (there's a
lot of crap running up Side 4 of the FSS), they just kind of "stacked" 'em, and let it go at that. But that's a guess, ok? The real reason does not have to agree with any guesswork by James I Don't Know MacLaren, ok?
Alright. Enough. Back to the Lift.
And now the rigging is taut, the ironworkers are down from the Arm, and the TTV people are nowhere to be seen.
We're off of the ground and we're rising.
And I've stepped around a little farther north with this frame, and from here you can see that the "snarl of crap" extending north from the FSS between Elevations 80'-0" and 100'-0" is very definitely
unfinished, and that horizontal LH2 Fill/Drain Line coming in from the ECS Platforming at a funny cocked angle doesn't actually
go anywhere, and clearly, those people are not quite there with it yet, but that's pipefitter work, and we had no interest in it, so I cannot give you the slightest bit of additional information about what and why is going on over there with this stuff, so... ok.
Looking at the terminal, horizontal, end of the vertical piece of LH2 Fill/Drain coming down from above on Side 4 of the FSS causes me to wonder how they're going to be connecting the two separate pipes together, and I guess I'll be keeping an eye on subsequent images in this series of photo essays, to see if I managed to get any frames showing it after it was finished, and if so, I'll loop back here with it, to let you nice people know, ok?
But for now...
And this isn't really the
best possible angle for seeing what's actually going on with all that vertical stuff on Side 4...
Who knows?
And of course it's
Centaur piping, and we all know what wound up happening in the end with Shuttle
Centaur, and it never got used, even once, so...
It was all for naught, anyway.
Of other interest in that same area, this series of images is about all we'll ever get by way of showing you
the stair which went from the ECS Platforming at Elevation 90'-2¼" to the FSS at Elevation 100'-0", shown here on 79K10338 sheet S-155, except that it
didn't, and instead the top riser on that stair was at Elevation 100'-5¼" and it had a little step-down as you went onto the main flooring of the FSS, which was exactly 100'-0", and that damn thing was a nasty little trip hazard, coming and going, headed into the FSS or out and down to the ECS Platforming, and it would
get you, even when you were already fully aware of the sonofabitch.
I
think they had to do it that way to give clearance for some damn duct, or pipe, or conduit, or some fucking thing that was running horizontally along the north side of the FSS Side 4 Main Framing, tied directly to the web of that big W30x99, but I cannot swear to that. I'm pretty sure I have no photographs which show the area up underneath the top riser of that Stair, and any previous understanding of that thing in the form of sensible memories is long gone, so... 'tis a mystery.
But, mystery or no, the fucking thing would
get you, and you really had to mind yourself, cause it would have been the easiest thing in the world to take a
bad fall on that bastard.
Despite the fact that I traversed that stair at least a million and one times, conceptually, it always remained an orphan, and that orphaned state included all of the ECS Platforming back here, too.
Recall that I previously identified
this whole area, which is shown on 79K10338 sheet S-173 (and a bunch of other stuff in other places, too) as being the "9099 Building" even though most of it wasn't, and while I was out there, the 9099 Building was just...
junk... in no way worthy of any real interest or consideration, and my
understanding was commensurately
murdered, and
I've previously mentioned that I deeply regret my signal failure to become interested in it at the time, and now the time has long passed, and I am unhappily reduced as a human because of it.
Sigh.
Very well then, let us proceed with the Lift.
And now that we're properly up and off the ground, and everything has been given a good looking-over, and we're vertically clear of the Pad/MLP Utilities Interface Platform, we can get started with rotating the arm around toward the general orientation it will take, to let us bolt it on to the tower.
And this is the image I was referring to earlier when I said "I'm going to be using one of the subsequent images in this series as a stepping-off point to delve into the mysteries of how the Arm was constructed, and what it might have been assembled from..."
And I'm going to need to mark it up, and use such few original engineering drawings as I've been able to find, to let you see how it
might have been assembled from more than one original Apollo Swing Arm, taken down from one of the LUT's, when those things were demolished.
And we start that by simply cutting out the GOX Arm from our above photograph, Image 102, so as there can be no doubt about what parts of the image are GOX Arm, and what parts are everything else, and then fading the background, leaving the Arm as-is, so as it stands out properly, and
it looks like this, and I chose this image with care, because it's the only one that lets us see what's behind that white duct that comes over the side and heads straight down to the bottom of the Arm. More on that, in a bit. This is not a
surgical cutout, and if you look close enough, you can find places where I did not cut every single last little teency bit of background away from the Arm, but this is plenty good enough for what we're about to do, and I guess if
you want to go at it with a scalpel and maybe a microscope, well then, you have my blessings, so... roll on with it if you want.
And our main interest here, regarding what this thing might have been assembled from, will be
Truss Elements, and there's
three of 'em, so let us get a look at that aspect of things on the Arm, as-is, so we can understand the engineering drawings I'm about to show you, as regards cutting that stuff up and then putting it back together,
differently.
Here's Image 102 again, but this time, the GOX Arm cutout has been marked up, color-coded for each of the three Truss Elements that make it up, along with additional coloring and notes to point out those sorts of details about each Truss Element that might otherwise escape notice, and once you're up to speed with the differences of the Elements, you can go and look at the engineering drawings, and recognize not only Truss Elements having a
lot in common with our GOX Arm, but other ones as well, which are different, and do not appear to have been considered for re-use as part of the GOX Arm. You can also now see why I chose this particular image, and that's because the connection between Truss Elements 2 and 3 has a pair of vertical pipes which locate it for us quite obviously, once we know what to look for, and it's the only image of the bunch where you can see that pair of nearly-touching vertical pipes, which are otherwise hidden behind that vertical duct running down the side of the Arm.
Ok. Time to look at the engineering drawings.
Here's an original LUT, unmodified for the Milk Stool, complete with a full set of numbered Swing Arms and a Saturn V sitting on it, taken from the "Apollo 10 Saturn V Technical Information Summary" which you've already met, back on
Page 41.
Then we move to Page 233 (actually Page 7-8) of the Skylab Saturn IB Flight Manual, to look at Figure 7-7, which shows us the numbering nomenclature for the Swing Arms on the modified LUT with the Milk Stool. Read down below, for additional information regarding how SA (Swing Arm) 1A was put together from what had formerly been an S-IC Forward Arm, (yes, it gets confusing, and you gotta watch out), but the remaining four arms were
original from the unmodified LUT, and also kept their
original numbers.
And here is a drawing that shows us the general sense of basic Swing Arm construction.
Drawing Package 79K30000 covers the
demolition of the last LUT, which was the one that was still out there when I first showed up, working for Sheffield Steel.
Return to Page 26 to admire the photographs I took of it, back then, if you'd like. It had the Milk Stool, and had been modified for use with Saturn IB, the top half of which was near-identical to the top
third of a Saturn V, and it had five Swing Arms up there. As part of the Milk Stool modifications, all of the lower Arms, numbers 1 through 4, had already been removed, but the lowest of the five remaining arms was a
rework job, kind of like our GOX Arm is a rework job, so things are not quite as straightforward as they might at first appear.
And, just as a reminder, the Saturn V consisted of a stack of three main
stages.
The
first stage was called the S-IC (the naming nomenclature for this stuff is quite the fascinating story, in and of itself, but we're not going to be getting into that here, and I leave it as an exercise for the reader to dig into and learn what was going on back in the early 1960's that resulted in the different names for these different pieces of flight hardware) and it was 33 feet in diameter, and that larger diameter perforce dictated
shorter Swing Arms.
The
second stage of the Saturn V was called the S-II, and was also 33 feet in diameter, and it too dictated the use of shorter Swing Arms.
So. Right off the bat, we can pretty much (excepting the reworked Arm) disregard Swing Arms 1 through 5 on the old LUT because all of them are going to be
short, and we can turn our attention to Swing Arms 6 through 9, which serviced the Saturn V
third stage, the S-IVB, and of course the Apollo Service and Command Modules above that. The S-IVB was narrower than the S-IC and the S-II, being "only" 21'-8" in diameter, requiring a
longer arm than everything that had existed below it. The Service Module was narrower still, at only 12'-10" in diameter, requiring the second-longest Arm of all, the longest of which is the Arm that serviced the conical Command Module sitting on top of everything else.
We'll work from low to high, ok?
Here's Swing Arm Number 6, the S-IVB Aft Service Arm, as shown on
79K30000 sheet 59.
Notice how the back end of the truss, Element 1, along with its Hinges, is quite similar to Elements 2 and 3 of our Gox Arm, along with its Hinges, too. This tells us
what they were using to make the GOX Arm with, although it does not tell us
exactly which Element, from which Original Arm, it was that got used, nor does it tell us where those elements wound up in the GOX Arm. But clearly, you can see they're grabbing what they've already got laying around, and re-using it.
In this possibly re-used Arm, and others, Truss Element One, the part with the Hinges on it, consists in
four Bays. But with the GOX Arm, there are a
pair of Truss Elements, Two and Three, which match the overall
construction, but they've only got
three Bays.
Looks to me as if they decided to get their required
extra length in the GOX Arm by connecting
three of these Elements, but that would have been too long, so they simply
cut one of the Bays off of the pair farthest from the Hinges, and beefed up the Bay which is attached to the Hinges by adding some additional bracing members, and in that way, they reduced their work (a simple cutting and trimming operation is cheaper and easier than fabricating new from scratch, and welding some extra bracing members into an existing Element is also cheaper and easier), and in that manner, they wound up with what they
needed, for the least time and money to do so.
So as many as
three of the original Arms may have been cannibalized, in order to produce
one finished GOX Arm.
And it makes for
one hell of a scrambled story, but when you're
building this stuff, you don't give a rat's ass about some damn
story or other, and
you do what's most efficient, to get the job done.
And you go back to my
marked-up version of Image 102, and now that you know what they were working with, it all stands pretty well to reason, and there's nothing about any of it that would cause us to
doubt things, so... ok.
And on our end, we've done the best we can, with what we've got, and we went as far as we could, and once we got to a place where any kind of actual
certainty disappears...
Well then... we went as far as we
could, and that's a sensible
distance, and we content ourselves with knowing what we
know, and also knowing what we
don't know.
The end result of what was cobbled together out of existing Apollo hardware consisted in
a 63-foot-long truss, with Hinges on one end, and Beanie Cap on the other. And this is a pretty
long truss, and none of what they had to work with was that long, so you can clearly see that they had to take pieces and parts, and put them together in a way that would give them what they
needed.
Here's the rest of the Saturn IB LUT Swing Arms above the reworked 1A Arm which I do not have a drawing for, from low to high, using unmarked versions of the rectified drawings, since you are now presumed able to recognize their salient features and also spot the similarities, and the differences, with the GOX Arm.
79K30000 sheet 60 shows us the S-IVB Forward Service Arm.
79K3000 sheet 61 depicts the Service Module Service Arm.
And up at the very top,
79K30000 sheet 62 gives us the Command Module Access Arm.
And we'll be getting into additional
Arm stuff, when comes time to hang the Orbiter Access Arm on the tower, but that should be enough for now, ok?
And I may as well stop right here and let you know, additionally, that this is going to be the best view, in all of my photographs, of the Utilities Interface Platform (nobody ever called it the UIP, for whatever mysteriously cultural and linguistic reasons), so I'm gonna stop and give
that thing a little bit of attention, here and now, too.
We first crossed paths with it back on Page 41 when we were taking our walkabout on the Pad Deck, beneath a cold blue Florida Sky, considering the very long, and very dark, Lingering Shadows of Apollo up there, along with everything else, including the shades of those who originally
built it, and whose lives have come, and gone, and are now forever out of our reach, in a way... that our
own lives will become ungraspable for those who might consider them from a far future which we will never know.
Their handiwork is everywhere around us, but they themselves...
...are
gone.
This place is very
technical...
But it is also very...
Spiritual.
And the MLP Utilities Interface Platform
remains, and it is enough of a lingering
enigma that I decided that I was sick and tired of not having all of this information, about
a single place, collected together into
a single place, so I decided to
label all of that plumbing you see in the photograph above, sprouting from the implacable concrete of the Pad deck, by golly that's what I
did.
Here is our same photograph,
Image 102, with labels identifying all of it.
And four drawings from which the identifications were extracted are linked herebelow (and yeah, plenty of it shows up on more than one drawing, but I only invoked a single drawing when I slapped those labels onto the photograph to kind of maybe
hold it down some with the fucking
clutter), that you may ensure yourself of the accuracy of my labeling effort.
I'll give them to you in order of the time from which the various elements first appeared in the relevant drawing packages:
Giffels & Rossetti Original Apollo Program Pad B Drawings, Volume 10, sheet 10044, M-306, Launch Pad Cells & Flame Trench (North) Mechanical.
79K10338 sheet M-13, Pad Water Piping to SSAT Plans And Details.
79K24048 sheet M-102, Pad to MLP Firex Line Mod.
79K24048 sheet S-32,
Utility Platform Modifications.
Of the four drawings, 79K10338 sheet M-13 (which is from the contract
just before I showed up on my first day at the Sheffield Steel field trailer) is by far the best when it comes to letting you see the
ridiculously contorted things they wound up having to do, because they had to
reuse existing facility infrastructure, and it serves as a bit of a warning about that kind of thing, and if you consider it properly, you'll start to maybe get a few glimmerings of an idea as to exactly
why, it's almost
always cheaper to just
rip everything out by the roots, and start over from scratch.
When you start with design and build, "clean sheet of paper," from
scratch, the benefits of designing for maximum
efficiency will
almost always, with very few exceptions, vastly more than offset any "cost savings" gained via the reuse of existing infrastructure. But, for some reason, this is a
hard lesson to understand, and with each succeeding generation of
hot-shot idiot bean-counters and
insufferably-overconfident management nitwits, the battle must be rejoined yet again, as the dumb sonofabitches
cannot be persuaded, that... god
damn it... it's fucking
CHEAPER! And
faster, too.
One day I'll tell you how the hot-shot idiot bean counters and insufferably-overconfident management nitwits at both Martin Marietta
and the United States Air Force learned that goddamned lesson, working Launch Complexes 41 and 40, one after the other, in that sequence, and let me tell you, once we were done with
doing what the contract specifically
instructed us to do, at 41,
the whole philosophy of doing the exact same work at 40 was
completely altered. But not now, ok? Maybe later.
Well... ok... maybe now.
But only just a little bit. The barest little bit, ok? It's a
giant story. The equal to this thing. But I do not have enough photographs, nor do I have the
engineering drawings, to permit me to ever properly
tell that story, so you only wind up getting the barest little bit of it, it in tiny little fragments, sprinkled around in this one. Please accept my apologies for not being able
to do it all.
Both Pad 40, and Pad 41, got completely redone as part of the major upgrade to the existing Titan III system that the Air Force, and a few Three Letter Agencies, deemed necessary for the security interests of the United States.
And the
upgrade to Titan III was sufficiently
major as to wind up being expressed as a complete, new, Launch Vehicle, and that new launch vehicle was called
Titan IV (it was a
dog, and it eventually went away, but for a pretty good while there
it was the only dog they had).
And the Titan IV was sufficiently
different from the existing Titan III
family of launch vehicles (there were quite a few permutations), and as an aside, I still have in my possession a trinket that was given to me by one of the Martin Marietta upper management guys, maybe Darrel Heckart, maybe Harry Solana, both of whom were pretty high-powered and savvy humans but yet down-to-earth and easy to work with, too, and my trinket takes the form of a lapel button emblazoned with the words "Last In Line - First In Performance, 34D·2, Thanks Team!" on a background depicting the variant in question pushing upwards in front of the Umbilical Tower with a cloud of liftoff smoke billowing beneath it.
And that "34D·2" is only
one variant of the
Titan III family of rockets (dig into it, there's some interesting stuff in there with all of the differing versions of the Titan III, all of which were well-handled by the existing Pad structures at Complexes 40 and 41), but the Titan IV was enough larger that it required a complete reworking of both the
Mobile Service Structure, and the
Umbilical Tower, at both Pads, and they did CX-41 first, and for that first go,
somebody... somebody in the the Upper Echelons somewhere in Denver Aerospace where Martin oversaw the Programs from... somebody from the Bean Counting World, determined that they could
reuse, most of the existing MST and UT
structures, and the contracts were put out for bid, and Ivey Steel got both the
Tear Out, and the
Refurbish contracts for the
structures... and...
It went badly south on them, but it was a sneaking, creeping, slow-onset malady that only fully manifested itself well after the work had been entered into, and the point of no return has been
passed...
And they were
stuck with it...
And I'm pretty sure that no small amount of the gray hair on my head today was turned that color because of just how far
south this thing went on...
...
Everybody.
