The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 72: Orbiter Access Arm Lift, Pad Deck Preparations.
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Ok.
Now we're up on the Pad Deck with our OAA, and we've attached the Environmental Chamber to the end of the arm which will be coming ever-so-close-to, but not quite touching, the side of the Orbiter, and Union Ironworkers are up on top of the Arm, putting the Lifting Gear together, and we're not very far away at all from hanging this thing on the side of the FSS, one hundred and fifty feet above the Crawlerway concrete that you see everybody and everything standing on top of in our photograph.
And this photograph itself is worthy of a little extra time spent considering exactly where was this picture taken from, anyway?
And at first you don't really notice anything unusual about the point of view, but then you stop, and consider, and...
We're definitely not up on top of anything, down low, pretty close to that line of removable handrail that guards the west wall of the Flame Trench, but...
We're obviously out there east of that wall...
But we're equally obviously not all the way across the Flame Trench over on the east side of the Pad Deck...
And... there's only one place...
And that's gonna be putting us out there up on top of the crest of the Flame Deflector itself, stepping gingerly between the SSW Spray Nozzles that run across its full width, to get to where this photograph was taken from.
79K10338 sheet M-50 shows us how all that stuff works, and if you look over on the right-hand side up near the top of the drawing, perhaps you'll be able to visualize, just a little bit, exactly how difficult it is, having to walk through/between those goddamned Nozzles without snagging a boot-toe on one, or stumbling over one, or placing a step ever so slightly wrong in a way that would knock you momentarily off balance, and... not everybody seemed to share my enthusiasm for walking across the top of the Flame Deflector as much as I did, but I kind of liked it, because...
...hey, it's a really cool place, and you're up over the great gash of the Flame Trench in a way that nowhere else can give you the views that are given to you up on this thing, and you're standing close-range directly, exactly, beneath where the Space Shuttles at some future point, and the Saturns of Apollo at some previous point, would erupt volcanically with unimaginable violence, and...
...no, you don't have to come out here with me, and you can stay back there where you are, and it's all good, right?
And most people would probably regard this place as a pretty stupid place to be, tickling the dragon's tail, inviting a stumble and fall, down the impossibly-steep slope of the deflector in either direction, getting chewed all to hell by its stucco-rough surface of Fondu Fyre as you scraped and rolled unstoppably downward for fifty feet before being brought to an abrupt halt with a potentially-lethal bone-breaking thud by the brick-lined bottom of the trench.
Yep. Sounds just about right. Sounds just about like something James Fucking MacLaren would do, just to get a goddamned picture.
Or maybe just for the sheer hell of it. Just for shits and giggles, and nothing more than that.
And I feel quite confident in saying that you will never, in any place, under any circumstances, ever come across another photograph which was taken by somebody who was out there in the middle of the goddamned Flame Trench, standing on the crest of the Flame Deflector. So this one's even more unique than all the other unique photographs you will find in this narrative, and that alone has got to be worth something, right?
Also of note, visible in the distance just to the right of the Manitowoc crane, looking remarkably like a gigantic sofa covered in a dingy yellow sheet, the PGHM Bridge Beam can be seen, which means these photos were taken before we lifted that monstrosity into place up into the rafters of the PCR. And wait'll you get to see the photographs of that lift. Radical. Fucking radical!
Visible in the photograph, up on top of the Arm itself, three Union Ironworkers are getting organized with the lifting gear that attaches to the OAA, and you can see that there's two spreader beams, each with their own slings that attach to the lifting lugs on the framework of the arm.
Notice how close the lift points are to the far end of the arm, please.
This is because the OAA was a pretty light thing in general, (Well..... relatively speaking, anyway. I did a little googling and science.ksc.nasa.gov informs me it weighs "approximately 52,000 pounds" which seems heavy enough I guess, until you compare it with the weight of the RSS which comes in at over four million pounds.) with the salient exception to that general "lightness" being the two Hinge Boxes that are partially visible as gray rectangles attached to the extreme far end of the arm, and connect to it above and below the main body of the Arm Truss in a way that gives clear walking access through to the steel-bar grating running along the bottom level of the Arm Truss framing, from the hinges all the way to the White Room on the end of the arm. Very similar deal to the GOX Arm, which we've already visited when it was being hung on the tower.
Those actuator mechanisms inside the Hinge Boxes were surprisingly massive things, made up of a large number of hefty steel components, and as a result, the center of mass for the whole arm was quite a bit closer to the hinges than outward appearances might give you to believe.
The open "mouth" on the far right end of the White Room (more properly referred to as the Environmental Chamber) was the opening which the crew of astronauts would pass through, directly abutting the open entrance hatch on the side of the Space Shuttle, as they boarded their vehicle on launch day.
The arm remained retracted, extending south from its attach location on the FSS, secured to its latchback, out of the way, until the Shuttle had been rolled out to the pad, at which time it was swung around into position, inches away from the left side of the orbiter, and the perimeter gap between the opening in the arm and the exterior surface of the orbiter was filled by a set of inflatable seals which you can see (deflated) in this image, that ran around the opening in the end of the Environmental Chamber. Filtered ECS Air was pumped into the White Room while it was in use, to eliminate the chance for contaminants entering the Space Shuttle, possibly fucking something up, with, of course, potentially dire consequences, should such a thing be allowed to happen. Once the bird was on the pad, this was the one and only way for technicians and flight crew to enter or exit the Crew Compartment.
The OAA was a Big Deal and was treated as such at all times.
And as for the Arm....
Hanging the OAA on the FSS is an exceedingly-similar procedure to hanging the GOX Arm, so maybe go back to Page 66 if you'd like, to review some of what's going on with what Union Ironworkers have to do in order to get this thing rigged, prior to Lifting it.
And I've already told you I do not have a proper set of drawings for the OAA itself, or the Environmental Chamber which hangs off of the end of it, but I do have a few things which might be of use, and we've seen some of them before, and we're gonna try to focus mostly on the Environmental Chamber first, but since it's part of the Arm... well... you're gonna get Arm stuff too, ok?
Page 71, which we just left, included a link to a (less than fully wonderful) general arrangement isometric view on 79K24048 sheet M-326 showing us the Orbiter Access Arm in its working position, extended, but with the RSS in its Mated position, too.
And I'm not real happy with that view on M-326, so I decided to doctor up one of the 79K14110 Vicinity drawings, with a pasted-in OAA (which, without an actual OAA drawing package to use for source material, involved a surprisingly-ridiculous amount of work to cobble together from the 79K24048 Electrical package, along with a bizarrely reworked/altered sheet from the 79K30000 LUT Demo package, along with a cut-out piece of 79K14110 sheet A-35 just for good measure, and... eeks!), and I also included an added-in plan view of the Space Shuttle Stack, sitting above the Flame Trench for reference with the OAA, and in the end, this version of 79K14110 sheet V-12 winds up having been worked-over pretty damn good, but it seems to work well enough, I suppose.
And here's 79K14110 sheet V-12 with the OAA just kind of slapped down on it, so as you can see where it goes, in relationship to the mated RSS, and in particular the RCS Room, which it winds up directly beneath, but this one is kind of missing a little something too.
So ok, so I did it a second time, and on this version of 79K14110 sheet V-12, I blocked out all of the OAA that has RSS structural elements above it, and in so doing we promptly lose all sense of where the damn thing is actually going, down there underneath the RCS Room and the Left SRB Access Platform, but since we get to look at it in the previous version, we can kind of blink back and forth with the two versions of V-12, and see how this thing is more or less buried in there, with a lot of steel directly above it, and on this page, we're going to dive deeply into the nature, locations, and clearances of that steel (and also the steel that's crowding up underneath it claustrophobically, from below), and I'm trying my best to let you see all of this, in detail, so as you'll perhaps gain a proper appreciation of what's really going on with the mated RSS and the OAA fitting up more or less inside of it.
And this is what they would be dealing with every single time there was an Orbiter on the Pad, with the RSS swung around and Mated to it, while they were doing whatever pre-launch work they might need to be doing (and oh good lordy gollamighty was there ever a lot of that kind of work which had to be done for every single launch). Which means it was by far the most common configuration, but it's not the one you are used to seeing, because what you are used to seeing, is the Space Shuttle sitting there on the Pad with the RSS rolled BACK, completely out of the way, in the de-mate position, with or without the OAA fully extended in its service position with the Environmental Chamber butt up (but not quite touching) against the Orbiter.