And to sum it up succinctly, once we were done with Pad 41, they put the same work out for bid at Pad 40, and all previous contractual requirements for "refurbishment" of existing Pad Elements (which were very precisely spelled-out in great detail in the contract for the work on Pad 41, and which we
had to do) had been removed from all of the plans and specifications which now only concerned themselves with
new construction, and we bid it, but Bechtel came in low bidder, and the first thing that Bechtel did on Pad 40 was to
completely demolish and remove both the MST and the UT (Go back and look at those pictures I just linked to. Go back and look at the
size of those things.), afterwhich they fabricated and installed them both, complete, brand new from scratch.
So.
Lesson learned, I guess.
It's almost
never cheaper to
reuse or
refurbish existing facility infrastructure, no matter what your own eyes might be telling you to the contrary, as you attempt to
size things up for the purpose of
significantly modifying things.
Ok, enough of that. Back to the photograph.
What else is going on here in this one?
Besides the GOX Arm, of course.
Well...
bonding and grounding. Electrician work. Stuff we never messed with, but which was
ubiquitous, and which was one of those things that you saw
so much of that your brain would
turn it off, and you wouldn't see it at all.
The psychosis of
explosive atmospheres is a deep-seated one (for damn good and sufficient reasons, I might add), and up here on the Pad Deck, in a location which would, at some point, wind up sitting
directly underneath a fully (or maybe only partially, who knows?) fueled
rocket, all nice and gassed-up with Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen (and other stuff, too, but let's leave that out of it for now, ok?),
they weren't taking any chances on a
stray spark being given an opportunity to
set things off, and your number one source of
stray sparks would be
static electricity...
And
anything metal that could
maybe make or break contact with
anything else, was considered to be a
prime suspect, and in the interests of keeping our prime suspect from being able to
do anything, they affixed
a zillion little copper grounding wires, with a zillion little screws (or sometimes it was
exothermically welded) to a zillion different adjoining things that might or might not make or break contact between one another, and you're getting a front-row-seat view of one of those things extending between the two removable handrail segments, closest to you, down near the bottom of the frame, on the
east side of the Flame Trench.
Just a wee little piece of droopy wire between those removable handrails.
And then, look across the Flame Trench to the other side, over there on the
west side, and... yep.
Every single separate piece of removable handrail is connected to
every other piece of removable handrail, with those little bitty pieces of
bonding and grounding wire.
Except for that last piece, extending out of frame on the right-hand side.
Which further illustrates the
psychosis insofar as not
every last thing had these stupid little wires attached to it, and no, I hold no hope whatsoever of ever understanding the
how, and the
why, of that one. Clearly,
distance between prime suspects was part of the criteria, but there were enough
exceptions to the rule that you could never quite assure yourself that you actually
understood what you might be looking at with this stuff. Arcane? Obtuse? Incomprehensible? You bet!
Suffice it to say that this crap was
everywhere, except for where it
wasn't.
How bad could it get? Well...
little stuff, stuff like maybe handrails, or the part of a flip-up platform that does the actual
flipping, back at the hinge line where it connects to the
non-flipping fixed part, or maybe individual segments of Cable Tray, or...
Yeah, that all kinda makes sense, right?
But it didn't stop there, and these people (whoever it was that had responsibility for this stuff in the Electrical World)...
Were not fucking around...
All the way up to, and including,
bonding and grounding the whole FSS to the
ground, and further bonding and grounding the whole RSS to the FSS.
79K14110 sheet E-10.
79K14110 sheet E-11.
Separate, specifically called-out installations for both of 'em.
And, of course, all points in between, high and low, big and small, allofit.
I say again, this is how it's done, and
they weren't fucking around.
Now that I've specifically brought your attention to it, maybe, as you cast your gaze around all the other photographs in this thing, and maybe some of the photographs in the linked documents and other backup and supporting materials which I've given you a vastly-more-than-adequate supply of, and
start looking for these things. I'm sure you'll find more than enough to amuse and entertain yourself for hours, and hours, and
hours of Big Bonding and Grounding Fun.
Ok. Enough already.
What's going on with the GOX Arm?
Well... it's now up above the stupid Utilities Interface Platform, which means we've now got ourselves a little
room for maneuvering, so whatta ya say we rotate it around into an orientation more in keeping with what it's going to be looking like once it's all the way up there, and we're ready to
make the connection.
The hook on the Hammerhead Crane's load block
swivels, so the block stays in place, more or less, as the hook swivels around when we reorient our
load.
Look close and you'll see there's tag lines on both ends of the Arm, but the ironworkers holding the tag lines are out of fame, on both sides.
What that guy in the middle there is doing, the one standing on the Crawlerway with the big Ventilation Air Duct directly behind him, I cannot say.
There's no crane or anything else over there for him to be looking
up at, so I'm not sure precisely what he was doing at the exact split-second I hit the shutter release and grabbed this frame.
"Oh look at that pretty bird!"
He almost looks like he's posing for some kind of
goof-ass Russian Propaganda Poster, but I'm pretty sure this guy holds no love in his heart for any of the goddamned drunken
barbarians that live in Russia.
So who knows?
And around it goes.
As a result of Ivey Steel having had to turn the Arm through nearly 180 degrees of rotation during the Lift, while I was photographing things, we wind up with a pretty good view of the Arm from multiple points of view, allowing us to see it clearly as it was originally configured.
As time went on, the GOX Arm, as well as the structures associated with it on the FSS, went through several quite significant modifications, and in the end, what shows in most photographs of the Space Shuttle at Pad B no longer agrees with what we see here, when the Arm was first installed on the tower.
Looking closely at the tag lines in this frame, you can see that the one on the Hinge end of the Arm, extending down and to the left in our view, is just a weency bit less
tensioned than the one on the Vent Hood (which isn't there, of course) end of the Arm, which extends down and to the right in our view, and it's pretty hard to make out because it runs near-parallel with the edge of the Arm's underside, but it's there, trust me.
At this moment, people on opposite ends of the Arm are pulling their tag lines in opposite directions, and with the Arm
up, and coming around the way it is, the
wind has now entered the equation, and it now wants
very much to rotate the Arm, as it presents
Sail Area to that wind. The people on the tag lines need to pull
against that wind-induced rotation to keep things under control.
Wind loads, sail area, and the entire business of how
air wants to
do things, and just how
strongly it wants to do things, is an astoundingly-complex subject.
A little something called ASCE 7-10 which is plenty big enough to require breaking it into smaller pieces, simply to allow us to get some sort of a grip on its full ramifications, with things like
Wind Loads, Guide to the Wind Load Provisions of ASCE 7-10, which itself can be broken down into smaller pieces that focus on any number of subsets of this nightmare like
Wind Loads for Petrochemical and Other Industrial Facilities and all of it gives us some
guidance, but in the case of lifts like the one we're seeing here, there can
never be any substitute for the
experience of Union Ironworkers, and the sense of
feel they have developed over
years of working
hands-on with this stuff. Trying to work the wind-loading
calculations on
this Arm, which has a
center of mass which is
very offset from its center of wind loading, which itself will be
changing as the arm rotates, as the Arm gets higher and higher,
rotating while doing so, as the wind becomes more and less and then more again
partially blocked by the Utilities Interface Platform, the 9099 Building and the FSS... well... best of luck with
that one. I sincerely hope that your
calculator has a set of really good
buttons, 'cause you're gonna be punching them right off of the goddamned thing before you're even close to being done with figuring this one out.
But we're ok, nonetheless. Ivey's Union Ironworkers have
got this one.
And as the Arm continues to rotate around to the orientation it will need to have in order for the Lift to proceed, its center of gravity/rotation causes the end of it closest to my position across the Flame Trench where I'm shooting from to swing noticeably to the left, taking my field of view with it as I panned across with my camera.
I've also rolled the camera over into Landscape View orientation, and this allowed me to keep the north side of the FSS in-frame, even as the hulking mass of the RSS has now entered the other side of the frame over on the left side, up above, as a dark and vaguely sinister apparition in the sky.
I have no sensible recollection of the
weather this day, but everyone is wearing jackets or overshirts even though the sun is out, so it must have been cold, and you only get cold sunny weather in Florida when it rides in on a stiff north-northwest wind.
And in this frame, you can
see that stiff north-northwest wind.
Bottom left corner of the photograph. Two ironworkers. One of whom is holding a tag line, and the other who may be there... just in case...
a little more
weight might become necessary to stay on top of things with the tag line.
Follow that line as it arcs upward to where it's tied to the end of the GOX Arm.
Look how
far it's bent to the left. It's not hanging
down, at all. It's hanging
across.
Now look again at the
size of that GOX Arm.
And that stiff wind is
working it, and is
urging it, and
will take it away from everybody if given the slightest chance to.
People see images of Lifts, and they marvel at the steel, and the rigging, and the workers, and the drama of the whole scene, but they never seem to marvel at the
wind.
Which is only to be expected. The wind after all, is
invisible, and it can be hard to
consider a thing that you cannot see.
But here. In the form of that tag line that's hanging
across, you can
see the wind.
And the force it's applying to the GOX Arm is
substantial.
And it's gusting. And swirling. And the GOX Arm isn't sitting still, either.
And what you're really looking at here is a
dance, and it's a dance that comes with severe consequences if you get it wrong.
Ho hum, just another day on the job.
Also, the ironworker on the farthest left down there in that bottom left corner, watching his buddy as he
dances with the tag line...
I'm pretty sure that's Glenn Johnson.
And we've already met Glenn Johnson.
But the Glenn Johnson we've already met was
from the future, and our present-day Glenn Johnson, the one working with his buddy on the tag line as the GOX Arm was being lifted at Pad B, the one we're seeing in our photograph...
Doesn't know...
Does not
know what the
future was holding in store for him...
And yet again we find ourselves having to
stop and make a deliberate and conscious
effort to actually
see these people.
The ones in the photograph.
And it all looks so ho-hum, and it all looks so banal, and it all looks so tediously work-a-day...
But it's
not.
And it never
was, and it never
will be.
And we're looking at a group
dynamic here, and our pair of ironworkers are working in tandem with another group of three, across the Flame Trench, and you can see the leftmost and center members of that group of three looking back across, and in this way, everyone stays on top of what everyone else is doing, and in so doing, the GOX Arm continues to be well and properly
controlled, even as our stiff wind does its dead-level best to
snatch it away from them.
By himself, across the Flame Trench, left of Mobile Launch Platform Mount Mechanism Number 6, Wade Ivey watches over it all, letting his team of Union Ironworkers
do their job without interference or micro-management, while at the same time
being there, if need be.
And as an additional tiny little vignette, completely unrelated to the main subject of our photograph, an ironworker is down at the very bottom of RSS
Stair #2, one of the two "
Stairs of Doom," working the modifications which had to be done to it, which you can see on
79K24048 sheet S-278.
At some point, somehow (I wish I knew, but I do not), something came along that caused them realize that they would have to provide additional temporary clearance with the MLP Deck when needed, by cutting the C10 stair stringers down near their bottom ends, and placing a hinge in there to allow that last little bit of the bottom of the stair to get folded back upon itself, up and out of the way. It wound up giving them less than a full foot of additional vertical clearance between the untrimmed bottom of the stair stringer and the MLP, but whatever it was, they
needed it, and so they
did it.
Look for them over there in the distance with their float and what appears to be a small temporary windbreak of some sort.
Far left of the photograph, near center, silhouetted against the brightness of the sky.
Fifty feet of clear, unimpeded,
lethal drop above the concrete of the Pad Deck.
Another life. Another story. Another past. Another
future.
And now we're starting to gain some proper elevation.
And the Arm is now more or less
weathervaning into that north-northwest wind, and in this orientation, the wind goes from a condition of wanting to
induce rotation in the Arm, to a condition of wanting to
suppress rotation in the Arm, which will now remain oriented more or less the way you see it here, but of course it's never going to be
sitting still, and the wind is going to want to
wag it around, so the tag line on the Vent Hood end remains
in play, and will not be coming
out of play until the actual
bolt-up begins, once the arm is in direct metal-on-metal contact with the FSS at the top of this Lift.
Which all of the principles in this Lift
know like the back of their hands, and look close and you see the tag line on the Hinge end of the Arm is only about forty feet in length, and was only there for
near-ground work, and now that we're
up in the air, you can see it dangling free, hanging down to where the end of it is damn near
on-center with the FSS, a foot or three below the steel-bar grating at elevation 100'-0", where we can see silhouettes of people watching the lift. Who these guys are, I do not know, but I would imagine they're
not Ivey people. At the moment, Ivey needs to be on the ground and up at the
destination, but in between... not so much.
But there's a
lot of other interested parties, so we're never going to lack for onlookers, making sure that whatever
entity it is that they're
representing, has a pair of good eyes on that entity's
interests.
Okey doke.
We've now got a fair whack of empty space down below our GOX Arm, and through that empty space we can
see things, and one of the things we can now
see is the new
Centaur Platform that's going in there, between the Hinge Column and Side 2 of the FSS between Elevations 120'-0" and 140'-0".
And we've caught it by luck at a pretty good time, from just about the one-and-only viewing location that does not involve being just above it, out over the Flame Trench in the gondola of a hot-air balloon. From where we are right now, you can see almost all of it, and it's
mostly complete except for the
Porch, which means we get to see pretty much the whole thing. And our viewpoint, from an angle allowing just enough daylight showing between the members making up the "floor" of it, lets us get a feel for what's going on with the framing that supports the steel-bar grating (and which will also be supporting
the Psychosis of the RBUS, too) you'd be walking across once it was complete, which in turn gives us a feel for pretty much the whole thing as a discrete
item.
So that's kind of nice, isn't it?
I introduced you to this framing before any of it ever went up, back when we were seeing the world through the shining eyes of a rapt six-year old child, my son Kai, when we were out on the Crawlerway just south of B Pad, during one of the exceedingly-rare open-house days for employees and their families, watching the return of Challenger at the end of Mission STS 41-G, back on
Page 62.
And that introduction starts in earnest, right here.
And now, at last, we've been given our first (and
only) chance to actually
see the fucking thing, and, based on
where it lives perhaps you'll understand just how
lucky we really are, to have accidentally been given a
point of view which allows us to see it
at all, and especially without the Porch blocking it from view, because it's
buried in there, straddling and intertwined with the Struts, deep within the Steel Forest between the FSS proper, and the RSS, more or less between Elevations 120'-0" and 140'-0", just beneath the Crossover Catwalk that takes you from the FSS over to the RSS, dead center, downtown, to the Anteroom and Airlock which is the Entrance to the PCR Main Floor at elevation 135'-7".
Here's the
Centaur Platform Framing, highlighted on the above photograph, Image 105.
But even with the framing highlighted, it's still less than fully-wonderful, and it's still pretty confusing, so ok, so I'll doctor it up some more, and we'll try
Image 105 with the Framing highlighted, and the blurred-out visual obstructions blocking parts of it from view labeled, to kind of give you an idea as to why the Framing is as chopped-up in appearance as it is.
And I'm
still not happy with it, so here it is again, one more time, but this time you get
Image 105 with Centaur Platform Framing blue-highlighted and labeled, with blurred-out visual obstructions blocking parts of it from view labeled.
And at this point, I'm
still not happy, but...
...fuckit.
Here's 79K24048
sheet S-50, and
sheet S-51, and
sheet S-52.
Figure the goddamned thing out for yourself, I'm done with it.
Suffice it to say, they way the just sort of
crammed this monstrosity in there, into a place were you could hardly tell there was a "place" there in the first place...
And yet, by some miracle, we actually get to
see the goddamned thing...
...sort of.
\\\\\\\
ADDENDUM, 2024 03 07:
And the gods (and yet
another anonymous benefactor) have chosen to smile down upon my unworthy ass yet again, and have tossed a piece of manna to me in the form of an image that lets you see what this thing looked like from the
inside, looking back east towards the Porch (which of course was not there yet when we hung the GOX Arm), and although it's not a large-scale image, it's plenty large enough, and from this vantage point you're getting a pretty goddamned good look at just how
intertwined the Centaur Porch was with all of the pre-existing
structure, out there in the Steel Forest between the FSS and the RSS.
Behold:
The Steel Forest as seen from the West End of the Centaur Porch.
And like I just said, they shoved this thing "into a place were you could hardly tell there was a "place" there in the first place..."
///////
Ok. Next frame, please.
And now we've gained some proper
elevation, and now the images grow commensurately more
dramatic.
As with the GOX Arm Strongback Lift we saw back on
Page 63, as the lift proceeds, and more and more elevation is gained, the farther and farther I have to step back, to keep it all in frame.
There are times when I marvel at my good luck to be
forced into having to do this, because of my fixed-zoom camera.
It caused me to include no end of other really cool stuff in the frame,
viewed from angles that I'd never thought to view it from at the time, and here we are today, reaping the benefits of my not having a damnable
zoom lens on my camera.
At the time, I felt woefully
constrained, but now, all these long years later, I realize I was just about as lucky as you can get with this stuff, and as I never grow tired of saying, "It's
always better to be lucky than smart."
The Great Snarl of the "9099 Building" is
particularly well-displayed in this frame, and this photograph gives you an excellent look at all that stuff over there in the sense of it being... a godawful
mess, bereft of all visual appeal, ugly as only
industrial ugly can be ugly, without the least redeeming
artistic merit about it in any way, shape, or form.
The FSS (and the RSS too), has this impossible-to-describe sci-fi ambiance of unsettling
potency, of inscrutable
looming, as a Great Dark Force, possessed of a
mana, a keeper of Dark Secrets. It did not seek to conceal itself from you behind a glittering facade of glass or concrete as all run-of-the-mill skyscrapers you encounter downtown will do. It exposed itself to you completely, and yet, in so doing, that only
added to its enigmatic
presence. It was a thing that may or may not have exerted some sort of strange
draw upon you in and of itself, evaluated strictly on
form, which became
greatly altered when cast at colossal scale, blotting out the sky, bearing
down on you from high overhead as a
first-order mystery, and just in general
forcing itself on you in ways that cannot be ignored. But the 9099 Building had
none of that going for it, and it was merely squat... and low... and...
ugly. It never stood a chance with the frightening power of the FSS and the RSS right there next to it, holding sway over it, looking down on it.
And the viewpoint of our photograph above is just about
exactly how you'd initially encounter all that 9099 crap over there visually, as you first came up on top of the level part of the Pad Deck in your car, every time, getting ready to turn left and go park in the shakeout yard area at the tippy-top of the Pad Slope just south of the RSS, or maybe head over there to the far side of the Flame Trench from the towers on the east side of the Pad by the TTV trailers or someplace like that.
Right now we're looking at things from over there in front of the TT&V trailers, and farther down this page, as our viewpoint changes radically
again, we'll get to
look back down, from up where the Arm is being
connected, which is unseeably out-of-frame above the top margin of this image, and
see right were I took this picture from.
The sheer overpowering
luck involved with
all of this stuff (and
more, too), getting to see it as we do in these photographs, leaves me
dumbfounded.
Just...
unbelieving of it all.
But here we are, nonetheless, and the facts of the matter are beyond dispute.
From where we stand now, we're facing directly, exactly, into the blowing north-northwest wind, looking down the length of the Arm longitudinally from below as it
weathervanes in that wind, far above us.
The Load Block and Hook of the Hammerhead Crane is hidden from view, behind the Arm. The lines which carry that Load Block are visible, but just
barely. Both tag lines on the Arm are easily-enough visible, and above and to the right of the white thread which is the line affixed to the Vent Hood end of the Arm, a darker, and much-less obvious thread is also visible, and that is the mid-reaches of the Lightning Wire which extends a thousand feet from the top of the Lightning Mast, to its concrete anchor out near the Pad Perimeter Road, to the north.
The overall effect is one of the Arm
floating in space far above us, adding yet
another layer of mystery to this image, which is already plenty well-endowed with enough mystery on its own, as is. The more I look at this photograph, the more I like it, and more and more different
reasons for liking it keep creeping subtly into the matrix as I continue to keep looking at it.
Down on the ground, bottom-left corner of the frame, Wade Ivey remains right where he's been the whole time, letting his people do what they do best, and giving us a sense for the grand scale of things as he does so.
Next to him, I'm pretty sure that's Ray Elkins.
Ray was one of the older ironworkers out of the 808 Hall, and had seen and done it
all by this time, which is one of the reasons Wade has him there right next to him. He was short-statured, but, as with so many others, now that I'm thinking about it, was possessed of a fiery presence. But Ray kind of kept that fiery aspect of himself on the down-low, and was an absolute
peach to work with.
He had a wry smile, and a wry sense of humor to go with it, and there was always a twinkle in his eye. I got along marvelously with him, and considered him a dear friend and one hell of an asset on the job. If there was ever anything I could do for him, I would do my utmost, but that hardly ever happened because he was just about as
complete as a human being can be. And he must have seen some damn thing or other in me, because from the very outset, when I first crossed paths with him when he was with Wilhoit and I was with Sheffield, he was unstinting in his efforts to help show me around, show me how things worked, and in particular was everlastingly excellent with tipping me to hidden subtleties and nuances of things that I would never have noticed on my own.
And then he'd suddenly flip into "silly mode," point gravely at a piece of aluminum laying there, and say, "That's loonium," with a continued grave expression masking laughter which was working its hardest to erupt to the surface, but which was unable to, although his eyes were a dead giveaway, every time.
But. As with so many other Union Ironworkers I met, Ray had lived a hard life and had endured much, and was long past countenancing the least whiff of bullshit from... anybody.
And he'd be
smiling, and he'd be
telling me something, and without causing me to think he was
warning me or anything like that, he'd nevertheless
get it across that...
Ray Elkins was a man not to be
fucked with.
And this, of course, caused me to like him
even more.
I
really like no-bullshit people. It's just my nature, I guess.
And Ray and Wade are down there on the ground, and they're both looking up at that goddamned
GOX Arm floating up there in the blue sky, complete with lines hanging down from it like
mooring lines hanging down from a fucking
zeppelin, except it's not a zeppelin, and instead it looks like
something off of a doomsday sci-fi book cover, and
it's coming this way, and... boy, I dunno.
I've been looking at this picture too long.
Let's look at the next picture, how 'bout?
And now we've walked around to the area just south of the Flame Trench, and we've stepped farther away from the Lift yet again, and now at last we're able to frame the whole FSS (with the exception of the Lightning Mast), but we've also managed to just clip the Pad Deck out of things, down at the bottom.
But this is a good frame anyway, and the scale of things is shown pretty well, and that scale is... quite large.
Look closely at the full-size rendering of this photograph, above and to the left of the Arm, and I'm about ninety-nine percent sure that's Wade Ivey standing there on the GOX Arm Lower Hinge Access Platform, which is the lowest of the two dark protuberances sticking out to the right of the main envelope of the FSS, between the suspended Arm and the Hammerhead Crane.
You're seeing him silhouetted against the sky from about the waist up. White hardhat, dark jacket with a bit of white running across the shoulders. We're pushing it pretty hard, given the quality of the photograph we have to work with, but nobody else on the tower this day was dressed quite the same, and that white across the shoulders in particular is pretty good identification. Maybe go back and look at some of the images above this one, with Wade standing on the Pad Deck, and compare for yourself.
Wade was an ex-ironworker, and, if he deemed it necessary or prudent, he would be out on the iron with the rest of the gang, keeping a close eye on things. He never interfered. But he never went away, either. Which of course is one of the main reasons he did as well with his company as he did. You don't consistently turn profits in this line of work year after year by sitting at a desk in a wood-paneled office, snapping your fingers at people.
Elsewhere in frame, the Arm continues its stately ascent, and from this angle the Load Block on the Hammerhead Crane, along with some of the Lifting Sling attached to the Arm has once again come into view.
To the left, part of the Great Bulk of the RSS is in view, with the large dark rectangle of the RCS Room Door Opening, far top left in frame.
And extending downward from out of the top of the frame, just to the right of the RCS Room Door Opening, a vertical trusswork that goes all the way down to the level of the bottom of the OMBUU (which we only very recently hung on the tower) can be seen, mostly-illuminated by bright sunlight.
More Guide Columns.
Which I'm still
dreading, even though we've encountered a
lot of it already, since
I first tickled you with it, back on Page 53, and again, after that,
when I threatened you directly with it on Page 64, and then again, after that
when the bludgeonings began in earnest farther down on Page 64,
and you've already seen the
marked-up version of Image 093, which was a sequence frame from the OMBUU Lift, and the marked-up version is mostly blurred out, so
here's Image 093 again, unlabeled, unblurred, and please note the fairly-close similarities in viewpoint and subject matter between Image 093 and
Image 107 just above these words, complete to the inclusion (barely) of the RCS Room Door Opening in both frames, and
that is one
hell of a lucky thing, because it allows us to actually
see the
changes as the hateful Guide Columns hanging down beneath the RCS Room on both sides, Orbiter
right on RSS Column Line 4.6, and Orbiter
left on RSS Column Line 3.4, were more and more installed on the tower as the work specified by our contract continued to progress, and what you're seeing
now is the
plumb version of things, following the resolution of the
daffiness...
And we're getting
slices of time here that...
...nowhere.
No
where else, and no
body else can can show you these two time slices where the nascent Guide Columns System started appearing down below the RCS Room at Pad B. Beginning first with the Columns on and below the
right side of the RCS Room, and after that, when the
left side started morphing from
lines on engineering paper, into cold hard steel.
Interestingly enough, we
do have similar Guide Columns time-slice images of Pad
A, and
one image in particular is quite well-known. Back in the early 1980's when it was taken, prior to the the first launch, this image appeared
everywhere, and could be seen as a poster on the walls of numerous places. Around here, in Brevard County, for a while, this thing was
ubiquitous, and plenty of copies of it yet remain, hanging on walls in no end of places, from gas station mini markets to bank lobbies to public buildings to private homes.
It's a
rare look at the Orbiter sitting on the Pad, with the RSS rolled
back giving a clear view of Columbia sitting there on the MLP, and it was taken at night, and it's lit with searchlights like some kind of sci-fi movie, and it's as dramatic as hell, and...
Why?
Why would Columbia be sitting there totally exposed, middle of the night, brilliantly illuminated by searchlights?
And then we look at the image
closely...
And we're very much
jumping ahead with some of this, but
here's that same famous image of Columbia illuminated by searchlights, and this time I've
labeled it, to show you
exactly what's going on, which explains why the RSS had to be rolled back,
well away from Columbia, with the whole place lit up like a rock concert. And what was going on when this photograph was taken was going on
at a dead run, and...
There is
much beneath the surface of things here,
very much,
unspoken, and we're going to need to go
behind the scenes to understand what we're actually
seeing here.
And nobody who looks at this dramatic image of Columbia sitting there on Pad A has the least glimmer of an idea that what they're really seeing here is people
scrambling, working
furiously against a ticking clock, attempting to execute an ad-hoc
fix, a great and scary
kludge, which was forced on them by a
life-threatening oversight, involving a
National Asset, and National
Prestige, and things were
hanging by threads in too many places, and in too many ways, to sensibly enumerate, and they managed to
pull it off, but at the time it was by no means a
given that they would succeed.
And right now, in similar manner as how we interrupted our tale of the OMBUU Lift, we're going to interrupt our tale of the GOX Arm Lift, to bludgeon you some more with additional
Guide Columns.
And the Guide Columns are
devilishly tricky, and
devious, and what you see here above these words in Image 107 as a single sunlit-illuminated vertical trusswork is in fact,
three separate things, and all of it exists as you see it in our photograph after the Upper Fixed portions of it had to be cut down off the tower and reworked to keep it all nice and plumb while it was hanging off the face of a very-much
not-plumb RSS...
And it just keeps getting worse and worse, and you can
depend on that, but for now, we're only interested in
just the three separate pieces showing in our photograph, the topmost of which we first learned about as we encountered The Leaning Tower of Pad B, which makes up the Upper Left Fixed Guide Columns.
And perhaps right now a little
review might be in order, and...
In the Beginning...
...they refused to
Roll Back.
And that was strictly a
political decision, but it was manifested as an
engineering decision, and it was a bunch of goddamned
bullshit in both regards, but it was
mandated...
...and
it came to be.
And you are presumed to have read
the relevant material on Page 55 that I just linked to with "In the Beginning..." where the explanation is given for just exactly
why this stuff had to be done the way it was done. And if you have not, well then,
goddamnit, go back there and read that motherfucking thing,
right now, because you will nowhere else in your life find this hidden story, out in the open,
told in plain words.
Read
me, or read
nothing. Your choice.
And the
raison d'être for the
Columns was the pair of
Split Platforms, one matching set of Split Platforms above the other, which rode up and down vertically
in that god-awful cramped little crevice between the near-flat belly of the Space Shuttle and the roundness of the External Tank, from one end to the other, from the
Aft Attach Struts to up above the
Bipod, which are the two places where the Tank is attached to the Orbiter.
That first
tanking of Columbia, out on the Pad, which, never forget,
was the very first time the goddamned External Tank had
ever been fully filled with its half-million gallons of
cryogenic fuel and oxidizer, betrayed
the hidden flaw, the
oversight, which might very well have
destroyed them on their
very first flight, and they became,
deeply terrified (rightfully so, I might add), of
what might happen.
And since
politics intervened, ergo,
The Platforms.
They needed the Platforms,
to inspect the Tank... to
repair the Tank, if need be.
...out on the Pad.
And the place that needed
inspection was not an easy one.
Far from it, in fact.
In fact, it was the worst place you could have possibly picked.
Hemmed in on one side by a wall of untouchably-fragile TPS Tiles on the belly of the Orbiter, which, if damaged, even slightly, would have pronounced sentence upon the vehicle and crew, during re-entry, and that sentence was
death.
No right of appeal.
And on the
other side, the equally-untouchably-fragile coating of
Foam which insulated the great cylinder of the Tank, and which, if damaged, had the potential to be knocked loose during ascent, and that too could have
pronounced sentence.
And there's no fucking
room in there to work, anyway.
"Build us the
Platforms."
"Heed us. Obey us. Do as we say."
"Or it will be the worse for you."
And
here again, is the photograph of where you will be doing your inspection work. And where you will be doing your repair work.
And where you will
find a way to insinuate
Platforms into, such that technicians could gain sure-footed
access to things.
Out on
the Pad.
And here, on
79K20408 sheet S-227, we'll get our first look at the E.T Access Platform itself.
And I'm going to doctor that drawing up some, in order to point out a few salient features, some of which are a little less than fully-obvious, and some of which reflect less than altogether
wonderfully on the quality of the PRC/BRPH engineering that went into creating it. RS&H
ruined me with 79K14110. Spoiled me rotten. But that does not make this PRC/BRPH stuff one iota better, no matter
how you slice it.
A lot of the trouble with the PRC/BRPH 79K24048 stuff consisted in breathtakingly
lousy naming and identification features, and extended from
there all the way down into
deeply critical technical and configurational
flaws, some of which very definitely had the power to
kill.
Simply
navigating around in the damn thing was a
trial.
Also, please note, that we're dealing with a set of
as-builts, created
after the fact, dated "11-5-85" (it's there in the Title Blocks showing in those Rev. E boxes), and oh by the way, there were one hell of a lot of other
changes to these drawings that are
not shown, and instead, as we've already seen in other places, it all gets subsumed into the drawing just as if the drawing had been fine and dandy from the very beginning, which it most manifestly was
not, and yours truly wrote
too much of the goddamned
paper, in the form of RFI's (Request For Information), which resulted in Change Orders (every one of which was issued...
grudgingly, but they
had to, every goddamned time) incorporating no end of
drawing alterations to correct no end of...
bullshit, and a vast quantity of my time on this job was spent over in the PRC/BRPH
field trailers...
...and I'd hit Jack Petty (ex-ironworker, and he was their structural tech rep, and he did not
care for politics, social
maneuvering, finger-pointing, or
who pays for it, and all he wanted was for the goddamned thing to be
right) with the conundrum-of-the-moment, and he'd spread out the drawings, and a
look would come over his face, and he'd get up out of his chair, and the two of us would
take a walk outside, perhaps to the company car for
a ride to Pad A, to see how they handled it over there (a
huge amount of this stuff was
repeated mistakes that, over on Pad A,
had already been solved and yet somehow
reappeared in 79K24048), perhaps to head up to the towers on foot and walk high steel with clipboards and tape measures in hand, or perhaps he'd simply walk across the open area inside the trailers to somebody else's
desk, or maybe just pick up the phone and
call somebody, and without him we would probably
still trying to build the miserable goddamned thing
today, and... if you think I'm being
picky with this stuff,
think again because this is
exactly the sort of engineering
sloppiness that winds up
killing people, and... ok MacLaren, it's going to be alright, MacLaren, calm down, MacLaren, go outside for a while maybe and take a breather, ok?
So ok. So here's
79K24048 sheet S-227 again, showing you the general layout of things, with some informational notes and some good old-fashioned MacLaren Snarl pointing out things that were no fun at all to
work with back when we were trying to
build this stuff.
And of course that's just a General Arrangement drawing, and the Platforms themselves were quite complicated. Rube Goldberg stuff.
Get a load of this thing. Here it is on
79K24048 sheet S-228.
All-aluminum construction, welded tube-steel frame. Which you don't get told about here on S-228. Oh no. That would be too easy. Can't be having any of
that can we? We'll give you "aluminum" for the
grating and the
checkerplate and the
handrails here on
S-228, but you're gonna have to go back to
79K24048 sheet S-224 and read Note: 1 to find out what you're gonna be making this drug-induced hallucination out of for its actual
framing members. Sigh. Keep reading the notes if you want to learn how to weld it together. I don't see anything about heat-treating with this thing, but it's gonna need it, and it's gonna need it done
right, or otherwise it will warp all to hell. I do see that they're invoking
KSC-STD-Z-0004 down below Note 1, but that doesn't really tell us anything about heat-treating aluminum
weldments, and I've already gone on enough about welded-aluminum monstrosities back when we did the
OMS Pods Heated Purge Covers on Page 60, so, suffice it to say, it's probably in there
somewhere, but I don't feel like chasing it down right now. Maybe later. Maybe. Maybe not, too.