And nobody ever considers stuff like this. Nobody ever thinks about it. They just take it for granted, that, ok, there sits the Space Shuttle, in plain sight, with that great goddamned big steel contraption, whatever the hell it is, over there on the side of the photograph, or the video, or whatever, out of the way, and who cares what it is, or what it's doing over there, and ok, fine, whatever.
Here's another NASA vid, for STS-134, with the RSS getting rolled back, and this one has better resolution, but not as good of viewing angle choices, but it's also got weency little ant-people on the Towers to give you a proper sense of scale, and in particular, after the RSS is fully retracted, you can see people going back and forth on the Elevation 215'-0" (Pad A elevation) FSS/RSS Crossover Catwalk (immediately left of the Orbiter's Cockpit Windows), and how that thing came together as the retraction proceeded, and you also get to see the RCS Room Rolling Door get closed, so... that's all kind of nice, right?
And nobody ever gives the slightest consideration to what things might be like, when the gigantic steel contraption was somehow wrapped around the Space Shuttle, completely blocking it from view, and hell, nobody even knows that a thing like that is even possible.
They never see it. Nobody ever shows it to 'em that way, because the Sexy Factor falls waaay off when the Shuttle is unseeable, and who gives a shit about gigantic steel contraptions anyway?
Right?
So for the vast majority of the population who even looks at pictures of the Space Shuttle at all (And how many people do you know, who could not possibly care less about it?), there is zero sensible awareness of what's going on with the OAA when the RSS is mated to the goddamned thing, as must it be, for the overwhelming preponderance of the time we're out on the Pad, preparing things for launch.
And I mentioned on Page 71 about how the OAA is "crammed in underneath" The RCS Room when the RSS is mated to the Orbiter. And in addition to that, it's not quite banging into the fucked-up Antenna Access Platform as it does so, but it's close, and...
It's pretty fucking tight in there, and it's near-impossible to properly visualize this stuff, but way back on Page 30 I took my best swing at it anyway, while I was fleshing out further details and interestingness on the Hated Antenna Access Platform, and I'm gonna link you back to some of the relevant graphics I cooked up in order to try to show you how this crap all fits together once again, because it's time to Hang The OAA, and the time to gain proper understanding of the OAA is...
...now.
But be warned.
What's coming is fucking hairy. Really, really, hairy.
And if you're not up to it, feel free to scroll (quite the long way, but it's there) down to the next photograph in this series, and simply skip over the hairiness.
But if you do, you'll miss out on all kinds of weird-ass shit involving "hidden lines" and "phantom lines" and ladders in truly weird places, and bizarre clearances, and truly awful engineering drawings, and hanging off of ladders having to grip them painfully directly above life-ending abysses with a pencil clenched in your teeth and paper flapping in the wind, and whack steel connections, and a white-out blizzard of dimensions, some of which are easy to find but others of which are... maybe not so easy, and...
But it's hairy, so don't say I didn't warn you, ok?
And all of this happens with the OAA in its extended position, and by now you may or may not have noticed that, holy shit, the stupid OAA can NOT be retracted back against the FSS and Struts, out of the way, when the RSS is mated to the Orbiter!
There's nowhere over there for it to go when the RSS is in Mated Position.
The goddamned mated RSS blocks it from moving at all, from moving so much as mere inches, toward its retracted position.
It HAS to be extended. Fully.
All crammed in there underneath the RCS Room, slap against the side of the Antenna Access Platform.
Take it or leave it, we're not asking you, we're telling you.
So ok, so now that we're sort of up to speed with this ever so sneaky and hard-to-visualize aspect to the goddamned OAA, let's see if we can try to come up with something to, sort of, let us see how all that works, ok?
And it's a bear, so get ready for it.
Scroll down the page to the next photograph, below the torrent of words and technical linked images that's coming, if you want to. You do not have to understand this stuff in full detail. Not required. Some of it is fairly punishing. That said, My People, the ones who really want to know, will be given a complete explication of how the OAA fits up against the RSS, directly beneath the RCS Room, and a thing like that does not happen quickly. Or easily. Just like when you're out on the job, battling shit like this in the Real World.
I'm going to be telling My People about what to expect. When they're out on the job. And that's why they want to know it. They want to at least have a fighting chance when it's them sitting there at the conference table, explaining why the motherfucking Project is three months behind schedule and a couple of million dollars over budget, in a way that makes it the owner's fault, or perhaps one of the other subcontractors' fault, and we're not kidding around here, guys, the stress generated by exactly this kind of shit, literally, and truly, kills people. So we really REALLY do want to know how to manage things, when it's our turn to do so.
The rest of you guys can skip down the page to go look at the next Pretty Picture that's down there somewhere, ok?
We'll start by returning to 79K24048 sheet M-326, but this time it's marked up to show the cutaway loud and clear, with the OAA down there underneath the RCS Room, as well as the fact that they misrendered the Antenna Access Platform and Left Side Seal Panel in relationship to the OAA (and no, I do not know if the misrender is because those two items are wrong, or if the whole ARM is wrong, or maybe some combination of the two things working against us together).
Then we'll head all the way back to Page 30 to the part where I hit this stuff VERY glancingly, and pull up a couple of things I needed to show you at that time, but did not bother to further elaborate on at the time, mostly because you weren't ready for it back then, but also because I was going on and on about Compressible Bumpers, as part of explaining this whole area, inside the RCS Room, and beneath it on the Antenna Access Platform, and... at the time, that was way more than enough, and I let it go.
First, 79K14110 sheet M-45, to see some renderings of the OAA in there with the RSS more or less surrounding it, when it's mated to the Orbiter, complete with a couple of views which include the Orbiter itself, to help understand the overall orientation and interrelationships between all the main players.
And this drawing is not an easy read, ok?
In fact, it's a difficult bastard to read, and will leave you feeling like you know less, after looking at it.
We can start trying to figure out M-45 by looking over on the left side, just a little bit above center, at "Plan At RCS Room Floor El. 212'-2", which is looking straight down on top of the whole Orbiter Access Arm, from FSS to Crew Hatch on the Orbiter, and over where I've blue-highlighted the Environmental Chamber, it's giving us Column Lines, and those Column Lines are for the RSS, which is of course mated to the Orbiter in this plan view.
So stop, and give Plan At RCS Room Floor some consideration, ok?
The OAA is showing, and the framing steel which lives on those Column Lines is also being shown, and in so doing, they're telling us that this framing steel, is sitting right there, just above the OAA. We're not hitting the OAA with any of this steel, but you're for sure as hell not going to be standing on top of the OAA where they're showing you this steel, because... hell, there's not nearly enough room to even lay down, on top of the OAA in there underneath that steel. It's CLOSE. Very very close. And they're further telling you that if you go just a wee little bit towards RSS Column Line A with your OAA, trying to swing it around toward its retracted position, while the RSS is mated, you will be dealing with more steel, what they're calling the "RSS Roof", and that stuff is even lower.
So ok. So maybe they weren't being quite as explicit with things as we'd like them to be, but they're still telling us, and it's our responsibility to understand what we're being told, and not theirs, ok? If you wanna come out here and run with these dogs, then you had better be good and ready to keep up with these dogs. 'Cause they've all got work to do, and none of 'em are gonna be stopping what they're doing, to wait for you to catch up. And that's just the way it is, and that's just the way it has to be.
Additional consideration of "Plan At RCS Room Floor..." tells us that the OAA, when it's in its Service Position, when it's flush up against the Orbiter so people can crawl through the Hatch, it's coming at the Orbiter at an angle.
It's not square with everything else up here, ok?
And they even tell us the angle.
In Degrees and Minutes.
And if you don't know what Minutes of Arc are, then this constitutes a Golden Opportunity to do so, because it's not just an academic exercise, it's something we'll need to know, and if we need to know it, then we need to first be able to understand what the hell it is, and that motivation is what we use to get us through.
The OAA sticks out away from the FSS at an ever-so-precisely-specified 76° 36' angle, swinging counterclockwise off of the true north-south alignment of the FSS and RSS when it's mated, from a pivot point which is 5'-6" east of the centerline of the Hinge Column, and 34'-6½" north of it.
And that's that. And with that we've got everything we'll ever need to let us know where this thing is, when we're building the rest of our Launch Pad around it.
The Orbiter, sitting on the MLP, runs the show.
And the OAA is built to the Orbiter.
And everything else in this area is built to the OAA.
And that's that.
And of course that's not that, at all, because "Plan At RCS Room Floor..." is flawed, and it's flawed twice. Once because of a very unfortunate lack of quality with this reproduction of the original drawing, which I am forced into working with, because... there is no other version of this thing that I have ever been made aware of. And the second "flaw" is the drawing itself, which is not fully accurate, and is downright misleading in a few key locations, so... we're going to have to step very carefully around here, and I'm going to try to bring this drawing back, as much as I think I can, while retaining faithfulness to a created on paper (which we sure as hell don't even have, remember) version of this thing, and... oh boy, this oughtta be fun, eh?
We'll start by giving you the bare unrectified, unannotated version of 79K14110 sheet M-45 straight off of the original digital material which I have been so astoundingly fortunate as to come into possession of, and which, of course, is what initially set off the whole saga of creating this narrative, in the first place.
And yeah, that thing's not the best, eh?
And before we go any further, we need to know why this drawing was created in the first place, and it was very definitely not created to help anybody out with the Orbiter Access Arm, and instead it was created so as they could put a ladder in one of the daffiest places imaginable, to give them contingency access to a Panel on the Orbiter that provided a Quick Disconnect (QD, and if you see "QD" anywhere else in these drawings, that's what it stands for) interface for the Water Coolant System.
And "Water Coolant" crops up in more than one place in the Orbiter. One of the places it's used is for the APU's, and you can read up on that end of things here, in Space Shuttle Auxiliary Propulsion System Design Study, which was written way back in 1972, and tells us how they decided against liquid hydrogen in favor of water, for this application.
But I'm pretty sure that's all in the back end of the Orbiter with the Water Spray Boiler System.
Up front, where the Crew Cabin is, you get Environmental Control Life Support System (ECLSS) stuff, and some of that uses water too, and I'm pretty sure our Water Coolant System as it relates to our bizarre Ladder which we might find ourselves needing to use, would be a part of this end of things, and you can read about it here if you'd like.
Here's our "Water Service Panel" on one of the pdf files that were once upon a time freely available from NASA, but at some point, somebody decided they shouldn't let us see this stuff, but by then, the horse was well and truly out of the barn, and you can find these in a variety of places on the internet, in addition to right here, if you look for them.
I pulled mine down directly from JSC, before they screwed the lid down on it, and was smart enough to save 'em to my computer when I did, (and you dear reader, may want to seriously consider scraping the entirety of these Pad B Stories, and saving it to your own machine, and... why not, maybe even creating a torrent or two for it... just in case the Gathering Darkness closes in on me, seeking to Extinguish the Light, and it's copyrighted, and I don't want you trying to sell it for money, but were you to help a little bit as an insurance policy against this thing disappearing forever, that might be a nice gesture) so... ok.
And here's some more, which I've decided not to mark up, but which include a few tidbits of interest for those who would like to know a little more about this stuff. 210b Forward fuselage coolant/air revitalization components 1 shows us the front end of things. And 210c Mid- and aft fuselage coolant system, shows 'em to us farther back, behind the Crew Cabin. Dig in. Have fun with it. Come back here when you're done, ok?
The fact that the OAA is in there at all is merest happenstance. This thing could have been anywhere. But it wasn't. And instead, it was in nasty, near-impossible-to-get-to location on the Orbiter when the RSS was mated to it. And how all of that came to be, I'm sure I'll never know. It just is, and we'll just have to deal with it, as is.
And before we're done with this, we'll know all about that Ladder, but right this minute our attention is focused on "Plan At RCS Room Floor..." on M-45, because it shows us stuff about how the Orbiter Access Arm works that we do not get to see anywhere else, except that it's flawed, and I've got to fix the damn thing, and even the fixes are a pain in the ass, because I must include other drawings which show us what's going on here well enough for me to do the damn fix, ok?
And we're gonna make a couple of fairly intricate loops as we go along, so maybe get ready for that too, ok?
Here's 79K14110 sheet M-45 with just those areas we're interested in for the moment, marked up to help you understand what they're trying to show you, and if this is not the worst drawing in all of 79K14110 as far as poor-quality of workmanship goes, it's pretty damn close.
And right now, all we give a shit about is found in the top left quadrant of the drawing, mostly involving Plan At RCS Room Floor El. 212'-2" but also, just a little bit, involving Partial Plan At El. 198'-7½" & 212'-2" which is just above "Plan At RCS Room Floor..."
And the reproduction is faded to invisibility, and the original drafting is misleading, and oh boy, here we go.
The Arm. The stupid Orbiter Access Arm. What's going on with that Arm? That what we came here to learn about, isn't it?
Yes. Yes it is.
But it's stuffed up in there in a hole, with cold hard Rotating Service Structure steel threatening it from all sides, and we need to understand how it all fits together in there.
And unless and until I specifically indicate otherwise, everything that follows below is talking about JUST "Partial Plan" and "Doctored-Up Plan" on M-45 repaired Marked Up 1. We'll move on to the rest of the drawing soon enough, but not right now, ok?
On the bare original M-45, "Plan At RCS Room Floor..." contains a bad Orbiter Mold Line. And a lot of it is faded either beyond recognition or all the way out to invisibility. And the way some of the lines that do show were handled is exceedingly suboptimal, and a bunch of that stuff is very very misleading as a result of it.
So we've got a lot to be dealing with, just up in this top left corner of M-45, all by itself.
Once again:
M-45 bare original.
M-45 as you originally saw it marked up, back on Page 30.
M-45 at its present state of reconstruction and marking up, which I'm gonna call M-45 The First from here on, and you'll be seeing why, soon enough..
Bounce back and forth between them to understand what's been done in the name of clarification. Give the altered version a good close squinting at, because some of what I did to it is... non-obvious. Which means you gotta squint at the previous versions too, in order to catch all the changes to the eency-weency niggly little stuff that's going on here. Top left quadrant only. For now.
In the unrepaired versions, it's near-impossible to understand the actual steel they're trying to show you. A lot of it simply does not make sense, both because of degraded material that you can't see clearly, or at all, and poorly-done renderings of the stuff that you can see.
The bottom-right corner of the RCS Room, down where the Environmental Chamber looks like it's just maybe touching a column, makes no sense at all. What's going on where the Location Line from "Access Ladder Attached..." cuts across things along Column Line D? What's that murky crap over there to the left of that "Access Ladder..." line, just below the Column Line D Location Line? And if you look at what I've done to it in the repaired version, closely, it still really doesn't make enough sense, so we have to go back to the Structural Drawing that we built the damn thing to, to see what's going on down there, in just that one little corner of things.
Which I've ever-so-kindly marked up for you on 79K14110 sheet S-59, and what they're trying to show you down there on M-45 is the front side of the RCS Room between the Corner Column at Line D-3.4 and the vertical door jamb steel for the big Roll-up Door on the front of the RCS Room. And it's a very small detail, but it's emblematic of things, and somebody drew some goddamned lines on M-45, and it's never a good idea to be looking at lines on engineering drawings, having no idea what they're there for, or what they might represent, without taking the time to get to the bottom of things, so... ok. Now we know.
And while we're at it here, 79K14110 sheet S-59, Elevation 'A', which is part of "Elevations RCS Room", is the only place where we'll ever find out what's going on up here in the vicinity of elevation 212' and below, at the intersection of Column Lines C and 3.4, and they take us from Elevation 'A', down to Detail 'D', along the lower left margin of the drawing, to make sure we really know what's going on here, and I can see why the poor mechanical guy who had to draw M-45 threw up his hands in despair, and just sort of bodged it, hoping it would pass inspection, and it did.