So ok.
So the whole Platform is aluminum. Fine. Well... except maybe for just the
weenciest little bit of it.
Little Stuff. Lifting shackles. Detent pins. Hinge pins. Nuts-n-bolts attach hardware. That kinda stuff. But you gotta mind, 'cause some of it might not be
what you think it is, and ya gotta be
careful about it with reading these drawings, lest you get crosswise with the QC and Engineering people, who you can rely upon to not be any kind of
nice, about any of it.
And it's
complicated. Don't believe me? Ok, how 'bout we take a gander at
79K24048 sheet S-230, then. Let's look at the Guide
Shoes, how 'bout?
And these are the things that keep you up in the air, safely pinned-off to the Guide Columns while you're working boots-down on the ET Access Platform, instead of falling to your death down onto the steel deckplates of the MLP far below you, and while they're keeping you up in the air, they're also keeping you on The Path of Righteousness, on the ever so Straight and Narrow, which is precisely defined and maintained by the Columns themselves, stuffed up in there, plumbing the depths of that god-awful hundred-foot-deep
crevice, between a marshmallow and a soft place, which you can not so much as
touch, lest you
kill people by inadvertently
damaging the thing that's keeping them alive as they hurtle along at 25,000 feet per second enveloped by a Plasma Sheath at significantly plus-one-thousand degree temperatures, and...
"Careful there, Lou. Don't be fucking those
tiles up, ok? Those things are fucking
delicate. And don't be touching the foam on that goddamned
Tank, either. That thing's even worse. That thing's made out of
mush. We're here strictly just to
look at it, and see if maybe
somebody else fucked it up. Nothing else. Don't be
touching any of this shit, alright?" From inside the dark confines of a goddamned
crevice. On a flimsy-ass aluminum platform that necks down to a minimum width of 1'-4½", which does not take into account the
deduct for the thickness of the pipes that make the frame that holds up the Environmental Enclosure that's mounted on it, which makes it pretty damn
close in there, in a place where you cannot so much as even
touch the walls of your fissure of a prison.
I launched off into this diversion of a diversion because of what we were getting a look at up above these words in
Image 107. Up there hanging off the face of the RCS Room on its left side, chandeliering down, out and away from the body of the RSS, all the way to the bottom of the OMBUU.
Here it is again in a marked-up version of Image 107, just to make sure we're all on the same page with it, ok?
We're gonna look at the three individual elements that make up this deceptively-simple looking piece of vertical trusswork (which is only the
upper part, after all, and it gets
better and better, the farther down we go, but we're not gonna go there right now 'cause that part of it hadn't been
built yet, and now that you've seen the Platforms, and the Guide Shoes, maybe you're starting to develop a sense of just how complicatedly-
whack this stuff wound up having to be, because
somebody didn't want to Roll Back for fear that it might make them
look bad, and because other sombodies, prior to that,
never conceived that people would need to be given
hands-on access to the
Tank (and the underside of the
Orbiter too), while they were sitting out on the
Launch Pad, ready to
go.
Keeping in mind, of course, that
once Fueling was underway, or at any time between completion of Fueling and Launch, this stuff was
nowhere near the Orbiter or the Tank, hanging off the face of a demated RSS, and
nobody was ever going to be
taking a ride on it, and...
Should something
untoward have occurred as a result of Thermal Shock, as it did
the very first time they tanked the goddamned thing, which of course is
what precipitated all this bullshit...
...and
nobody picked up such untoward thing visually from farther away, looking at a screen which displayed
camera views from a
safe distance...
...well then...
You're on your own with it, good luck, and godspeed.
And we already started out with the toppest and simplest part back on Page 64 when we were lifting the OMBUU, and now we'll work our way farther on
down.
And to do that, in order to refamiliarize with the toppest and simplest part of the Left
Fixed Guide Columns, we return to
79K24048 sheet S-234, which is a General Arrangement view of things, and which we've already been introduced to, and back on
Page 64, down near the bottom of the page, we got to see the
Right Upper Fixed Guide Columns on S-234, and it's all pretty straightforward and sensible, with simple-enough vertical runs of trusswork tied back to various bits of RSS framing steel. Once you've managed to
get it all plumb, of course.
All well and good.
But that's about to
change.
Below the bottom margin of the RCS Room, over there on its left side, where the run of Guide Columns merrily continues on downward, we find ourselves encountering a little something that might occasionally get in the way, and that little something that might occasionally get in the way is the
Orbiter Access Arm. And of course without an OAA, we're not gonna have any ability to get our
crew inside of their Launch Vehicle, and without a
crew, things become Less Wonderful.
And that Arm will get in our way when in its extended position, which is the position it has to be in for Crew Access, or even to simply allow the RSS to
rotate around into the
mate position. And with the RSS in mate position, the OAA is butt-up against the
face of the RSS, inches beneath the RCS Room, more or less even on its bottom margin with the Antenna Access Platform, and we've been here before,
and we even talked about that weirdie bumper over there just above the Side Seal Panel in case the OAA was to accidentally hit the RSS, and...
...now the time has come...
...to
deal with it.
And can you see how this fucking
Guide Columns thing is starting to
snowball on us?
Stop a minute and
think about it.
For that Arm to get in there
behind the Guide Columns, as the RSS is mated and demated, that section of Columns is gonna need to be
out of the way. That little run of Guide Columns over there on the Left Side just beneath the RCS Room,
traps the Arm behind it when the RSS is mated to the Orbiter. Take a look at
79K14110 sheet M-45, which I've previously showed you, marked-up, and take note that the Left Guide Columns are
outboard of Line D, over there where it intersects with Line 3.4 on the Front Left Corner of the RCS Room.
Clearly, the Guide Columns are trapping the OAA, and that's not gonna work out well for anybody.
So. Something's gonna have to be done about it.
And what they did was to put hinges at the top of this segment of the Guide Columns, which allows them to swing it up and out of the way when they need to pull the RSS around into the mate position where the OAA is going to be banging into it unless they get it the hell out of there.
And to gain a sense of what and where, we return once again (and we'll be doing this repeatedly as we step through this stuff)
79K24048 sheet S-224, which is our General Arrangement for the whole Guide Columns System, and I've highlighted it and labeled it for you, so as you're properly squared away with just exactly
what and
where.
There's
mistakes on this drawing, but I'm not gonna
fault them for it,
this time, because, clearly, this rendering of things was done back
at the very beginning, and the Lifting Boom in particular was not a "finished thing" at the time, and so they just kind of SWAG'd it in there, they best they could, knowing that it would get properly finished-off farther on into the Drawing Package when the actual
engineering for this thing had been fully nailed down.
And I further marked up this annotated version of S-224 with a note indicating that the
reeving for the Hinged OAA segment was all wrong, and we'd need to go to
79K24048 sheet S-232 to see it done correctly. Notice that the
winch that does the actual
lifting and lowering had nowhere to go,
nearby, and they wound up having to put it over on the Access Catwalk, that takes you to the SRB Access Platforms, and this, as you will continue to learn, is
typical, because...
It's a a Great Kludge, and
they had nowhere to go with far more of this stuff than might otherwise be pleasant. Or even sane.
And now that we know how it all fits together with its lifting
apparatus (We don't,
really, but we're close enough, so let's let it go at that, ok?), I'm going to
jump you forward, to a time well beyond the time which we're seeing in Image 107, and show you the
finished version of our Left Hinged Guide Columns, with a really nice isometric view of it, which includes a lot of bells and whistles that have yet to appear on the tower as our GOX Arm Lift proceeds.
79K24048 sheet S-274 shows it to us in all its contrapted glory. During the GOX Arm Lift, none of the ECS Duct stuff was anywhere to be seen, and it would be a while yet before it would show up, because that's
Pipefitter Work, and the fitters were going to have to
wait till Ivey's Union Ironworkers were done
building the goddamned thing in the first place. So now you know, ok?
And it's even hairier than it looks, because at some point along the line, the SRB Access Platforms were ripped off the sides of the RCS Room, and completely redone. And just so as you know, the "old" SRB Access Platforms are what you will be seeing
throughout these photo essays, and the "new" ones did not appear until
after I was gone, and I have zero hands-on familiarity with them.
And 79K24048 has a nasty habit of mixing the "old" and the "new" together, without bothering to tell you what it's doing, and you're kind of on your own with it, and what you see in the above marked up version of S-232 turns out to be the "new" SRB Access Platform framing and bracing, and this whole mess with the Lifting Jib on the OAA Hinged Guide Columns Segment was
threaded through that bracing, and... jesus fuck, why can't these people get fucking
organized?
Oh yeah, I remember now.
They can't get organized because
C-suite management decided they could do this
on the cheap, bid it that way, won the bid, and then walked on over to
engineering and said, "You figure it out. It's not our problem anymore. You've been given the budget and you'll allocate your
humans per that budget, and those
humans will by-god
do the sonofabitch or we'll toss the lot of you out on the street and find somebody else who
can."
We must view our
problem in its original
context, and all of this went down back when Regan Republicanism was really starting to
sink its teeth into The Body Politic, drawing blood for real by this time,
feasting on it, and people like
Jack Welch had secured stranglehold grips around the throats of the corporations they were "leading", and were being hailed as Shareholder Value Saviors, and we're
still suffering from their murderous assault on our culture and on our nation, and at the time,
the squeeze was on and people were literally saying things like
greed is good, and all of the Little CEO Fish were making like the Big CEO Fish, and every last one of them was raping and pillaging for all they were worth, making
short-term profit look like a good
long-term plan, despite the fact that smarter people were warning of
The Train Wreck To Come, and the boots were already firmly in place on workers necks
everywhere, and...
"Never fault the guy behind the counter for not doing the job right when it's the guy you can't see in the back room who's
understaffing the store."
Fucking assholes. Fucking corporate-greed
assholes. Every last one of them.
And we're looping through the skies over the Pad, diverting our
diversions as we go, and hey why not, let's ask, "Why did they re-do the SRB Access Platforms anyway?"
And the reason for that is so as
somebody could get on the fucked-up ET Access Platforms. (Remember
them? Those are the things that ride up and down on the goddamned
Guide Columns, which of course were precipitated by the fact that some puffed-up asshole in an oak-paneled office somewhere
didn't want to be made to look bad, and... here we are.) Sigh.
The "old" SRB Access Platforms headed straight and true toward the top of the SRB where the work got done, and for this to happen, the platforms stood well away from the sides of the RCS Room. Also, please note, there was a significant elevation change along that pathway.
See it all here on 79K14110 sheet A-16, which I've pasted the Guide Columns with their Ladders into, so as you can see how the existing "old" SRB Access Platforms and the Catwalks taking you to them will never be able to give anyone access to those Ladders, which needed to be pushed over there to the far side of things, making them that much harder to get to from the Main Structure, in order to locate 'em right next to the ET Access Platforms (not shown), which of course is what they were
there for.
And when the fucked-up Guide Columns entered the picture, with their even more fucked-up ET Access Platforms riding up and down on them, they realized they didn't really have any way for any of the techs to actually get
on the damn things, and they built that ladder that runs on the exterior side of the Guide Columns, and the sense of the thing was to step off the Ladder, over on to the Platform, and that's pretty sketchy, but that's what they were stuck with, except that
they didn't even have any way to get onto the goddamned Ladder in the first place, and so they had to
figure something out, and the best they could do was to use the SRB Access Platform as an
embarkation and disembarkation point, and for that to happen, the SRB Access Platforms had to get dragged back over there right next to the side of the RCS Room, so that the back end of 'em would be
close enough to that miserable fucking
Ladder, which now means the
front end, which is still going to the exact same destination as the old SRB Access Platforms went to, was going to have to depart the new
back-end Ladder embarkation point at an
angle and...
Is there no end to it?
Does it ever
stop?
There are times when I wonder. I really
do wonder.
79K24048 is signally
worthless for showing us those "new" SRB Access Platforms, and how they have been pressed into double duty as an embarkation point for the Ladders, but they didn't
quite manage to cover their tracks
all the way, and once again, as before, it turns out that the
Electrical drawings contain the missing parts of
things that weren't quite swept all the way under the rug.
79K24048 sheet E-471 gives us the "new" layout, and as before, I've pasted the Guide Columns and Ladders in there, so as you can see how access to the Ladders is now gained off of the reworked SRB Access Platforms.
And we've got ourselves an excellent photograph of the scene of this crime, and you've already seen it, but I'll link back to it for you anyway, and it's the lead image for Page 65 which I presume you've already read, but if not, click away, baby, it's all yours.
And there stands James Fucking MacLaren, on the
old SRB Access Platform, the day we hung the OMBUU on the tower, and directly behind my big stupid block-of-wood head is where the
Guide Columns would be, but we hadn't
built 'em yet, and Tommy Northcutt is standing on the
Catwalk that takes you to the SRB Access Platform, and the Catwalk is near-flush against the side of the RCS Room, and between Tommy and me you can see the little
stair that heads out and
away from the RCS Room to where my boots are down on the steel-bar grating, and you can clearly see how the SRB Access Platform is set out
away from the RCS Room, and of course underneath it, you get a good look at the pipe-framing that held that cantilevered goddamned thing up out there, and...
All of this
disappeared when they realized they needed an
embarkation point for the Ladder that would give them access to the ET Access Platform, happily running up and down the Guide Columns so as
people could get into that horrid
crevice, and see if maybe there was something
hiding in there on the Tank, or maybe even the
Orbiter...
...that was going to
kill them all if somebody didn't
spot the motherfucker in time, and
fix it.
This blighted little area where the SRB Access Platform was press-ganged into double duty as an embarkation point is
difficult, conceptually, because that little plot twist is... tricky... and it's nowhere well-depicted cleanly and
understandably, on the drawings I have or any of the photographs I took back when we were building this crap, and it stands as an emblem as to just how
nasty things can get
configurationally, coupled with the additional nastiness of a drawing package that just throws it all into the same stewpot, old, new,
mixed, whatever, you figure it out, 'cause
we're not gonna tell you.
Here it all is, labeled for you, on an image supplied to me by another Anonymous Benefactor, letting you see what this part of the Left Upper Guide Columns all looks like from below, after they'd redone the SRB Access Platforms.
Miraculously, NASA had chosen to place surprisingly-useful photographs of this
whack system on the internet, and when I
found 'em, I promptly
grabbed 'em, and
you get to
see them, and not just as a casual looky-loo, but as somebody who now, via my own exertions with this stuff, can actually
understand what you're seeing, and appreciate it in all of it's
beyond-whack glory.
And you thought I was
joking when I said "the sense of the thing was to step off the Ladder, over on to the Platform, and that's pretty sketchy, but that's what they were stuck with..." but I
wasn't.
Pretty radical, huh? Pretty low-rent, low-tech, and low-safety too, if you ask me, but oh well. Left ET Access Platform. Left Fixed Upper Guide Columns.
Unlike the way things were done back in the early 80's when we were doing the work, at least they've got their High Crew (And those people NEVER come in for enough praise and support, and what they did, and what they do, is pretty hard core, and without 'em
you don't fly, but yet somehow, you never hear about 'em, and no, thank you for asking, I do
not like that, as a matter of fact.) guy in a
harness, but even so, that's one hell of a
bad fall if you take it, and you can
never discount the possibility of
taking it. That
never goes away.
I've got more of this stuff. Not gonna fill the whole page with the images, though. Just gonna give you links to 'em, ok?
I'm pretty sure all of it is Pad A, but I cannot state that as a proven fact for any of the images where background scenery which provides positive identification does not show.
We'll start out backed away, to let you get a look at a more generalized overview of things on the Left Side. Of note in this image, when you give it a close look, you can see that the technician who's standing there is just about to go hands-on with the safety-line clip which he will be attaching to his harness. This tells us he's about to be heading
up as opposed to just coming off of it. Also, different person than the image above.
In this next image, we're backed even farther away on the Left Side, and looking down from the FSS at the entire area up on top of the RSS, giving us an excellent perspective on how the Guide Columns (with the trusswork smoothly paneled-over and coated in white paint) attach to the front side of the RCS Room (gray paint) and run all the way up to its roof. Our ET Access Platform along with its white-fabric work enclosure remains visible in the lower left portion of the image.
Elsewhere, a
lot of different work is being done by at least four separate work teams, one of which is not even visible in the image, but an individual's presence is betrayed, hidden on the ET Access Platform, by the safety line which hangs down at an angle from it's red spring-loaded retainer which can be seen hanging from the gray steel framing which projects up above the roof of the RCS Room on its front-left corner. This line disappears around the back side of the Guide Columns just above the white-fabric work enclosure on the ET Access Platform, and although it's far from prominent, it is distinctly visible when given a close look.