And what's going on down at that location consists in a great-goddamned-big vertical W36x194 column (which we've already met no end of times previously, since it's RSS Primary Framing, and we are expected to be completely familiar with it, and you may admire its Line 4.6 opposite-hand counterpart's lower end, seventy-five some odd feet below, with nothing whatsoever beneath it except for a gut-churning free drop to the Pad Deck, in the lead photograph at the top of Page 54), which is coming up underneath a plenty big enough horizontal W21x57 beam, which itself has another vertical member on top of it, and that vertical W12x53 column isn't even on center with the vertical W36 column groaning down there underneath everything, holding it all up, and.. that's a pretty whack connection right there, boys and girls, and the mechanical draftsman had zero interest in all this goof-ass structural gobbledygook anyway, and...
You and I get to use this thing... whether we want to or not... and...
Onward.
Over to where the Environmental Chamber runs beneath all that framing and platforming steel, which is a place where things are particularly gubbed up.
Fucking thing don't make a lick of sense.
The Orbiter Mold Line on the unrepaired original is all horsed up, and down where it needs to be tucking back in, as it closes in on Column Line D, somebody just kind of said, "Fuckit" and decided they did not need to finish the curve, and that goddamned thing is extraordinarily misleading, and you find yourself wondering, "Is it platform steel? Is it the Orbiter? Is it framing steel? What the hell is that thing, anyway?"
The Orbiter Mold Line you see on the repaired version of M-45, down where it closes in on Column Line D, was cut from 79K14110 sheet S-41, resized to match its new background, and pasted in there.
And what's up with the flip-up platforms? Are they up? Are they down? Both at the same time? Whu?
And then there's the framing steel that lives behind the hinge line of the flip-ups, tying back to the heavier iron on Line 3.4. That's a goddamned mess, too.
And back farther away from Line D, back where it's solid floor steel without any flip-ups, they've put a member in there all nice and neat, and then, just to confuse the hell out of everybody, they put an Orbiter Dimension Line "Zo - 400" right next to the location line for Column Line C, and dammit, that's not a steel beam in there, no matter how much it might look like one.
And while we're on the subject of lines, I may as well take this opportunity to draw your attention (presuming it hasn't already jumped out of the tall grass directly at you, on its own) to the fact that the business of rigorously following all the standard conventions involving the use of double-dash, single-dash, repeating-dash, and unbroken lines has been cast overboard in this blighted little corner of the universe where sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't, and it almost looks as if they decided to do this whole area in either phantom (double-dash) or center (single-dash) lines, except for the stupid Ladder and the Panel on the Orbiter, and that doesn't make any sense, and I'm not even going to bother pointing any of it out, above and beyond the mere fact of writing the words in this paragraph. Fuckit. And it may or may not have been done better and/or correctly on the fucked-up paper-original, and it looks vaguely as if they might have tried, but that visual information has gone the way of the dinosaurs, never to return, and I just filled it all in any old whichaway, and I've got a few labels in there to guide you along through this very dark forest and you guys are big girls, and big boys, and I have every confidence in you, and you'll be fine, goddamnit.
And there's also nothing at all about the rendering of the Environmental Chamber that might cause you to believe it's underneath all of that steel and mess, anyway. Nothing.
And we'll ice this cake by going up to "Partial Plan" and looking at the stupid Ladder, which is done in hard line, even though it's down there attached to the underside of that flip-up platform it lives on... and what the fuck are we doing with a Ladder of all goof-ass things, welded on to the bottom side of a goddamned flip-up platform anyway?
Not now. Stick around and we'll get to it. I promise. But not now. We've got more than enough on our hands as it is, right now, ok?
And I tried to label, and mark, and highlight, and fill in, and erase, and...
You do not want to know how much time and effort was expended in making sense of this crap in the first place, and then correcting the motherfucker in the second place. Gah.
And there should definitely be a sense of familiarity with what we're looking at now, because we've been here before with this narrative.
Twice, even.
The lead photograph on Page 29 gave us an excellent look at the Orbiter Mold Line which cuts a large rounded-off hole in the RCS Room Floor at our good friend, Elevation 212'-2".
And the lead photograph on Page 30 showed us even more, from underneath, in this exact same area.
And the goddamned OAA is supposed to be fitting into this stuff... somewhere, and god damn it, we're gonna learn exactly where, before we're done with this, no matter how fucked-up 79K14110 sheet M-45 might actually be.
Let us now turn our attentions elsewhere on this marvel of a drawing. Let us now give the lower left quadrant of M-45 a look, now that we've established at least a sort of half-assed understanding of the steel structure that fills the spaces just above the OAA, as depicted in Plan At Elevation 212...
Oh boy, more fun!
And without further preamble, the Second Doctored Up Version of 79K14110 sheet M-45. M-45 The Second.
Drop down below "Plan At RCS Room Floor...", and you get "Elevation Looking South" in the far bottom left corner of the drawing, and right next to it, to the right, "Elevation Looking East", and these two Elevations take up the entire bottom left quadrant of the drawing, and that quadrant is our area of interest at this time, and it's plenty more than enough, all by itself, let me assure you.
Go look at that stuff, ok? Now, please. Don't even bother trying to make sense of it. I mean, yeah, there's the Orbiter, and a bunch of steel and stuff, and a bunch of words and arrows, but just leave that alone, ok? We're gonna do it, but first, just give it the old once-over so as you're at least aware of our general location and point(s) of view. Click the link and go there, take a little time to just sort of... admire it, and then come back here when you're done.
Thank you.
And in the meantime, while you were away, I've decided to upgrade this drawing from being one of the worst in all of 79K14110, to being the very worst. Hooray!
We're trying to learn about clearances, for all that crap which surrounds the OAA when the RSS is mated to the Orbiter (And please do not forget about the Hinged Left Guide Column, which we met back on Page 66, and which you are presumed fully cognizant of and fully familiar with, and no, NONE of that shows on M-45, so... mind, ok?)
And here's 79K24048 sheet S-224 again, just to refresh your memory of where that Hinged Guide Column fits in to its surroundings right next to the OAA, but try as you might, you will never find the Canister Guide Rail or the Big W36x194 which I've had to include and label on M-45, and it's almost like they wanted to hide that shit, across several different drawing packages, but for the life of me, I'll never know why.
Ok. We need to stop here. I've just shown you the second doctored-up version of M-45, and it's riddled with dimensions, a lot of which were never on the original, and I did not have room on the drawing to tell you where I got all those dimensions, and it's getting out of hand, and who's to say I'm not just making this shit up, so I'm gonna give you a list of where it all came from, so as you can check my work, to verify I'm not just making shit up, and even just that is gonna be a giant fucking pain in the ass, because some of the dimensions had to be derived, and I also for sure as fuck do not trust all of them equally, and...
Fuckit.
Here we go.
Working more or less high to low in our Quadrant of the Damned on M-45...
Bottom of W21x57 El. 210'-3¼" on M-45 The Second, is derived from 79K14110 sheet S-41, RCS Room Floor Framing Plan @ Elevation 212'-2", which tells us there's a member running from Line B to Line D on Line 3.4 which is a W21x57. 79K14110 sheet S-59, Elevation A (which is cut from 79K14110 sheet S-43) is showing us the Line 3.4 side of the RCS Room, and agrees that there's a "W21" at Floor Level in the RCS Room on Line 3.4, at Line C (which is what we're seeing on M-45 "Elevation Looking South" even though it does not specifically tell us that), and tells us to go to Detail D on that same drawing, S-59 to see what's happening with the "W21" at Line C-3.4, and that Detail D tells us there's a W36 column coming up vertically beneath our W21, and it also tells us T.O.S. (Top Of Steel) of the horizontal W21 beam is at elevation 212'-0¼". Ok. From there our Manual of Steel Construction tells us that a W21x57 is exactly 21" deep (which is rarely the case for members specified by inches of depth, if you were wondering), and when we come down exactly 21 inches from 212'-0¼", we wind up at 210'-3¼", and ok, there you go, our first derived elevation, tra la la. Check it yourself, if you don't trust me (and you should, and you should strive to develop this as a habit, if you ever Get Into the Business, and you don't do it because you don't like me or you don't trust me, you do it because it'll keep you out of one HELL of a lot of trouble at some unknowable point down the line, in the future, and Future You will thank Today You profusely for developing this life-saving habit, ok?).
Top of OAA El. 209'-6" is given elsewhere on M-45 The Second, and we'll get to that side of the drawing, but not right this minute, although we'll happily use what we're given as the elevation for the top of the OAA, and of course, the only part of the OAA we're really interested in, is the Environmental Chamber, so if you see me say "OAA" kind of don't forget that it's the Environmental Chamber that's our immediate Subject of Interest, and the rest of the Arm, can be ignored for the most part.
Which, also of course, allows us to derive 0'-9¼" Headroom Clearance Above OAA, as the RSS is grandly steaming in toward us, coming in at us around from the side like a battleship, with the bottom flange of our W21 passing directly above the Environmental Chamber as it does so, which sounds all well and good for room enough, except that it's not, and What This Part of the Drawing Giveth, That Part of the Drawing Taketh Away, and we'll get there soon enough, ok?
And 198'-8⅜" bottom of OAA turns out to be a rat bastard, and as far as I've been able to tell so far, they never do give it to us directly, and instead...
We find ourselves having to work indirectly with things, to an unknown degree, and we're gonna be heading over to 79K14110 sheet M-70 real soon now, in just a couple of more paragraphs, where the tops of the Left Side Seal Panel and the Left Canister Guide Rail come together right next to the Big W36x194 Column at the far end of the Antenna Access Platform where that annoyingly-complicated Flip-up Platform tucks in to the top of the Left Side Seal Panel, and I didn't bother giving you clearance between the bottom of the OAA and the Antenna Access Platform because the OAA doesn't quite make it that far, so there's no actual overlap, but with the Canister Guide Rail, there is some overlap, and careful there Lou, don't go swinging the OAA into that W36x194 column while you're at it, ok?
And the Big W36 in particular, is close. We don't quite hit it, but we come... close. Very very close. Or actually, I should be saying, "It doesn't hit us," because the poor OAA is already fully extended, up against the side of the Orbiter, unmoving, unmovable, and it's the RSS that's in motion here, W36 column and all, and if push was to somehow come to shove, the OAA has nowhere to go, and every time we mate the RSS to the Orbiter it's truth-or-consequences time with that W36 and the OAA, and... like I just said... careful there, Lou, ok?
And as we're having to deal with all of that crap, we notice, "Oh by the way," that in 79K14110 sheet M-70, Section D, which is cut from 79K14110 sheet M-68 (and yeah, I had to repair and rebuild that goddamned thing too), they've ever-so-casually dropped in a little note that says, "Swing Arm Clearance Xo 559.62", and ah, shit, now we gotta go back to the fucked-up Orbiter Coordinate System and see if we can convert that into the feet and inches system we're using to build the stupid tower to, and...
Hairy enough for you yet?
And at no point does anybody ever tell you what "clearance" actually means in this instance, and is it the lower edge of the actual steel (or aluminum, or some bracket, or...?) of the OAA's Environmental Chamber, or is it something which contains within itself some margin or other, which means we might have just an extra smidgen or two of squeak room for this thing to not hit what's underneath it over here, and...
Giant pain in the ass is all it'll ever be, and it's also all we're ever gonna get, so... grin and bear it, I guess.
And if you're wondering why I might be going to such extraordinary lengths to walk you through this unpleasant district of The Dark Forest... well... a little while ago I mentioned "if you ever Get Into the Business," and this is exactly the kind of shit you're going to be finding yourself having to deal with, and you're thinking, "Ok, so what," except that your thinking is incomplete, and what we're dealing with here, In The Business, can turn out to be the loss of eye-wateringly large sums of money, in addition to the continuance of your own employment coming to an abrupt end, and it doesn't really matter if it's lines on paper, or lines on a screen, or if it's two-dimensional, or three-dimensional, and you can rotate it around and look at it from all angles when it's 3-D, but that doesn't matter, because... it's just lines, and the paper, or the screen, will very obediently put whatever line somebody dictated it put, at whatever location that pleased them, and there's always going to be some asshole with more power than intelligence (or morals), telling you to, "Make it like the drawing shows," and if the miserable sonofabitch is making demands like that because he's crooked, and knows full-well that it's impossible, as-shown, but he also knows it's gonna cost him a bundle of money to make it right, then he's gonna lean into it, with every bit of strength he's got, and YOU had better be on top of this shit to a degree where you can take the stick he's coming after you with, snatch it out of his hand, and then turn it around and shove it up his ass, and break it off up there, and the only way to be able to do that is to be on top of this shit, and there's this guy's set of drawings, and that guy's set of drawings, and some other guy's set of drawings, and they all sure do look pretty, and all the lines on all the drawings close up nice and neat, but yet somehow, the wholeness of the thing fails to pass the Sense Test, and it's up to you to keep people with sticks in their hands from being able to do to you what they want to do, and...
Are we getting the idea here yet?
They're playing hardball, and they're not kidding, and they will hurt you if you let them, so you must be able to integrate different things from different systems, or even the same system, the hard way, the old-fashioned way, and in the process of integrating things, it goddamned better well motherfucking fit, and be buildable, or...
...you're gonna be looking for a new job, and your former company is going to be looking for people to purchase their assets in Bankruptcy Court, and no, I'm NOT exaggerating, not to the slightest degree, because I've seen it, with my own eyes, and you never know where the next Horseshit Event is gonna be coming from, so you must, at all times, know everything about the situation you're dealing with, good and bad, and about what's going on with and around it at any given time, and...
...this is why they don't just grab people off the streets to do this kind of work.
Construction Management is a BASTARD, and no slack ever gets cut, no mercy ever gets shown, and no credit for doing it right ever gets given, and you either learn to swim in that water or you don't, should you ever find yourself having been pushed into it, unexpectedly, and the choice to Get Into the Business is entirely yours, and I'm letting you see all of dirty underside of things here out of the goodness of my heart, so as you might, maybe, thereby be enabled to make a somewhat more-informed decision about things, before you find yourself nostril-deep in this very cold, and very dark, water.
That said, on the other side of the coin, the sensation of getting it right, of making sense of a very difficult technical thing, of finding ways to beat NASA's Rocket Scientists at their own game, is very heady wine indeed, and taking a deep draught of it can be one of the most pleasurable and satisfying things you'll ever experience in your life.
But. You must never forget that as you are enjoying your very-heady wine, you are being supported by a small raft, floating on top of some frighteningly-deep water, and that water is very cold, and very dark, and it will take you if it gets a chance to.
Ok, where were we?
Oh yeah, we were deriving things, and I was warning you about it, because when you derive something off of the Contract Drawings, you are, in essence, buying it. Step one inch away from anything that's in black and white on the drawing, as produced by the engineering, and the contractually-specified entity they work for, and...
...it's yours...
...and if it's wrong and if you failed to submit paper on it in advance, if you had the slightest lingering doubt or question about any of it, well then, that becomes yours too, and depending on the wrongness, the time and money penalties for being wrong can get...
...substantial.
If it was right there on the drawing to begin with, and you're being a good little doo-be, and you're doing what you were told to do, and it turns out to be very expensively fucked-up, then you submit paper on the motherfucker (and yeah, you'd better know how to write, or learn how to write on the double-quick, in a technically-precise and utterly unambiguous way that will withstand high-powered adversarial scrutiny in a court of law), and once the miserable sonofabitches are finally forced into owning their mistake (which may or may not be a quite wild-and-woolly process in and of itself), you get paid for the extra work in the form of a Contract Change Order, and all is well with the world (over on your side of the house, anyway).
But.
Step that one inch away from anything that's spelled out plainly in the contract documents...
...and god help your mortal soul.
So when we're deriving things...
We learn pretty quickly to be very very VERY careful about it, and we double-check and we triple-check, before we...
...commit.
Ok?
And if the OAA bangs into the tower, because we made a mistake in deriving things...
...horrifying amounts of money will suddenly lurch into motion, start swirling around in a mad circle, and then funnel down into a bottomless pit from where it will never return, and...
...are you sure you had your people read... Every. Single. Word. in this thing? All 632 pages of it? Every single bit of it? Because if you missed something in there somewhere...
...Careful there, Lou, this shit's pretty expensive when you get it wrong.
And we have not yet left M-45 The Second behind, and now we move on to 198'-2" top of Canister Guide Rail, and at least this one actually does get spelled out directly on a drawing, and you can see it for yourself on 79K14110 sheet M-70 Section D, which we've previously visited here, and which I'm giving to you again, just to maintain your familiarity with it.