The roof of the RSS is a beehive of activity with a lot of temporary equipment in use, all of which will need to be removed and/or properly stowed prior to launch. Everybody is dressed for the weather, and I can attest from personal experience that it gets
cold up here, and the north-northwest wind that's blowing is
much stronger at this elevation than it is down on the ground, and it's blowing for true and for real
down there, and... it'll cut pretty good, and you need to be dressed for it up here, Florida or no, and whenever you rest the palm of your ungloved hand on bare
iron, yeah, you can feel the cold that way, too.
Much of what you see here is at variance to our available drawing packages for this series of photo-essays, and this is mute testimony to the fact that the Launch Pad is more of a
process, than it is a
place. It never stops changing. Operational Requirements and Lessons Learned never stop changing, so the Pad has to change right along with them, too.
Note the work ongoing in the extreme bottom-left corner of the image. They've erected a temporary work scaffold over there, and that scaffold is sitting on the Intertank Access Arm, which is a thing that hangs off of the north side of the FSS, and is very definitely wholly separate from the roof of the
RSS, which is the main subject of this wide-angle photograph.
And in this image we get a look of one of the techs using the ladder on the Right Upper Fixed Guide Columns as seen from the Access Catwalk that takes us to the Right SRB Access Platform. It's impossible to know for certain, but the look of his body and the placement of weight which that look informs me of, tells me he's
descending, having just come off the Platform. In this frame you're getting a fairly good look at the little Safety Gate on the Platform "ear" where it sticks out past the Guide Columns and allows you to step across to the Ladder. That gate does not inspire confidence in me, and I never trusted
any of the Safety Gates anywhere on the towers, but that's all you're going to be getting between a solid footing on the Platform and
certain death. And yeah, this is a very different day than the previous image, and we're dressed for
noticeably warmer weather in afternoon shadow under a clear blue sky than we were on the previous image.
And I suppose I've about beat this end of it to death, so let us move down the trusswork to the third, and final, segment of the Upper Left Guide Columns that were originally pointed out to us in
Image 107, shall we?
And this is the part that's hanging off the OMBUU and extending up above it too, some, and
we've already learned that the OMBUU itself needed to have one of its corners clipped, to keep it from bashing into the Orbiter during mate/demate operations, so of course any Guide Columns stuff in the same area, is also going to have to accommodate that kind of
interference, and since we're now facing the unpleasant fact that we
need the Guide Columns, we can't just
whack a corner of 'em off, and instead they must be
pivoted out of the way in this area. It would be nice if we could just
lift 'em, like we did with the OAA Segment, but
there's more stuff down below, which you have not met just yet, and will not be meeting during the course of our GOX Arm Lift (Remember the GOX Arm? Whatever happened to the damn GOX Arm? Is it still hanging there in empty space, 'twixt and 'tween? We need to get back to that thing here at some point. But not right now.), but
it's gonna be there, and to be able to get
that stuff out of the way, we're gonna have to be
pivoting what we've got right here, right now.
Oh boy! Big Pivoting Guide Columns fun! And we're allowed to call it the "Pivoting Guide Columns" without reference to Left or Right, because it was the only one that
pivoted so, ok, skip all that left and right jazz, and just roll with it, as is, and you're fine, and you won't get lost, and nobody else will, either.
Here it is in a really good isometric view on
79K24048 sheet S-248E, which is titled "Fixed Wing Cover Mods at OMBUU" and if
that doesn't constitute fair warning as to
what's coming then I don't know what else might. We are now crossing an invisible event horizon into the overlapping murk surrounding the ill-defined border between the actual
Guide Columns themselves, and all of the
no-longer-creeping Orbiter
Weather
Protection crap that is getting ready to start raining down out of the sky like a hailstorm of butcher-knives and meat-cleavers, just a few big fat widely-scattered dagger-sized drops at first, and thankfully we're not getting
hit with any of them, but the
torrent is most assuredly
on its way.
And the way they're showing us the OMBUU here is nothing short of
precious, because...
Three
empty decking levels, without the least sign of any of all that...
stuff that's plastered all over the damn thing like far too much icing on a crazed wedding cake, and... sure thing. Whatever you say.
We already know what's all over that thing, top bottom and middle, so go right ahead PRC/BRPH Engineering Guys, whatever you want. It's all fine with us, either way.
As before, with the Left Hinged Guide Columns Segment, the actual
Guide Columns themselves are quite straightforward and simple. Just a pair of vertical columns backed by enough diagonally-braced trusswork to keep them
rigidly in place, forming a plumb, square, and
true trackway for the ET Access Platforms to move vertically wherever they might be needed.
But
the stuff that supports our Guide Columns is...
Not so straightforward...
Not so simple...
And it was
forced on us because these things were never
foreseen when the RSS was originally
designed, and now we find ourselves having to just sort of
cram it all in there somewhere, and all well and good, but
we're running out of room to put pretty much any
thing,
anywhere.
And now,
on top of that, we're beginning to deal with
OWP as an
integrated part of our Guide Columns, and that too
needs someplace to go, and that too,
is running out of room.
And hey, why not, we'll also spice things up a little by having to use a set of drawings which is showing us a bunch of stuff that's
not yet visible in our photographs of the GOX Arm Lift, forcing us to
jump ahead, and I'm gonna have to figure out a way to extract
that which is, from the larger matrix of
that which will be, which we're dealing with on our drawings.
Wish me luck, ok?
I'm gonna need it.
As it stands, in Image 107, almost none of the OWP stuff has been installed. From the point of view of our Union Ironworkers, that stuff was all a bunch of
fluff, fit only for getting in the way of the
real work which was very much still
ongoing, and they wisely left it undone until everything else was finished, and it would no longer constitute some kind of
roadblock getting in the way of moving more substantial things around and working them into their finish-constructed places.
In Image 107, they've worked their way down to the bottom of the Left Hinged Guide Columns with the
Cover Plates, but that's as far as any of it goes. Nothing more than that. They skinned-over the top end of the run, and stopped right there to give themselves enough freedom of movement to keep on going with the actual
iron.
79K24048 sheet S-248E does not lend itself to me altering it by removing all the Cover Plate stuff and all the rest of the OWP,
graphically, to let you see the bare Guide Columns with its Pipe Bracing, so I'm going to take you over to
79K24048 sheet S-237, which is what builds this stuff, so you can see the "bare iron" parts of it, which is what you're also seeing up there in Image 107, although not all of it is visible. It may or may not be as pleasing to the eye, although it does have more than enough Artistic Merit on its own anyway, and it's very informative, and... it's also what we used to do the actual
work, creating and installing this stuff, so ok.
You have to kind of
look, but once you do, you start to realize just how
sneaky that Pipe Bracing turned out because of where they had to
connect it back to the RSS Main Framing. That top triangular piece showing in View 'A' Plan at El. 197'-4¼" that I call the "arrowhead," looks perfectly symmetrical, side-to-side,
but it's not. Where it connects to the big W36 on RSS Column Line 3.4 is not as far away from its "point" as where it connects to the 16"Ø pipe on Line 3. And on top of that the "point" is not
exactly midway between Lines 3.4 and 3, either. Which makes the whole "arrowhead" just a little bit
lopsided, but you'd never notice that just to give it a quick look.
And then if you
really want to have some fun with it, give that 6"Ø Knee Brace, which is identified as a Knee Brace in View 'A', but which is also visible in Elevation 'B' and View 'E', and follow it back and down, to where it encounters the RSS Main Framing between Lines 3.4 and 3, and you can see that thing is
way off center, and then, if
that's not enough, give the 4"Ø pipe running from midway along
it, back up to the "arrowhead," and... holy shit, it gets
hairy as hell with all this stuff, and
somebody had to run the calcs on it (remember, early
1980's, no computer for you, Mister Engineer, do it with a hand-held calculator or don't do it at all), and somebody else had to figure out the lengths, bevels, and cuts required to get it all to
fit, and... whoa!
They give us another look at our Pipe Bracing on
79K24048 sheet S-225, and the depiction is small and low-res, but it's just enough, and from here you get a good look at that Knee Brace heading off at a weird angle beneath the "arrowhead." And you can also see how our Left Vehicle Access Platform at El. 191'-0" has to thread through that Pipe Bracing, too. Lotta shit going on in there with that Pipe Bracing.
On the next drawing in the package,
79K24048 sheet S-226, we're getting the same low-res looks at stuff, but this time we get to see the top of the OMBUU, and the screw-jack that actuates the Pivoted Guide Columns, pulling them around and out of the way when it comes mate/demate time with the RSS.
The actuation mechanism for the Pivoted Guide Columns, like all of the rest of it, was pretty straightforward and simple. It was all winches and screw-jacks. This one consisted of a Screw Jack attached to the Guide Columns Frame on one end, and resting in a simple-enough Bracket that was welded down to the OMBUU Roof on the other end, and the Bracket allowed the Screw Jack to swing side-to-side, as the angle the screw made with its support changed when the Guide Columns were rotated around to their retracted position. Give it a look on
79K24048 sheet S-251 if you'd like. There's not very much to it, really. We actually got a pretty good look at that Bracket in one of our photographs, back when we were lifting the OMBUU, on
Page 64.
You can see it sitting there on top of the OMBUU in
Image 094.
And if you might also want to see how all that
Cover Plate skin paneling on the Guide Columns works, you have to bounce down to
79K20408 sheet S-273, which further bounces you
back to the Left Hinged Guide Columns(!) which we thought we were already
done with, and are trying to get the hell
away from, but we're not succeeding at it as well as we'd
like... And in case you haven't noticed yet, 79K24048 is a
choppy motherfucker, and if you start watching the
sequence of the drawing
numbers as we step through all this stuff, you'll get a feel for what I mean by that. It's almost as if somebody
dropped the whole package, and a really strong fan was blowing, and everything went all over the place until somebody turned the stupid fan off, and they just sort of scooped it all up from wherever it landed, desks, floor, outside, who knows, piled it all up on a table, made sure that at least everything was
right-side-up, and then said, "That's close enough. They'll figure it out."
I already know that you're
over it with hearing me rant and rave about 79K24048, but the fuckups contained within it are so outrageously
manifold, that we never stop finding new and different ways that they managed to fuck it all up in the name of Shareholder Value.
And if you think putting up with my endless griping about it is bad, try
bidding the goddamned thing, and then after that, try
building it!
So leave me alone, and I'm gonna
keep on pointing out the fuckups as I go, and... welcome to my world.
And while we're looking around for other people to blame, let us not forget to blame
ourselves while we're at it. My own
recounting of the whole Guide Columns Nightmare is also choppy like a motherfucker, and commensurately hard to follow. And it's not an
excuse, but you're getting it that way because that's the way it shows up on our
photographs which, of course, are
what runs the whole show with this saga, and I want very much to keep an at least half-accurate
timeline with this stuff, so when more and more of it starts showing up in the photographs I took, well then, more and more of it will start showing up in the
narrative too, and in between...
...choppy... ...gappy... ...
hard to follow...
And I suppose, in a way, that's telling us a little bit about the goddamned Guide Columns, too.
Ok, I'm
sick of all this Guide Columns shit. We've hardly scratched the surface with it, but I'm already
overdosed on it. Never liked the damn things. Too kludgey. Too contrapted. Too tricky. Too
stupid.
Let's get back to hanging the GOX Arm on the FSS, how 'bout?
And
again we take a wild swing from the workaday complaints and conundrums of a difficult
job, and suddenly find ourselves transported into a world of stark beauty where
function creates unimaginable
form, and the resulting aesthetic is enough to send chills down your spine, even as
other, stronger, chills are already running down your spine, created by the raw emotions which are involuntarily elicited because of the absurd
danger in which you have placed yourself, directly beneath a Great Slow Dance of Steel, being played out against a clear blue sky in the air directly above you.
And no, I do
not expect that last paragraph to convey
any of what it discusses, in the slightest.
For things of this nature, for otherworldly things you find yourself somehow a
part of, in
this world, there can be no conveyance.
You stand, rapt, vibrating with energy, spring-loaded ready to
run for your life, even as the aesthetic pours down on you like a waterfall, overwhelming, utterly impossible to understand on your own, nevermind trying to
convey any of it to someone else.
But me, being me, I
try, anyway.
And I just this moment had an
epiphany regarding the signal lack of response to the
aesthetic on the part of everyone else around me who was working on the Pad at the time.
Allowing yourself to be
transported, to be
taken away to another
world, a world where things like form, beauty, harmony, symmetry, and all the rest of that sort of
aesthetic appreciation of things...
...was deeply
stupid and dangerous!.
As you stand
rapt, as before a stunning piece of
Art, in a
museum, you, even though you are
staring directly at it, become utterly
disconnected from the world around you.
And in a place like
this, any kind of
disconnect at all, however small, can, without warning, become a Capital Crime, punishable by death,
immediately, on the spot, in the blink of an eye.
And the
participants, the
inhabitants of this world, all
know that, have
seen with their own eyes what a moment's
inattention can do, and they learn quickly, and they learn thoroughly,
to block it all out. Every last bit of it.
And I'm not sure if any of them properly
realize that's what's going on, but
they don't need to.
All they need is to stay
focused. And if the guy next to you starts in on some
bullshit about the
look of something, in a way that has nothing to do with
the work, then you, as a worthy member of the team, will promptly and roughly,
jerk them back to reality, with harsh words of stern disapproval, derision, or whatever else negative thing might be required to
break the spell.
Because if one of your teammates, one of the people you're
working with, becomes
disconnected...
Well then, suddenly it's no longer just
them.
It's now
you.
And they have the power to
kill you by failing to stay
focused.
And you will
call them down if they ever show the least sign of such a thing.
And now, forty years later, I think I might, at long last, actually
understand.
Which means I was even
luckier at the time than I already believed myself to be.
I wasn't on anybody's team.
I was
not an Ironworker.
And no one's
life was hanging in the balance based on whether or not
I was there, mentally, or not.
And every last one of them was happy as a clam to
let me go.
I neither held nor controlled anything at all which could have
disrupted them, had I not been
focused.
And the thought of the
freedom I was somehow,
impossibly, afforded in this way has got me utterly gobsmacked, disbelieving.
The Fates needed
a single person. Somebody who was already
disconnected.
Who could, at will, disconnect even
farther.
All the way out into the
aesthetic.
Where no one else was granted entrance to.
And this
can't be true...
And I'm going to do my best to
disprove it...
But for now...
I'm inescapably
stuck with it.
So I hereby take back all the unkind words I've spoken about people in this regards. They knew what they were doing. And I did not. And I was viewing them from a position... apart. And I did not know. Please, all of you, accept my apologies.
But it
still gripes me that nobody else could
see any of this stuff.
Sigh.
And the thought that I somehow did not manage to
kill myself, through my own willful
disconnection from things...
...is an unsettling one.
The Hand of Fate was holding me...
...gingerly.
Carefully. Like a newborn baby...
And all I can think to say is...
...
why?
And never the answer shall I know.
And the more I write these words trying to teach
you about The Pad, the more I find myself
teaching little, and instead
learning much.
About myself.
And about the wide world, all around me.
Very well. Enough of that. Let us return to our Science-Fiction Movie.
Image 108 is
powerful, and it's powerful on a multitude of different levels.
What, exactly, are we
seeing here?
What, in our image, can we
identify?.
And I'm going to mark it up and see what I can point out to you, visible, from this very-unusual viewpoint, looking more or less
straight up, from below.
And I'm certainly doing this for
you, but I'm also doing this for myself.
The process of marking it up
forces me.
And it forces me to go through he drawing packages
closely, making sure everything I've
identified really
is what I say it is.
And if further forces me to deal with a
lot of platforming that's hanging off the face of the FSS, and to this point my photographs have not really
shown this stuff properly, and this one doesn't either, but a hell of a lot of work was going on with this stuff while I had you occupied elsewhere, and at some point, we're going to be paying all of it a visit.
And when we do, I'm gonna need to know what the hell I'm talking about before I open my big stupid mouth about it.
So here's Image 108, marked up, letting you see what you're seeing, and giving you a
foretaste of what's coming, over on the FSS.
Now let's get out from underneath this thing before something falls off of it and kills us.
In the image directly above these words, I am jumping you ahead, in the actual sequence of events, to let you see the Arm once it was connected to the tower. There will be seven more images coming, all of which were taken
before this one. But I want you to see the lift proceeding from the same general point of view down on the ground, stepwise, just so as you can form a decent mental picture of the
motion of things. I have returned from taking photographs
up on the tower, to a place far enough away to get it all in frame, from the top of the Flame Deflector to the bottom of the Lightning Mast, and we're able to see the whole thing, now that the Arm is in place.
This image also allows me to introduce further
Guide Columns stuff, while that's still reasonably fresh in your mind, too.