But of course they're not gonna be making any of this stuff easy, and we have to, yet again, derive 0'-6⅜" Clearance between bottom of OAA and top of Guide Rail, because they decided to give us the top elevation for that margin of clearance in Orbiter Coordinate System units, "Xo 559.62," (which derives to a mere ⅞" above the level of the Antenna Access Platform, which sits at elevation 198'-7½", as a nice hard well-established reference point for stuff in this area, and notice please, on M-70, how they just decided to drop that five one-thousandths, third "significant" digit when you convert decimal ⅝" from the original fractional .625" in Orbiter Coordinate System horseshit units) but then they gave us the bottom elevation for that margin of clearance in the usual feet and inches nomenclature which we're building the tower to, and we must convert one of them into the other, so as they're both the same, and become therefore comprehensible, and since we're building the goddamned tower to goddamned feet and inches, ok motherfuckers, we'll do the conversion and we derive yet another dimension which permits us to finally understand what the fuck it is that we're looking at here, and...
Careful there, ok? This is an excellent place to get hurt, if you're being insufficiently careful.
And our final complicating item in this area (which is not shown anywhere on any version of M-45), is the Left Side Seal Panel. We first met the Side Seal Panels back on Tracking the Steel: Page 3 - Orbiter Mold Line Grating Panels Elevation 135, and for the moment, it's enough to know the top of the Side Seal Panel is the exact same elevation as the top of the Canister Guide Rail (and you can verify that by looking at M-70 once again, taking note of the ¼" Teflon Weather Seal shown in Detail 'D'), and the Teflon Weather Seal provides a coplanar seal between the top of the Left Side Seal Panel (which moves) and the top of the Canister Guide Rail immediately adjacent to it (which does not move), which of course is specifically located at elevation 198'-2" on that same drawing, so there can be no surprises with this thing, ok? We'll visit it shortly, in a marked-up photograph which we've already seen, although it's been a while.
And we'll stop right here, and take a couple of looks at marked-up versions of Image 031 which is the lead image for Page 30, so as you'll have a better (not good, but at least a little better) chance of properly visualizing this whole OAA mess up here.
And our first look will be at Image 031, very-high-resolution, with a few of the main players marked up, but without the addition of the OAA Environmental Chamber, which, when it's actually there, you're looking very nearly right down the barrel of it.
And now I'm just gonna paste the OAA (Hand-drawn, and there's perspective effects, and let's not forget that this is a montage of three PRINT PHOTOGRAPHS laid down on a photo album page that got scanned, so don't gimme no shit if it's not perfect, ok?) in there on Image 031, but of course when I do that, it covers everything up and that's not very satisfying, is it?
And of course I had to just kind of guess at it, starting out with the end-on view of the Chamber, which I clipped from over on the right side of M-45 (and we're definitely not done with revisits to that thing, either). And to get it to even half-ass match the scanned print photographs from a photo album page I'm working with here, I had to twist it around it pretty good, to match (sort of) the bizarre perspective distortions which are inherent in those photographs (three of 'em, slapped one on top of another to make up Image 031), plus the fact that it's coming in at us at an angle of roughly fifteen degrees off from the grid pattern of all the structure you see around it, and then hand draw the rest of it, as best I could, and while we're talking about this crap, maybe give that end-on part of the Environmental Chamber you're seeing here in light blue with darker blue double-dash phantom lines to let you know where the Crew Hatch on the Orbiter is, along with its immediate surroundings on the Chamber, a comparison with the business end of the Chamber you see in the Image 130, which leads off the top of this page, and yeah, that shit don't match, either, so the whole thing is quite a bit less than optimal and yet, even with all of that going on, you still come away with a feel for how this thing comes reaching in at you from across the way, over where the Hinges on the far end of the OAA are bolted on to the FSS, crossing a whisker above the top of the Canister Guide Rail and the Side Seal Panel as it does so, not quite bashing into the Big W36x194 going by that, and barely squeaking in underneath the RCS Room Floor Steel and Flip-up Platforms which are pressing down on it from up above, and... this fucking thing is CLOSE in there... but it fits. Barely.
I also chose to not attempt any shadowing effects with the cartoon-looking Chamber sitting where I put it, but rest assured that in the real world, on those days when, for whatever operational, test, QC, or any other reasons, the RSS was swung around into the mated position, but without an Orbiter sitting over the Flame Trench, in that area back there on the left side of this thing as you see it in my doctored-up photograph, it would get pretty dark, and the artificial lighting back there would be pretty much mandatory, to let you see where you were going, should you have been so unfortunate as to have to get up in there to do whatever task you may have been chosen to do. And of course, with the Orbiter there, it gets even darker.
Go back to M-45 The Second, down in the far bottom left corner, and give Elevation Looking South yet another look, to see just how far this thing sticks out past that Canister Guide Rail (which is shown on the drawing), and the Side Seal Panel that's right next to it (which is not shown on the drawing), ok? And as we learned about the Hammerhead Crane so very very long ago on Page 44, none of this stuff manages to quite stay put as you're out there with your buddies tromping around on it, and it bends, and it flexes, and it better not hit anything, goddammit!
And hey, why not, let's do Image 031 with the Environmental Chamber pasted in, but this time without any arrows or labeling. Plain vanilla. What you see is what they got.
And now, finally, we can return to M-45 yet again, and see if we can finish this thing off, for once and for all, and get back to hanging the goddamned Arm on the tower, how 'bout?
So ok. So here it is. 79K14110 sheet M-45 The Third.
And we're now working pretty much the whole right side of our blighted drawing, and things are rendered commensurately larger, and you might expect that as a result of things being larger, that they would also be more comprehensible, but if you did, you'd soon find your expectations dashed to bits on the Sharp Rocks of Reality, and the fuckups and the omissions over here on The Right Side of Hell, are so goddamned monumental as to defy making useful sense of this thing, unless you really bear down on it.
And I'm gonna have to address the fuckups and omissions first, or otherwise we'll never be able to figure out the (actually quite simple) things we'd like to learn about the place, as a real-world kind of deal, where steel is hard, and inflatable seals are soft, and ladders go up and down, instead of sideways.
And for simply being able to successfully visualize this goddamned thing, we must immediately take into account that whoever it was that made our renderings on the right side of M-45, did so in a way that makes what they drew (which looks completely reasonable to a casual glance, and stands as an exemplar of what I mean when some sonofabitch is telling you to "Make it like the drawing shows" and what the drawing shows is... not of this world, and really not even of this three-dimensional universe, and we must convert Pretzel Dimension Universe into our old familiar Three Dimension Universe, and... oh boy, here we go.
And oh yeah, they did it to us TWICE, in two completely separate ways!
Dammit!
And the first one is (sort of) easy enough to understand, and consists in a mirror-image reversal of things and... have you ever really considered what's going on with a mirror when you look into it and discover that the writing is all backwards in some weird way, but everything else seems to look perfectly normal, and... how the fuck does a thing like that work, anyway?
Might help to give mirrors a couple of minutes of our time, perhaps.
And when we look into a mirror, the dimensionality, the left-to-right, up-and-down, front-to-back, three-dimensional interrelationship of things we see in the mirror has been altered. And the alteration is not particularly straightforward, and mirrors give people trouble when it comes to properly and correctly understanding what's going on. And, instead of giving it the Idiot's Shrug and saying, "It's a mirror. That's just what it does, is all," which of course is no kind of understanding at all, we'd like to really know what the hell's going on here, and not be like the Idiot who blithely goes on about his life, aware that something's happening, but having not the slightest clue as to exactly what.
And a mirror reverses front-to-back, the near-to-far dimension, and in so doing, it winds up causing human brains to think that it's flipping left-to-right, instead.
But it's not.
And that shit's just weird, and it is strictly an artifact of human perception.
Step through the mirror, and take a look back out at yourself standing there looking at it, along with some writing to make the effect completely unmistakable, and something funny happens, that people never seem to notice.
If it was really me, along with with some writing, in the mirror, looking back out at myself in the real world, a very sneaky transformation has to take place, or otherwise I won't be able to look back out at myself from inside the mirror.
And the "transformation" is just the most stupidest, most ridiculousest, most subtle thing imaginable, and it consists in the fact, that if I'm now inside the mirror, looking back out, I HAVE TO TURN AROUND TO DO IT.
And just as soon as I've turned around, my left shoulder and my right shoulder (and of course all the rest of my right and left halves) HAVE SWITCHED PLACES!
Well, duh.
Except that when I'm looking in, looking in to my Mirror Self...
Those left and right shoulders did not switch places, even though, clearly, I'm looking right back out at me, and...
That's because near and far have been reversed and everything else has not and the only way for me to be looking back out at myself without actually having to turn around to do it, is to mirror-image reverse myself and...
Front to back, ok?
Side-to-side is just a collateral effect of not having to turn around to do it!
And then, of course, some of you are going to try and cheat, and you're saying to yourself, "Well fuck this guy, I'll keep left and right unswitched with each other by standing on my head!"
"HA! That oughtta teach him!"
Except that fails miserably too, because the front to back dimensionality reversal of the mirror image remains utterly unaffected by your lame attempts at trickery with left and right, and even when you're standing on your head, looking at you in the mirror, it's still all fucked up, and the writing is still some kind of deranged part-gobbledygook and part-normal-enough letters, and the overall effect is writing that steadfastly remains utterly incomprehensible!
So go right ahead, Mister Trickster, stand on your head, or spin around in circles all you want, but whenever you look into a goddamned mirror, the writing is still gonna be all fucked up, (and you're still gonna be all fucked up too, but you're bilaterally symmetrical, so you never manage to even notice the fuckery that remains in plain sight, whether you're seeing it or not) whether you like it or not.
Give that one some thought, perhaps.
So anyway, that's what we're about to have to start dealing with, in our doubly-flawed right-side of M-45.
And as prelude to the first flaw, the "easy" one, "South Elevation" and "East Elevation" on the right side of M-45 are wrong, completely mislabeled in backwards fashion, and they're actually the "North Elevation" and "West Elevation" and I've scratched through what was written, and corrected it to let you know you're seeing the North side of things, and the West side of things, and how something that blatant might have slipped through the Review Process is beyond me, and it causes me to have serious doubts that there even was a Review Process, but...
And in truth, they're not even properly "elevations" in the first place, and they never should have used "North" and "South" to identify them in the second place, and there'll be more about that soon enough, but not right this minute...
So be sure to stop and remind yourself that with the RSS in the Mated position (as it's shown, repeatedly, on M-45, never forget), Column Line B is the north side of the RSS, and Column Line A is the south side of the RSS. Going the other way, Column Line 1 is the west side, and Column Line 7 is the east side. Count up your column line numbers, increasingly higher and higher in number, heading EAST as you do so. Count up your column line letters, going from A to Z in the alphabet, heading NORTH as you do so.
But only when the RSS is in the mated position, ok? Roll that sonofabitch back, into the DEmate position, and everything goes straight to hell, and becomes quite a bit worse than merely useless. Which might be a bit of a hint about the wisdom of using things like "north" and "south" when discussing the RSS in the first place, but let us give that a rest. For now.
For the particulars of the RCS Room itself (which is where we are, and which is what we're interested in), with the RSS in MATED position, Column Line B becomes the south side (See how things can switch around when you improperly use North and South instead of Column Line Numbers/Letters for this stuff?) and Column Line D is the north side. Going the other way, Column Line 3.4 is the West Side, (And this is the side we're working on, where the OAA comes in underneath it.), and Column Line 4.6 is the East Side. Of the RCS Room. With the RSS in mated position. Any questions?
Here's a marked-up copy of 79K14110 sheet A-16 to (hopefully) help you with visualizing all of this north/south RSS/RCS Room bullshit.
My guess on how this profound dopiness with badly-mislabeled "Elevation" views on the right-hand side of M-45 might have happened comes from the fact that, over on the bottom left quadrant of M-45, you get "Elevation Looking South", and "Elevation Looking East", and both of these are of a very non-standard nomenclature, and ok, we're not getting a "South" or an "East" Elevation view, but instead, we're looking in those given directions (looking at things through a section-cut of the vertical plane of a very unspecified cut-line, located god-knows-where), and... can you see how this stuff will snowball on you, in a hurry, should you fail to notice that you missed that first, properly-correct exit ramp on this freeway?
And then, over on the right side of M-45, which is our present area of interest, they just dropped the whole "Looking" part of things. They just dropped it, and said "Fuckit", and blithely went on to call it a South Elevation and an East Elevation, and goddamnit, this shit is just WRONG.
So I corrected "South" and "East" for you by red-lining them into the drawing.
Which, of course isn't nearly enough, but it's at least some kind of a start, and it better damn well be warning you that things around here...
...are not as they're purported to be.
And of course they're never going to give us a properly-specified vertical section cut-line plane for either one of our bogus elevation views over here. And really, now that I'm this deep in their shit, I may as well revisit the fact that neither one of these "elevations" is any such thing, and instead they're motherfucking section cuts goddammit, and should be labeled, located, and identified as such on the drawing, but... what's the use? It's all fucked up. Don't matter what you call it, 'cause it's all fucked up, and that's never going to change, no matter what you decide to call it, 'cause... Fucked. Up.
Elevation views are external, goddamnit. You're looking at something from the outside when you're looking at an elevation view. And section cuts are internal. You're looking at something that's been sliced open to see its otherwise-hidden internals, ok? HUGE difference there, and it must always be kept in mind, or otherwise you lose all hope of understanding what the fucked-up drawing is showing you, ok?
The assholes.
And we step the Bullshit Factor way up by having the whole world over here on the right side of this wretched drawing done in phantom line with just a very few hidden lines (go back and look at the goddamned standard nomenclature for this stuff so you can really understand what I'm on about here) and a few solid lines, and... these motherfucking line-styles are motherfucking telling us something, and what they're telling us is that the whole place is rendered abysmally, horribly wrong, and you can bet your ass we had to submit paper on this monstrosity, and the miserable sonofabitches tried to hand-wave it away in a dismissively-insulting manner, and tell us "Well, it's obvious to anybody who knows anything at all about this kind of work," but...
No.
It's not "obvious," and you yourself do not know what's actually going on here, so maybe you need to get up out of that fucking chair and go back to the engineering and drafting end of your offices and ask them about your own worthless rendering to find out, and you're being dishonest about it, and...
If you're gonna make us build the goddamned thing, then you're also going to have to specify, in sufficiently-fine contractual detail, just exactly what the fuck it is that we're building here. And maybe where it is, too.
And the far-too-extensive use of phantom lines, which for the most part are supposed to be used for depicting nearby things in the vicinity of what you're interested in to give you a sense of place, or maybe alternate locations of the things your interested in (which should therefore all be shown in hard line when not in their "alternate" location), that causes this whole place to look like it's behind something we're interested in, even though it's not done in hidden line, but the psychology of the thing results in your brain, like it or not, presuming that all the phantom-line stuff is somehow less-substantially farther away, or maybe occupying some sort of alternate location, and... oh boy.
So. We start off with some mirror-image fake-elevation-view column line fuckery, and then, going from there...
The shit gets pretty damn deep, is what happens going from there...
In our
Go look at it. Go look at them.
M-45 The Third, once again, for review.
Ok?
Two stupid flip-up platforms, and they're not even very big flip-up platforms. Two lousy flip-ups.
And it's not like we don't know how to build 'em, either, because we do. We originally met them, a long time ago, when we were first learning about this area, on Page 29, and we even got a photograph of this same exact area, over on the other side of the RCS Room, in the image at the top of that page, and we also got introduced to 79K14110 sheet S-41, which builds them with C10x15.3 and W10x15 framing members, on that page, too.
And as part of telling us how to build them, S-41 refers us to 79K14110 sheet S-105 which gives us the precise dimensions for the perimeter channel framing on both flip-ups that faces the Orbiter, although it does so using the odious Orbiter Coordinate System nomenclature, and no, I'm not going to convert any of it into sensible feet and inches to get it to match everything else. You do it. I don't want to.