The seven images upcoming, all of which were taken before Image 109 which you see just above these words, were all taken
up in the air. They form a coherent group, in similar manner as 109 is part of a coherent group, all taken from the ground. So. We'll take a little stutter-step forward, talk about what we're seeing, and then return to the proper timeline, once again.
To sum up: I believe no real harm is done in inserting this, the last image in the sequence, here, and I can only hope you agree with me on that.
From this vantage point, you can see how
very little remaining margin they had with the Hammerhead Crane, not only with the 25-ton lifting radius for weight, but also with the overhead lifting clearance they had, vertically.
Look close at the Load Block on the Crane, and you can see a bare sliver of blue above it, but I'm guessing they only had another couple of feet of vertical clearance left, before the Block started getting into the Boom, and of course once a thing like that happens, you're done with lifting, then and there.
The ironworkers had an expression they used for times when things were brought to a halt, in a way that no further progress could be made, like it or not. That expression was "two-blocked," and it comes from working with cranes, lifting, and the load block and the head sheaves (or such block as may have been above the load block), come in direct contact with one another, preventing any more line from being
taken up, and when that happens, you're done. Nowhere else you can go. No further room for maneuvering. The
two blocks are touching each other, and further lifting is thereby rendered impossible. And we're damn near two-blocked here, with our GOX Arm beneath the Hammerhead Crane. This expression was applied, generally, in broadest-possible meaning, to anything and everything that had gone as far as it could, with no further margin for additional progress, whatever that may have been. Occasionally, I still find myself using it, all these years later. It's a good, pithy, expression, denoting that you might
like to be able to keep going with something, but circumstances have you...
two-blocked, so you cannot.
At far left, bordering the entire top half of the frame, we can now see that the Right Guide Columns are installed, complete, top to bottom, along with cover plates extending to down near the bottom of the run (And that's as far as they go. The very bottom end had no Cover Plates.) and our view includes a very thin sliver of the Right Wing Cover, but we're not going to be getting into any of that right now. But. I draw it to your attention to let you know the
sequence of things, and in that sequence, the Right Guide Columns had been fully framed-out by the time we lifted the GOX Arm. I'll show you the Right Wing Cover now, on
79K24048 sheet S-248C. But that's all you'll be getting for time being. Just the one unannotated look, no more. We'll be returning to it, all in good time, I promise, ok?
Up above, extending out of the top of the frame in Image 109, over on the left side, above the RCS Room, you can see the darkness of another
sliver. And this one is a
bear, and it's
incomplete and by sheerest good luck, the incompletion, and in particular the stuff we're
not seeing, out of frame above, matches
near-perfectly with an exceptionally-fortuitous drawing we have, which is also
very incomplete, and in being so, it allows us to begin the disentanglement of things up on top of the RCS Room, and lemme tell you, once you see
what else is going on up there, and you get tasked with
trying to figure THAT shit out, you'll be very happy indeed that you're only getting things in
teaspoon quantities right now.
79K24048 sheet S-268 shows us the OWP Roof, and the OWP Roof is inextricably intertwined with the Guide Columns, but it's also inextricably intertwined with
what actually raises and lowers the ET Access Platforms up and down on those Guide Columns,
which we are not seeing in Image 109 or drawing S-268, and there's going to be a
scary story associated with what raises and lowers the ET Access Platforms, but even without the scary story, this shit is hard like a motherfucker to understand, and... just you wait.
But not now. Not yet. You're not ready for it yet, and I'm gonna let this sleeping
bear lie... for the time being.
The "Roof" itself, is a dead-simple enough thing. Nothing to it, really. The rest of it?
The stuff we're not seeing yet? Not so much. Not so much a "dead-simple enough thing." Be warned.
We are building up a pretty significant
static charge of stuff we'll be "returning to," and once we go back again, and get close enough to all of this stuff for the stroke of lightning that's going to be coming off of it to use
us as its pathway to ground...
...you will be
feeling it.
Believe me, you will be feeling it.
But right now, Union Ironworkers are getting ready to connect the GOX Arm to the top of the FSS.
Let's go look at
that, ok?
Let's go see what they're doing up there right now.
And here you see the rightful image which should have immediately followed
Image 108, after my harrowing pause, looking dumbfoundedly
straight up beneath this suspended load. Getting the hell out of there, I then walked over to the FSS Elevators, hit the button, and got out up at the 260'-0" level, which was as far as it went, because the 280'-0" level was taken up by the Elevator Machinery Room, which of course contained all the hoist gear to raise and lower the cabs.
There were two elevator cabs, side by side, on the FSS, in case I haven't mentioned it.
From 260'-0", if you want to go any higher, you walk around behind the Elevator shaft to the FSS Stairs, and climb 20 feet up the stairs to get to the next level, which is 280'-0", and the only thing that's left after that is the FSS Roof at 300'-0" where I did not want to go. So I took the main FSS Stairs to 280'-0" and walked across the steel-bar grating to the little stair over near the Side 4/1 Perimeter Column, and climbed another five feet up to Camera Platform 8, which sticks out to the northeast, out
beyond the Main Framing envelope of the FSS at elevation 285'-0" and took the photographs you see here.
As vantage points go, they don't come any better than this. In and of itself, and in regard to being able to watch, from very close range, while still remaining totally and completely
out of everybody's way, as the GOX Arm was drawn in to the tower, where Union Ironworkers went
hands-on with it.
Another marvel to behold.
Another superlatively
indescribable thing that I will never be able to properly describe
. But I'm going to attempt to, anyway.
As ever, wish me luck, 'cause I'm gonna need it.
We'll start with the mundane aspects of my perch, looking down on everything.
And I'm going to give you this part of things
twice!
And the reason for that is because this is one of those ever-so-sneaky places where Pads A and B
diverge, and the divergence is something you'd
never spot without having it specifically directed to your attention.
This is
fascinating stuff, but it's also
troublesome stuff, and occasionally it can become quite
dangerous stuff, insofar as things which look to be the same
on the surface of things, turn out to be
different, and in this case there's definitely the potential for
trouble, but not so much for
danger, but it's not always that way, and this is a good enough example, without being overtly
hazardous, that I'm gonna use it to illustrate the point anyway.
On Pad A its official name is Camera Platform 8, and you see that abbreviated to CP8 at times, and it is reused
Apollo stuff.
Drawing package 79K04400 for Pad A shows it, but, as ever,
mind the elevations, 'cause Pad A is
5 feet lower, across the board, and you have to add that missing 5 feet back in when you're talking about Pad B stuff, but once you're up off the Pad Deck, where the five-foot elevation differential between the two Pads occurs, things are pretty much the same...
...but not quite, of course.
Ok. First, Pad A.
Let's look at the
LUT, before it got chopped up and turned into an FSS.
Pad A drawing package
79K04400 sheet S-134 tells the tale, and in so doing, also tells us that Camera Platform 8, the highest one on the LUT, was the odd man out, insofar as it was on the opposite side of the
LUT from every other camera platform. And it got torched off the LUT, and put away for re-use, later.
It also shows us that the Camera Platforms were numbered in a non-obvious way, and why the numbering of these things did not proceed in a straight numerical order, going up the tower (or even down), I have no idea. Somewhere... for some reason... but I have not properly learned of it yet. It almost looks as if they originally thought they'd only need five of 'em, and then, at some point later on, they came back and inserted the next three of 'em, with both presumed numbering systems increasing as you went from low to high on the tower. That, however, is sheerest guesswork, so take it with the very large grain of salt which it is due. Maybe I'll find out later, and if so, I'll come back here and let you know. But for now, the numbering system for them will just have to remain a mystery.
By sheerest luck, we have actual photographic evidence, showing us that Wilhoit
had to take
all of the Camera Platforms off of the LUT, prior to cutting it to pieces, and in
this photograph (taken quite dramatically with a camera placed down in the weeds at the MLP Park Site, looking through an MLP Mount Mechanism and its Strut), you can see that Wilhoit's twin-boom demolition lifting rig had both booms (very reasonably, I might add), tucked in as close as possible to the vertical envelope of the LUT, and those booms were
so close to the tower that the Camera Platforms
had to go, and in the image, by golly, they're
gone. So. They all got torched off the tower, and then some of them got put back on, per our good friend 79K04400 sheet S-135, after the chopped-up LUT reappeared in the form of an FSS on Pad A.
S-134 also gives us a look at where so many of those radical
close-up vids of Saturn V liftoffs were taken from, and the tipoff is that the videos which came from cameras on these Platforms were always slightly off-center, not perfectly lined up with the centerline of the ascending Saturn V looking due south.
79K04400 sheet S-135 shows us
six Camera Platforms as they initially reappeared on the
Pad A FSS, and it even has a nice plan-view detail showing how they're constructed, and all well and good. For the time being, anyway.
On Pad
B, they handled the Camera Platforms in
a completely different way, and they only
reused a single platform at Pad B, the one at elevation 260'-0" on the southeast corner of the FSS. The others were new, and not only that, there were only
three of 'em in total, the one I'm standing on taking the photograph above these words, and another pair of 'em on the other side of the FSS, over on the Side 1/2 corner, one at elevation 200'-0" and the other one at elevation 260'-0", which we we've already learned is the only one of the bunch that got reused from the original Apollo stuff that used to be on the LUT.
79K10338, which had just wrapped up when I first arrived at the Sheffield Steel field trailer at Pad B on Saint Patrick's Day, 1980, only calls for the installation of a
single Camera Platform, at elevation 260'-0" on the southeast corner of the FSS, and is otherwise dead silent about Camera Platforms anywhere else on the FSS.
Delving into the depths of 79K10338, we see our one and only Camera Platform hanging off the side of an
SSAT, on
sheet V-16, which I'm showing you, highlighted, just so you're fully up to speed with all of the other Camera Platforms on the FSS that it's
not showing.
And
79K10338 sheet S-78 tells us how to hang our one-and-only Camera Platform on the tower, and it also clearly specifies it as being
reused.
And then, just to be damn good and sure we really do
understand the extent (or the lack thereof) of the Camera Platform work which was done when the FSS was still
red, we can go back to
Image 045, and see for ourselves, that, above and beyond the single Camera Platform at Elevation 260'-0" (which is labeled as a Camera Platform in the image) the FSS is utterly
without any of the rest of them.
So they did it very differently on Pad B than they did it on Pad A, and I'm sure they had their reasons, but I do not know what those reasons were, although I've got a feeling that back in the early 1970's, when things were still very much in a
formative stage, and the
concept of what became the RSS was still something
small enough, and
light enough that it didn't even need support on its far side, away from the Hinge Column, there was going to be a
lot of open space in between the FSS and the "RSS" and if they wanted to get good photographic documentation of their launches (they did) then they were going to have to make
Platforms to put the cameras they'd be using on, and...
Check out this
early concept art with a Space Shuttle very dramatically blasting off. Look close at the area between the FSS and the
triangular RSS. Lotta open room in there. Whoever did the art didn't bother with Camera Platforms, and, more importantly, the RSS is bolted on to the side of the FSS, and the Hinge it rotates on does
not make it all the way to the ground.
Look even closer, and you see that the retracted RSS is actually
sitting on top of some kind of pedestal, or stand, or some damn thing, with its own spindly legs going down to it from all
three corners (and back there where the support pedestal's far edge should be, our artist didn't really quite know
what to do, and just sort of made the ground beyond it a very similar color to the color of the PCR, and the more you look at it, the less sense it makes, and the more physically impossible it gets), and it was freely detached from any support in contact with the ground besides the FSS itself, at all positions between that support pedestal and the MLP which presumably supported it in the mate position, and... Ah... those were the days... and such a simpler and more hopeful time it was, eh?
Since we've taken a little side-branch into the history of this
early concept stuff, I dredged up
EXTERNAL TANK GH2 VENT ARM, which is included in that vast treasure trove of stuff you'll find in
Space Shuttle Technical Conference, Part 2, and on Page 4 of EXTERNAL TANK, you'll find an
outstandingly-primitive rendering which includes a very early RSS concept, and I'm dead-certain (without any actual
proof, of course) this rendering is the source image which our unknown artist who did the dramatic liftoff image which we just saw was given, and told to spice it up a little for dramatic effect. But of course,
looking close, you can see significant differences between the two images, and the Primitive Rendering gives no sign that the RSS is actually
supported anywhere besides its hinge on the FSS (which at least makes it all the way down to the ground), and that "pedestal" down there could simply be a means of access, but... I'll never know, and... you probably won't either. Oh well.
But in the end...
there was so much other crap in there that they discovered they could just stick the damned cameras just about any old where, and not have to worry about a dedicated
Platform, because they could just bolt 'em down to the
cruft, and it would work just fine, that way.
And allow me please, to take this salient opportunity to give you a look at just how
bad the drawing quality is with some of the stuff I find myself having to work with, trying to show you how the Pad was built.
Behold! the glories of
79K24048 sheet E-198 OTV Camera Locations. And if you look for my little "79K Rectification/Annotation" Copyright notice, you'll discover it's not there, because this is an original,
untouched version of what I'm having to work with, and...
Some of it ain't pretty...
And you have
no idea what's actually involved with that "rectification" part of the Copyright notice with this stuff...
And this one, E-198, in its
original form, is quite the prize specimen, eh?
OTV stands for
Operational
Tele
vision, and this is pretty old-school tech, dating from back in the late 1970's, when this kind of stuff was still being figured out, and it was all big, clunky, low-quality, and required a
lot of wires and power and support miscellany of all kinds, and... then you find yourself working with a drawing like this one.
Gah.
But. Despite the utter illegibility of the actual
structures depicted in this thing,
the Bill of Materials, the listing of the Cameras, along with their ID Numbers and given locations, came out pretty much crystal clear (And if this isn't a good example of the wildly-differing natures of the various quality defects across
single images I'm working with, I don't know what is. And on top of
that, almost every single one of these
rectified images winds up with a cockeyed
drawing border line which I had to
leave that way
to keep the CONTENTS of the drawing reasonably square and undistorted, and how a thing like that might work, I shall never in my life know, but however it works, I
had to work with it, and... such jolly fun it all is!), and with
that, we can learn a
lot, and one of the things we can learn is that they had this stuff
everywhere, welded and bolted to
whatever existing cruft turned out to be pre-existing in the locations they were interested in placing a camera, save a lonesome
three dedicated Camera Platforms, and they were just fine and dandy bolting it all down to the densely-packed riot of local
ferrous vegetation which grew so luxuriantly
all over this place.
And of course a part of my job with Ivey, working 78K24048, consisted in
riding herd on a bazillion Camera Mounts, and the stupid things are sprinkled around
all over the place, and a
lot of 'em consisted in one or more six-inch pipe segments bolted and/or welded to angle iron, steel plates, channel iron, or whatever the fuck else, which itself was bolted or welded to... whatever the fuck was already there, and... no, I'm
not going to show you every last one of these things because it's a fool's errand, and my momma didn't raise no fool.
As your consolation prize for my refusal to run that fool's errand, here's
79K24048 sheet S-40 Typ. Camera Supports for you to admire. There. Are you happy now? No? Well then... fuck you, it's all you're getting.
But one of the dedicated Camera Platforms that remained, turned out to be the one I was standing on when I took the photograph above these words, and we can go to
79K24048 sheet S-118 to learn how to build it, and the stair that takes you up five feet to get to it, too.
Compare the one on Pad B with the one on Pad A, and you can see they're
different, and the B Pad version is longer, and a little beefier along that near-side rail to the departing Orbiter, where they would be bolting their blast-proof (they hoped) cameras to it. And over on Pad A, the corresponding Camera Platform is accessed by a short
ladder, instead of the stair I tromped five feet up to get to where I wanted to take my photographs.
And then, just as a little
more configurational icing on this unexpectedly-complicated cake, at some point (most likely well before I ever showed up), over on Pad A, they removed three of their
six camera Platforms, and if you examine the photographic record of Pad A, you can verify that my little platform at 285 (280 at Pad A), and the ones over on the other side at 260 (255 at Pad A) and 200 (195 at Pad A) were all that was left once the hatcheting was all over and done with.
Phew!
And that might seem like a lot of trouble to go to, just to show you this Platform as it actually existed on the FSS, sticking out to the side mostly to the north, but with just enough east angle along its front side to allow any cameras mounted on it to kind of peek around to the south, maintaining full visibility of everything on the east face of the FSS, but I've found that it's exactly this sort of thing that tends to trip people up as they're trying to follow along with it, but find themselves constantly stubbing their toes on no end of weird niggling little inconsistencies and unexplained Mystery Items. So, in the interests of trying to keep things
comprehensible, instead of just
firehosing you with it, shrugging my shoulders, and walking away from it to leave you abandoned, I figured I'd give you the full-and-complete story because...
I'm such a nice guy.
Ok, back to the photograph, and what's going on here.
You are eye-level just a trifle less than 300 feet above the open grassy areas of the Pad and the curve of Perimeter Road just below the top margin of the frame, with the matching curve of the Pad Access road above it, bending away toward the unseen Atlantic Coast in the top left corner of things.
Bottom right margin of the frame includes an arcing segment of the Rail Beam which carried the RSS across the Flame Trench which you can see part of, black, previously-yellow firebricks
rendered to near-obsidian by the insane fires of Apollo launches which occurred here.
Two field trailers are visible, along with some ant-like people nearby.
The upper right trailer is where Howard Baxter, Hank Morgan, and John Bell managed their end of things with TT&V, and the lower left trailer held a few Quality and Safety operatives that I very rarely interacted with as they worked their own end of things, which usually did not come into play until after Ivey Steel had completed any given work effort, which meant that our worlds did not intersect very much at all. Their job revolved more around the testing and validation of structural, mechanical, and electrical systems that had been
completed, and bought off, but which nonetheless required a
lot of additional work to integrate into the overall operational wholeness of the Pad.
Bringing a thing as gigantic and ridiculously-complicated as a Space Shuttle Launch Pad into a finished state of proper operational
working order is one hell of a job, and does not happen on its own, or overnight. It is self-interacting in vastly too many combinations to enumerate, and, as with a well-shuffled deck of cards, there's
no way you're going to ever run through
all of the combinations in advance, and instead, you give as much of it a proper self-interacting workout as you can, structural, mechanical, and electrical, all interfacing with each other, interacting with each other,
affecting each other, and in so doing assure yourself that the damn thing at least works to that extent, but... come Launch Day... sometimes you wind up finding additional stuff anyway, and sometimes that additional stuff doesn't quite behave like you want it to, and... It's its own complete world in and of itself, and the overlap with the stuff that we (and other contractors) were still
building, was minimal. But once in a while we'd deal with one of the QC people in there, who's name was, I think, Jim Lassiter. Most people have small photographs of their family here or there on their desks, but Lassiter had small photographs of his white sports car, which you can see parked right behind the near end of the TTV trailer, partially obscured by it. Make of that, what you will.
Bring up the image full size, follow the tag line down to the ironworker who's holding it, and just behind him Harvey Dixon's weird bow-legged posture is a dead giveaway.
I'm sure I know others in-frame, but cannot identify any of them from this remove.
And of course, utterly dominating the image, the suspended GOX Arm closes in on the FSS like an apparition from a Stanley Kubrick science fiction movie.
Notice the dark shape of the Spreader Bar, with its lifting gear hanging down beneath it, attaching to the Lift Points on the Arm, straddling the white
GN2 Duct, just past where it bends, upper left quadrant of the image.
Notice that the Bar itself, is held up with a pair of shackles attached to a plate with clipped corners, along its top margin, which further attach to the Lifting Sling coming down from the Crane Hook, unseeable out of frame above.
Give those shackles a look, and you immediately see that they're not
centered, and instead are noticeably offset to the right.
Then look at the Hinge Boxes extending out of frame to the left, beneath.
And we've been looking right at it the whole time, all through this series of photographs of the Lift, and the Hinges are very much
not on-center with the arm, but instead are clocked off to the side significantly, keeping the arm from sticking straight out away from the FSS when it finally comes in contact with it, and those hinges are by far the heaviest part of the Arm, and that offset weight is going to need to be
accounted for during the lift, and...
Yep. That was all taken into account, and our Union Ironworkers are
on it, and the whole thing, from the Spreader Bar on down, was
biased, off-center, to counteract the off-center weighting of the Arm because of those clocked Hinges, and it's the
little stuff like this, that never ceases to amaze me when looking at the very best, doing their job.
I've now drawn it to your attention, and you can see in the above image just exactly
why a thing like this might be done, so now you can go back up to the very first photograph of our lift,
Image 099, and look at
both of those Spreader Bars with
new eyes, and see things with complete clarity, and realize that the Bar closest to the Hinge was weight-biased to account for the clocking of the Hinges, while the Bar closest to the far end of the arm was not.
Little Stuff.
I never grow tired of picking out the
little stuff in these photographs, and giving it the full and complete
consideration which every last bit of it is so very worthy of, and every time I do, I find myself making more and more little
discoveries about things, and I don't know about
you, but for
me, that is a
very satisfying feeling when it sets in, and I never grow tired of it.
And now we find ourselves talking about the Hinges, and in this image we're getting the best look we're going to be getting, of the Connection Plates on those Hinges, so let's look at 'em.
The Connection Plates on both Upper
and Lower Hinges are visible on the
right side of the Arm, and most of the Left Connection Plate on the
Lower Hinge is visible, but the Left Plate on the Upper Hinge is out of frame, and yeah, this is
suboptimal, but it's the best we're going to be getting, so we'll go ahead and use it, and it's not like we're going to be
designing our own Connection Plates anyway, we're just giving them a proper
look, to see what's going on in that place where
steel meets steel, a couple of hundred feet
up in the air, up above all those ant-like people down there on the Pad Deck.
And all four of those Connection Plates had to be properly square and
coplanar...
And that word, "coplanar", for whatever reasons, during my total 10 years out there working Launch Pads, seemed to always cause trouble with some of the
engineering people, whom you would
presume should know better, but they'd give me shit about it whenever I had to use it in the paperwork which I generated over the course of that ten years, claiming no such word
existed, trying to
shoot down my paper, using that as one of the bullets in their Box of Worthless Ammunition which they'd spray in our direction,
every single time, in a Fusillade of Futility, attempting to wiggle out of having to pay for the results of their own inadequacy and undercooked engineering, and of course back in the 1980's you'd look for words in a goddamned ten-pound
dictionary instead of clicking into the
internet, and the ones who'd never done so, even though they were
engineers... and oh yeah, I wasn't... and how do you get through the goddamned
math program for engineering
without crossing paths with "coplanar" somewhere along the line in Geometry 101?... and they would
give me shit about it... and I never did figure that one out, and why just this one particular word would have been so goddamned
troublesome...
But I digress... and the Hinges were not only independently
clockable from
each other, they
also had far more
play in their own individual mounting and
rotation mechanisms than you would
ever imagine, and... ok, something's gonna have to be done about
that one, and in this image, you're getting one of the two best looks at what
kept it all from just sort of flopping around up there, and the next image after this one will complete that "best look" and of course the implication there is that neither one of the images gives a
complete look, and... oh well, we do the best we can with what we've got, right?
And in addition to the requirement for coplanarity, the whole schmutz had to remain
rigidly plumb, square, and true, lest the bolt holes wind up in places you
might not want them to, when the time came to actually
bolt this fucking thing to the tower, and...
Yes, as a matter of fact, it really
is one hell of a lot more complicated and difficult than you'd ever imagine, and never forget we're having to deal with all this bullshit
up in the fucking air, and...
So they made a pair of
fixtures, one for
alignment, and the other to
keep it all rigidly in place, to ensure that those fucking Hinge Connection Plates would wind up being
exactly where they needed to be, and...
We've got exactly
one drawing that shows it, and of course it shows it
poorly...
But it's all we've got...
So...
79K24048 sheet M-351, which I've marked up some, in the hopes of improving its woefully-inadequate quality, but I'm probably not doing a good enough job of it, so... oh well.
And now that you've got an idea of what's going on with this stuff, you can go back and look at a
marked-up version of Image 110, to see it in the real world, before it all got taken down after the Arm was hung.
The rest of the Arm pretty well speaks for itself in this image, so let's go ahead and look at the next frame in the series, ok?
We are now
hands on, and shit has now gotten
real.
The margin for error has now gone to
zero, and we're now playing for
keeps.
We're nearly 300 feet up in the air. It's about 60 feet long and it weighs more than a city bus. It's in
free suspension and the wind is
blowing up here, and it's
your fingers in between a pair of cold unfeeling steel
entities which will very soon be coming into
direct contact with each other.
Can you handle it?
Probably not. But do not feel bad because of that, because hardly anybody else can handle it either.
Ivey Steel's Union Ironworkers are
earning their money today.
In-frame,we're getting a really good look at the rest of the Weldment and Rods Bracing we were talking about just above this image, and, interestingly enough, the Rod closest to our vantage point, connecting to the Weldment on the near side of the Top Hinge Box, is conspicuous by its absence.
Except that it's not absent at all!
Yet again,
structural steel has
gotten us with a
chance alignment wherein foreground and background objects mesh together in a Synergy of Bewilderment, and that goddamned
Rod has managed to line itself up
perfectly with the Weldment it's attached to, and... can you see it? It's
there, trust me.
Go back to
79K24048 sheet M-351 to look for it, and, although it's displayed quite-poorly, it
is there, complete with its own individual notation and arrow.
And here in our photograph, it manages to get displayed quite a bit
worse than even M-351 manages to try and make it disappear. Yeesh!
Meanwhile, over on the tower, our gang of ironworkers is using the Upper and Lower GOX Arm Hinges Access Platforms to get ready to make the connection, and we've seen these platforms before, glancingly, so let's go ahead and give them the closer look they deserve, so as we can better understand this Lift, the GOX Arm, and the entire FSS/Orbiter System that this is all a part of.
And as background for this investigation into those platforms, I'll refer you back to
Image 084 GOX Arm Strongback Lift 11 of 12, which we saw down near the bottom of
Page 63, and in that photograph you can see the area where the Hinges are going to be bolted on to the Strongback by the noticeably-darker prime-coat only paint job, along with the rows of bolt holes in the flanges of the Strongback Columns. Then, look around, and... no Camera Platform sticking out off the side of the FSS at elevation 285'-0" or the small Stair I took to get up on it, and no Upper or Lower Gox Arm Hinges Access Platforms.
All of that stuff came later, and now it's later, so let's go.
The Camera Platform and the Stair are already accounted for, on this page, so here we go with the Upper and Lower GOX Arm Hinges Access Platforms, and they're surprisingly elaborate.
We'll start with the closest foreground in our photograph, over on the right-hand side, where we see one of Ivey's Union Ironworkers taking a momentary break while keeping an eye on the
Crane Hook (out of frame, above and left), before
shit starts going down for real. I do not know who this is, and for that I apologize, to you my readers, and to our ironworker and his family. They deserve better recognition than the pittance I have to offer, but I am unable to set things to rights with this one. Sigh.
He's standing on Upper Hinge Access Platform 'A' and you can see that labeled here on
79K24048 sheet S-105, along with where I was breathing down his neck from on the Camera Platform at 285'-0".
The
GOX Arm Hinges don't show on that drawing, and I'm gonna add 'em in, in their final
installed location, and Upper Hinge Access Platform 'B' doesn't show, either, so I'm gonna have to add that in too, and that way I can properly finish off with giving you
complete information as to the overall layout of this whole little
scene. I'm doing my goddamnedest
to try and put you there, and I don't know of any other way to do it with any kind of useful-enough accuracy.
Here's the
altered version of 79K24048 sheet S-105 with Platform 'B' and the Upper and Lower Hinges pasted in from a drawing that we're going to be looking at here in just a bit. It's not
perfectly accurate, but it's
good enough and we've already become well-accustomed to the fact that even
the drawings themselves contain no end of sneaky (and some glaringly obvious)
inaccuracies, so we'll be ok with my less-than-fully-stellar effort, ok?
And now that I've added Platform 'B' and the Hinges, you can clearly see there's very little room for maneuvering with the GOX Arm, and that Upper Hinge in particular is
tight, with platforms on both sides of it.
I've derided the Hammerhead
Crane itself often enough, but I will never deride the Hammerhead Crane's
Operator, who is (not able to actually
see any of this, remember) going to be threading a goddamned
needle with the heavy end of something that's 60 feet long and weighs more than a fucking
bus, in a blowing wind.
High stakes, high skill.
So now that we've kind of got a sense for all that, let's go to
79K24048 sheet S-123 (which is where I clipped out Platform 'B' and the Hinges from, to insert them in my altered copy of S-105) and get a pretty close look at it in plan view.
And of course, as with so much else we've found ourselves dealing with along the way, the bare drawing isn't going to be good enough, on its own, to really let you get
the sense of things, so I'm going to mark it up some, to help you understand some of the nuances of what it's showing, and what that means for our Union Ironworkers and Crane Operator as they make this connection, attaching the GOX Arm to the FSS.
And even when it's
marked up, as you see 79K24048 sheet S-123 here, it's
still pretty goddamned hard to
follow, and to really understand what's going on, we need to go back and click on
Image 111 again and zoom in on it, and look
really close at the Platform to see where it got trimmed off (our ironworker has his right foot literally
hanging off the side where it got trimmed), and look
really close at the Upper Hinge Box, to see how that Cover Plate sits on top of the Box Framing Steel, which is a weldment with its bottom side having the aspect of a Wide Flange over on the side of things where it's gonna
hit the Platform if that hadn't been trimmed, and the top of the Box is going to be
four inches above the top of the Platform Grating, but since the "web" of that Weldment is set back in, away from the Platform, some, the stupid thing will
just fit in there, but...
None of this is going to be easy.
And on top of all that, I
cheated a little, and
looked ahead in the photographs, and the business of
trimming that Platform Frame and Grating becomes
much more clear in those upcoming photographs, so... you're gonna be alright with this one, I promise.
But it ain't gonna be
easy, ok?
And now that we see how we're going to have to thread
the heavy end of our 60 foot long
bus which is dangling in
free suspension, while we're hanging off the side of a skyscraper, into this ridiculously-close-fitting compound-notch while the wind is
blowing, trusting somebody on the crane controls
who can't even see any of it...
...yeah, nah, that'll be a hard pass, chief, how 'bout you get somebody else to do it?
And of course they
did!
And just as one last little dollop of icing on this cake, let's return to our
marked-up copy of S-123, and consider what's going on over there on the top-right (as we're looking at it in the drawing) corner of that Upper Hinge Box were it's coming into awfully-close quarters with the lower-right corner of Platform A.
We know the top of the Box is
four inches higher than the grating on that Platform, and we know the "lower flange" part of the Box is down there somewhere very definitely
below the level of that grating...
And my coloration of things where the lavender of the trimmed portion of the Platform overlaps the orange of that "lower flange", turns an ugly shade of off-red where they're overlapping, and ok, we trimmed the damn thing off, but what happens when we've got to
put it back on?
S-123 tells us that's a ten-inch channel, sitting there on-edge, making up the far end of the perimeter of the Platform, and ok, they cleverly put a 2x2x¼" piece of angle iron in there to hold up the grating on the side where it runs near-parallel with the side of the Hinge Box, and that's not gonna hang down anywhere near far enough to get into that "flange", but the bottom end of that 10 inch channel out there on the tippy end of things, out where the Box and the Platform are
closest to each other, is gonna be 1'-2" below the top of that Hinge Box, and...
And then you go to the far bottom-left corner of
79K24048 sheet S-125 and look at View M which is cut from S-123 out at the end of Platform A, looking
directly at the side of that channel, and...
Well whatta ya know, they actually saw that shit coming ahead of time and clipped the channel so it would clear the "flange." Barely. Which is nice, I suppose, but still... this is very much not a "user friendly" place to be hanging by your tail off the side of a skyscraper trying to get all this shit to fit together,
just so.
Moving farther away from the camera in our photograph, over on the left side, we've got an excellent look at the hinged end of the GOX Arm.
Both Hinge Boxes are in plain view, along with the Frame that ties them together and also ties them to the Arm.
All of the weight of that Arm, plus the Beanie Cap that we'd be putting out on the far end of it later is
transfered through the Frame and then the Hinges in a way that rigidly keeps the Arm from falling off the tower (duh), while simultaneously allowing it to swing left and right through an originally-specified 73 degrees of horizontal rotation, and with the length and weight of the Arm being what they are, there's some pretty hefty
forces being applied through that Frame and Hinges connection point.
And alas I have no drawings of
any of this stuff, so I'm not going to be able to show you any of the
details of it, and the precise
mechanisms by which it
worked.
But. Despite that signal lack of engineering
documentation, we still have our
photograph, and when we look at it, we see that the Arm is
structurally tied to the Frame (which I've previously identified as the
Pivot Frame) at its top and bottom corners where the Arm Truss meets it. In the middle, there's some handrail stuff tying in there too, but none of that provides any proper structural
support, so we can ignore it.
The Frame itself is a simple rectangle, taller than it is wide, and is requisitely-sturdy, and it comprises a pair of vertical wide-flange columns tied together horizontally at top and bottom by specialty-shaped structural members which allow for a
Bolt Circle to fit within their envelope, and on the Bottom Hinge, the lower horizontal member of the frame along with its Bolt Circle is plainly visible, and we are doubly-fortunate with this photograph because in order to do the Lift, Ivey had to remove the
grating which you'd be walking upon as you entered the Arm, and with that grating not there, visibility is unimpeded, and... lucky us! It's nice to have
something to walk on here, but when we're hanging the Arm on the tower, it's
nicer to be able to get to what's
underneath what you'd be walking on, so as you can affix things like the Weldments and Rods that hold the Hinges firmly in place, and to also be able to gain access to
the guts of the the thing, if need be. So. No grating during the Lift, ok?
And that Bolt Circle ties the Pivot Frame directly to the
Actuation Mechanism hidden within the Hinge Box itself, and oh boy was that thing ever a nightmare, and I've already mentioned that I personally wrote what came to be called the "Pitchfork Letter" and that Letter specifically addressed all of the
fuckups we encountered when it came time to
put the Hinges together and then attach them to the Arm via that Bolt Circle, and... just you wait! But not yet. Not now, ok? We'll get to it, but not just this minute.
So. We wish we could look inside that Hinge Box, but we cannot, so let's keep moving through our photograph, and see what's going on down on the
Lower Hinge Access Platform.
And this one, thankfully, isn't
nearly so complicated as the pair we just dealt with up at the Top Hinge.
Here it is, in
a further-marked-up version of 79K24048 sheet S-105 with the locations of the two ironworkers who are visible in Image 111 down on the Lower Hinge Access Platform labeled, in addition to all the rest of the markups you've already seen.
The closest ironworker to us in the photograph is going at it with a
sleever bar which he's pushed the pointy end of into one of the bolt holes on the Connection Plate with his right hand, applying additional force and also steadying himself via what looks like one of the hydraulic fittings on the Box with his left hand, and a sleever bar is equivalent to a
crowbar in your world, but as with so very much else in ironworking, sleever bars come in a wide array of particulars, and they're not really crowbars at all, and there is much nuance with this stuff, and every individual ironworker seems to have his or her own very definite
preferences with his or her tools, but... for you... it's a crowbar, ok?
If you
must know, sleever bars fall into the same category as drift pins and bull pins, and the sense of all three is get the pointy end of your pin, or bar, down into the
bottom hole of a pair of only
partially aligned (and of course other places will do just fine if it's not bolt holes we're dealing with at the time) holes, and then, via some serious
brute force applied with a beater (for the pins) or human hands (for the sleever bar), cause it to go all the way down into the the lower hole such that the two pieces of metal are
forced to move transversely with respect to each other, and the two holes wind up in sufficient alignment to permit slipping a structural bolt throught the aligned holes (generally adjacent to your
persuader, but sometimes you have to remove it and use the holes you just aligned, and that can introduce...
interestingness at times) so that a nut can be threaded on to the other end of the bolt, and the two pieces with the bolt holes in them can be properly torqued down into rock-solid contact like they're supposed to be.
For a sleever bar, think of the pair of properly-aligned holes, which a bolt can easily be passed through without damaging the threads, as a
sleeve for the bolt, and you've got it. In the instance of our photograph, there are no bolt hole alignment concerns of any kind, and instead that sleever bar is exerting some nice
crowbar leverage on the Hinge Box, as the GOX Arm continues to close in on its final location, fine-guidance controlled by strong and steady human hands as it does so.
What our other ironworker down on the Lower Platform is doing, I cannot say. He's barely visible, and... I dunno.
We learn how to build our Lower Hinge Access Platform on
79K24048 sheet S-126 where we get a good look at it in plan view, and on the next drawing in the series,
79K24048 sheet S-127, where the little ships-ladder of a stair takes us up just a bit more than three feet above the grating at FSS Level 260'-0" to get to the Platform.
Going up that stair, left shoulder brushing against the Strongback, you wound up with your feet on the Platform, and the Arm just above your head, because it was always retracted, folded back against the FSS, sitting on its Latchback and tied to the Hurricane Lock over on the south side, and the Lower Hinge Box was sitting
right there at eye-level, but the place was still pretty cool to visit, 'cause there was ample room to get around the Hinge If you wanted to, and there was something about being
under that Arm, but I really couldn't tell you exactly
what, but I liked going there when I could, and of course the view was... as ever.
Ok. Next photograph, please.
Gonna take the alt/caption text right off the photograph and paste it in here, because it tells the tale and there's not a lot I can add to it as regards the very real drama of this moment.
"Image 112. At Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, the Upper Hinge Box of the freely-suspended GOX Arm is just about to enter the compound-notch formed by Upper Hinge Access Platforms A and B far above the surface of the Pad Deck and Flame Trench which are visible in the distance below it. The Lower Hinge Box is less constrained, but it too is a thing to be reckoned with, possessed of fiercely-unfeeling forces which must always be paid full and complete attention to. Things have become critical, and Ivey Steel's Union Ironworkers out of Local 808 are hands-on with it, and shall remain hands-on with it despite the very real and very severe risks associated with working an object weighing more than a city bus into and through a place where room for human hands introduced into it, controlling it, could easily disappear if it was to unexpectedly jostle or swing in the wind. Not all ironworkers have ten fingers, and the ones who don't even have two complete hands, or arms, are no longer ironworkers, so you will never meet them out on the job site. But you may rest assured that those people are out there, living their lives, following whatever dire and suddenly-unexpected turn of fortune left them in that condition. Nobody's stupid. Nobody wants to get hurt. But everybody wants to pull their weight in the gang and do their job. And once in a great while... Photo by James MacLaren.
I'm going to further
explain things, but as to the import of the moment...
...no... ...there's nothing I can add to that end of it.
People are positioned at the wide-open edges of platforms, over 200 feet above the concrete beneath them, without handrails, without harnesses, without
second chances, dealing, very much
hands-on, with a coldly-unfeeling
entity, possessed of well-hidden,
nightmare, forces, which is
in motion, and the lives of each member of the gang are well and truly
in the hands of the other members of the gang, who they must entrust their lives to
completely and unhesitatingly, and...
You're
looking right at it...
...but you
cannot imagine.
...you can never enter this world no matter how hard you might wish to try to.
Trying to
gain a little understanding...
Trying to
feel...
The grim and very-dark cloud of
energy which surrounds this scene...
In which everyone is
immersed...
And which every one of the people you see here are
feeling...
For themselves...
Upon themselves...
As they go about the business of
doing their jobs.
As the GOX Arm
closes in with the tower.
There is so much going on in this frame, in so many different places, in so many different ways, that I'm not even sure where to begin.
Wish me luck, ok?
We worked, more or less, near-to-far with the last photograph, but with this one I'm going to reverse that, and work far-to-near. We need to step away from the enfolded
intensity of the near field with this image, and shift our attention to the far field to do so, ok?
And as a tapestry or a carpet provides backdrop for the contents of a room, the Flame Trench and the Pad Deck provides a backdrop for the
contents of this image.
Somehow, from this unworkable distance, the
smoothness of those fire-blackened bricks lining the bottom of the Flame Trench comes through loud and clear. The way they had been
worked by The Flames of Apollo. Near-melted. Become
ceramic.
You're looking down on the fucking
Ramp upon which I had been sufficiently purpose-minded and
lucky, during time snatched from the cares and burdens of my job after-hours,
to walk barefoot upon it.
It has nothing to say.
And really, nothing can be said
about it, in return.
It simply...
is.
Around it, an unknowable life attempts to make itself
known, and fails miserably in the attempt.
As the attempts of those who would try to explain it all to others must also fail miserably.
There are cars. There are people. There is even a bit of
greenery coming up through the
seams in things, down there on that blackened post-volcanic
Ramp.
These are all laughably-familiar reminders that we should have no trouble at all, understanding the matrix in which they are embedded.
But understanding fails to come, anyway.
True gut-feeling
understanding of this place simply
refuses to admit itself into the lives of those who did not inhabit this at-once warmly-familar and coldly-outré off-planet scene.
And even, sometimes, those who
did.
Partially hanging over the edge of the precipice, the big red Manitowoc crane continues about its business, getting the iron
hung, out of harm's way, out from beneath the
Lift.
Someone is standing on the running board at the side of the cab, eye-level, nearly brushing shoulders, with the crane's Operator. More life-and-death hanging in the balance with every push or pull of the levers inside that cab.
We're signaled to
stop by invisible people
up on the iron, and we do so, and the crane enters a temporary stasis which permits moments of conversation with whoever that is, standing there on the running board next to us.
Are they talking about
work? Or
beer? Or
fistfights? Or
women? Or
football? Or
fishing? Or
politics? Or
church? Or...
Those words were blown away on the north wind literal
decades ago, and shall never return.
And the people who spoke them? And heard them?
That too has been carried off by the cold wind which was blowing this day, never to return.
Whole
worlds.
Unenterable.
Behind the crane, the curved Rail Beam which groaningly carries the full weight of the RSS across the chasm of the Flame Trench is casting a hard shadow on the Fire Bricks of the Ramp. The
windward side of the Pier which holds the Rail Beam up in the middle is mostly obscured by the Right Connection Plate of the Upper Hinge Box, but the hard shadow the Pier is also casting on the Fire Bricks of the Ramp betrays its presence as a very solid object which a fool had, in the not-so-distant past, kept attempting to
avoid, switchbacking down the Ramp barefoot on a
skateboard of all impossible things, nearly hospitalizing himself in the repeated attempts, and finally giving up on it, to the soft sounds whispered by a light late-afternoon breeze, with no other human anywhere to be seen or heard anywhere around, and this too is long-gone, blown away on the endless wind that never stops
carrying things off, and it could never has possibly happened in the first place, and the whole thing is as become a fever dream, not remembered, not forgotten.
And not
understood.
Ok. Enough already, MacLaren, what else is going on in this photograph?
And I gave that one some thought, realized just how deep the water I was thinking about jumping into really was, stepped back from the edge, and then decided I was just going to mark up Image 112 with labels identifying all the salient features visible on the towers within it, including the ones I haven't even gotten to yet. So ok. So here's
Image 112, colored and labeled, identifying a bunch of this stuff. No, you
don't know what a bunch of this stuff is. Same deal as with
Image 108 where we were looking straight up from below. But yes, you, at some subsequent point in the narrative,
will know what it all is. So ok. Give ya a little something to think about, waiting for me to get around to explaining the parts which to this point remain unexplained.
This photograph is more than I can deal with and I'm going to just keep moving with the story, and go to the next image in the sequence to keep telling it.
And how 'bout I just free-associate with it for a minute or three?
Those fucking
aircraft bolts cost us
forty grand, and it was beyond stupid, and NASA held our feet to the fire with it, as much out of goddamned
meanness as anything else.
The guy on Upper Hinge Access Platform 'B' managed to keep his hand out of it, thank god, and you can see where the
space between the Right Upper Hinge Connection Plate and the perimeter channel on the platform has gone to
zero, and we sure the hell
look like we're in
direct contact, but maybe there's a thirty-second of clearance, but maybe not, and either way, had it
been a finger, or a hand, it no longer
would be, and the Lift would freeze in place while people
scrambled, attempting to see to the
maimed man's needs, who himself would be viewing the world around him
through a prism of shock and pain, and there'd be blood and pulped flesh to clean up, and... but it didn't happen, and all is well despite my mind ever drifting towards nightmare scenarios of this sort.
The guy on the walkie-talkie should be wearing his hardhat, but he's not, and we don't know why.
And he looks like he's looking
directly at us, but he's
not. He's zeroed in on that Right Lower Hinge Connection Plate, and all of his attention and focus is aimed at keeping the Crane Operator he's talking to on the straight and narrow with the still-freely-suspended GOX Arm, working to get it up against the Strongback, bolt-hole to bolt-hole, so as Union Ironworkers can pin that bitch in place, and start throwing bolts into those properly-aligned hole-sets, and get this sonofabitch tied to the tower.
The ironworker squinting up at things right next to him has his hands on the shorter of the two tag lines, the one that left the ground long ago, and he's got it single-wrapped around the top handrail runner (go back to the previous image to see this), and he too is laser-focused, working that single-wrap rope as a set of
brakes on the corner of the Lower Hinge Box, and he's a vital
insurance policy, keeping that goddamned thing from suddenly lurching into motion toward the Strongback for no sensible reason (it
happens, goddammit), catastrophically
fucking everything up as it does so.
Additionally, with that tag line attached to the
Lower Hinge Box, he also has the ability to fine-control the vertical
plumbness of the Arm, by letting the Crane Operator come up on his Hook, ever so slightly, even as he holds his tag line
tight, restraining vertical motion of the Hinge Box, which, of course, will be tipped slightly
upward by the competing forces, permitting extraordinarily fine-grained and nuanced
control of this aspect of the Box's
orientation. And yes,
every last bit of this was taken into account, and properly addressed,
down on the ground when the Arm was initially being
rigged for this Lift. These people are beyond
good at this, and it is a
joy to watch them do what they do so well.
Our guy on Upper Hinge Access Platform 'A' is now using
his sleever bar, as a crowbar, working his side of the Upper Hinge Box.
The guy down on the ground at the far end of the tag line needs to be walking north along the east side of the Flame Trench, 'cause our Connection Plates, and our Strongbacks are
not coplanar, and that lack of coplanarity's gotta go before anybody can do
anything.
The Crane Operator
might be able to help him by booming
left a little, to bring the longitudinal axis of the Arm more into line with where it needs to be, but the Hook's on a Swivel, so there's only so much he can do with that one, above and beyond simply hitting the
alignment square and true.
People on the ground are wondering to themselves, "Why is this so fucking
slow? Why is this taking so long?"
People on the ground have no fucking idea what's actually
going on up here. Except for a very few.
The fucking
wind! The fucking wind
won't stop blowing.
NO STEP
No shit.
High stakes, high skill. Fuckwits, losers, liars, and bullshit people of all stripe and color need not apply.
And about those
aircraft bolts...
Far bottom right corner of the frame.
2 of 'em. Laying there on the grating, ready to go.
Instantly-recognizable out on the jobsite because of their weirdie 12-point flange heads.
These are the things that hold the wings on the airplanes you fly, and they're pretty hard-core, and they're
strong as hell, but then again, the A325 high-strength structural bolts
we built the whole tower with are also pretty hard-core, and
they're strong as hell, too.
But NASA spec'd out goddamned
aircraft bolts, and those things are eye-wateringly
expensive, and we submitted paper on it, offering a credit against the contract if they'd let us use the same goddamned A325 bolts that everything else seemed to be doing so well with,
staying held together with...
...and the answer came back...
Nope.
We called out
aircraft bolts and you're going to
furnish and install goddamned aircraft bolts.
And in casual conversations with the engineers who oversaw this end of things, every one of them agreed that A325 would be just fine, and none of them could actually
tell us what the stupid aircraft bolts were doing that an A325 high-strength structural bolt
couldn't do in this instance, but for whatever mysterious reasons, the answer handed down from on high, from NASA
management, was... nope. "Make it like the drawing shows, contractor scum." And so we did.
And if you wanna play devil's advocate and say, "Well maybe it's because the GOX Arm swings back and forth, every once in a while, and maybe it has something to do with
that," (carefully and completely ignoring all the
other stuff that swings back and forth every once in a while, and some of it's even
heavier than the stupid GOX Arm) well go right ahead and say it, but just as soon as the devil's words have come out of your mouth, you have to stop and consider that the Arm was fastened
directly to the Strongback, and any and all recurrently reversible rotational forces that the Arm induced, were going to be
transferred right on through that fucking Strongback, and guess what the Strongback was being held on to the tower with?
Yep. A325 high-strength structural bolts. Just like
everything else.
So no. It does not make a lick of sense, not on
any grounds.
And they forced us to use 'em anyway.
However, in their defense, those aircraft bolts were exceedingly...
pretty.
They came packaged in individual little long boxes, made out of some kind of heavy construction paper stuff, off-green, dark, with a top that had full-height sides, so to take it off you slid it straight up to reveal...
Some kind of white paper stuff which was wrapped around each bolt, hiding it from view, and you had to
unwrap the fucking bolts, and even then you weren't quite done, 'cause they had also been coated in
cosmoline, and the cosmoline on these particular bolts had been exposed to air for long enough to become rendered into pretty much pure
wax, and wasn't
that stuff just too much jolly fun to get out of the
machine threads on those bolts, but at least they didn't make
me do it, and...
Why?
We're back in the early 1980's and these fucking bolts cost a hundred dollars a pop, and that's still a lot of money for
one goddamned bolt, even now, but back then it was
much worse, and that was just the bolt itself, no nut (those were an additional 25 bucks each, if memory serves), no washer (yep, pay extra for
that, too), and oh yeah, the washers were special torque-indicating
crush washers, which worked as a torque measuring device, and when the fat
crush washer collapsed, you knew you had applied the requisite torque to the goddamned thing, and...
Holy fuck what a huge pain in the ass it all was, and you couldn't handle 'em like a normal A325 bolt because the over-fine machine threads wanted to cross-thread and bugger up
every time, and
everybody hated those miserable bolts, and yeah, I can see where I might want something like that to
hold the wings on to my airplane, but up on a gigantic set of steel structures which were,
everywhere else, held together perfectly fine and dandy using nothing more than standard hot-dip galvanized A325 bolts?...
No. Nobody wanted 'em. Nobody
needed 'em.
But by god that's what everybody
got, to hold the stupid GOX Arm (and also the OAA, and we'll get to that later) on the goddamned tower.
Sigh.