Additionally, S-41 also gives us a section cut (See? It's not like they don't know how to do section cuts, ok?) right through our Ladder Flip-up, and that section cut takes us over to 79K14110 sheet S-59, where we get to see exactly what's going on in there with the flip-up, complete with hinge call-out, a nice sturdy piece of a W10x22 welded to the Fixed Framing Steel with a 1⅝" Stop Bar at each hinge, and a very loud and very clear single C10x15.3 perimeter channel over on the side of the flip-up that faces the Orbiter. Ok? We get the whole thing. Nothing was left out, ok? We get allofit.
Ok, fine, where are you going with this, MacLaren. What's the big deal here?
Alright. For starters, get a look at the "Ladder" Flip-up as it's depicted on M-45 The Third in its "Up Position" (darker green), over there on the
Ok. Now. The raised platform framing part of things is very definitely shown in phantom line, and, with two very-weird exceptions, nothing in this whole right half of the drawing gets shown in hidden (continuously-dashed) line, and of course this only adds to the psychological effect that all the goddamned phantom lines have of making you think it's all farther away somehow. And of course the fact that they're calling it an "Elevation" only adds to the misdirection by causing us to think we're looking at this thing externally somehow, instead of internally, via a section cut, which has been sliced through the RCS Room Floor someplace a trifle beyond a near-side bracketing location which is at least 2'-4" past Column Line 3.4, and a far-side bracketing location just inboard of the Orbiter-side perimeter members of our two flip-ups, (and you can go back to S-41 to see where I get that set of bracketing locations if you want to, 'cause it's there) and this is exactly what we're being shown here (Hint: The pair of wholly-unidentified W10's, one immediately to the right of our Ladder Flip-up, and one just beyond Column Line C, is the smoking gun with this one.), whether they choose to admit to it or identify it on their own (which of course they don't).
And in the middle of all of this ambiguity, the ladder is very definitely shown in hard line in its vertical orientation. And that ladder is hanging off of a platform rendered in phantom line (double-dash), along with one of the two very-weird use cases for hidden line (continuously-dashed), which we'll get to in a couple of minutes, but not right now, ok?
No question about it. They did all of this on purpose, meticulously in fact, and the locations of all this crap, although they are a mighty pain in the ass to pin down, are rock solid, ok?
And then, below the depiction of the platform in its raised position, we're also shown a depiction (viewed end-on) of the platform in its lowered position (lighter green), and again, that's shown in phantom line, and the damned ladder (for the lowered position only) is also shown in phantom line, making it look like it's farther away, whether it is or it isn't (and since they're refusing to use hidden line for any of this part of things, there's no way in hell to tell what's near, what's far, what's in front, or what's behind, anyway).
And it's that "what's in front, or what's behind" that's the source of all the trouble here.
If the ladder were behind either the raised, or the lowered depiction of the platform, then standard procedure tells us that the shown platform should be in hard line, and the shown ladder should be in hidden line.
Period.
And this is perfectly normal engineering drawing convention. Standard procedure.
Well then, since the vertically-oriented version of the ladder, which lives underneath the platform, is shown in hard line with the platform in its raised position, that means the ladder is closer to us than the body of the platform, and for the raised-platform depiction of things, the only way that can occur is if the platform flips down, coming in our direction as it does so. As depicted, this can only occur if we're looking face-on at the underside of the raised platform, ok?
We're very definitely looking at the underside of a flipped-up flip-up, which will flip down, by moving toward us as it does so.
Now stop. Stop and make sure you really understand that.
Everything about this particular part of M-45 is telling us that the Ladder Flip-up comes our way as it's being lowered into its down position.
Except that it can't because we're over on the Line 3.4 side of the RCS Room with this stuff, and the drawing very clearly shows Line 'D' to the left of Line 'C', and the only way for that to happen is for us to be (section cut, remember?) embedded in the Floor Steel over there somewhere between Line 3.4 (which must be behind us somewhere) and the Orbiter (which must be in front of us), looking East, and once all of that condition is met, the goddamned flip-ups we're looking at must be moving away from us as they go from their (both of them) shown raised positions down to their lowered positions (only one of which is shown, only the Ladder Flip-up gets shown in a lowered position), which means we're actually looking face-on at their top sides, and...
This drawing is a goddamned piece of shit, and I do not like it. In fact, I hate it.
And I'm not done hating it, either.
Not by a long shot.
There's more.
So. Let us continue to narrow this thing down, all the way down to only the raised Ladder Flip-up.
Nothing else.
Just the one Ladder Flip-up, in the one (raised) position.
This one, the same one we've already seen faaar too many times already, on our old friend M-45.
And over on the left side, the South?North? "Elevation" side, with the raised flip-up in edge-on "profile" view, we can see how the ladder attaches to the C10x15.3 perimeter framing members, with one C10x15.3 back by the hinge, and another C10x15.3 out on the end of things closest to the Orbiter (which would be the "top" end of the platform, as-depicted), and the ⅜" by 3" FB (Flat Bar) ladder stringer bends around and extends 1'-3" down to the SINGLE Orbiter-end C10x15.3 where it gets welded on, and back on the platform-hinges-end of things, they're calling for another piece of flat-bar that extends at a right-angle from the stringer the same distance down to the platform-hinge-end C10x15.3, where it too is welded on.
Sounds great.
Except that... right next door, on the East?West? "Elevation" side of things, the flip-up platform (which we're now seeing in a sort of "plan" view), has suddenly grown a second perimeter framing channel out on the Orbiter end of things, and now there's a pair of them out there on the Orbiter-end of things, slap one-against-another, and the ladder welds down to the inboard one, and AIEEEGGGHHHRRAAAAHHHH! What the fuck is going ON around this place, anyway? What the fuck are we even supposed to be building here, anyway?
And I guess I need to calm down some, and maybe I should stop right here to get away from this fucking thing for a little while, and take a brief side trip into the world of Ladder Stringers, as is generally encountered on NASA's launch pads. Otherwise, I'll probably never get another chance to tell you...
That they suck donkey balls!
⅜" by 3" steel flat bar makes for a particularly lousy, and occasionally particularly painful, thing to have to grip on to with any kind of weight-bearing force. And no, you're not allowed to wear work gloves, because you're up here with fucked-up sheets of flapping paper in the wind, and a fucked-up pencil, and just you take a go at efficiently working that stuff on a clip-board, or just a note pad, or even loose paper, bearing down with the pencil to make a mark on it, with the goddamned paper laid against whatever hard and (hopefully) smooth-enough surface may be close at hand, up in the sky somewhere, wearing heavy gloves, and... you'll learn pretty quick how that works. And of course everybody is saying, "Well, duh, you're supposed to be holding on to the ladder rungs (Which, being ¾"Ø round bar, are also just about as suboptimal as hell, but not now, ok?) except that, in the real world, that's not how it works at all, and when it's your turn to be climbing around on this crap, holding a clip-board, reaching (much too far for safety) out with a tape measure, trying to read a drawing while looking around some fucked-up corner at an otherwise hidden thing, trying to make a field sketch, and other cheerful things people get to do in high places, you will learn right now that the variety of reasons that you just might be required to hold on to the ladder stringer instead of the goddamned ladder rungs, knows no upper bound. There will always be a new and even-more-wonderful reason to have stop, let go of the rung with one hand (or even both hands), and grab the goddamned stringer (or maybe let go of the fucking thing altogether and work it into the crook of your elbow and hang out over the Gulp of Death and hold on for dear life that way), and... that's when you'll find out, ok?
Maybe go find some of this stuff somewhere. ⅜" by 3" steel flat bar. Stand it up vertically in front of you, up above you a little, securely fastened to whatever, with its narrow aspect facing in your direction. Just like you see it there on the drawing. Now grab hold of it. One-handed (it happens), and then try pulling your full weight upwards or just maybe hanging out away from the ladder itself at arm's length (perhaps with a 200 foot Death Drop yawning malevolently directly underneath you, maybe with a few widely-separated W8x13's that don't have any grating or deckplate on 'em yet, intervening between you and the distant concrete), and then come back here and you and I can talk all about it together, ok?
Another favored place for having to deal with this stuff is where the ladder stringers extend three feet or so above the top rung on the ladder (which you will find in a lot of places, where ladders take you up, and over something narrow, like maybe one of the big pipe diagonals on the FSS close to where it meets a Perimeter Column, and then back down on to the decking on the other side), and in that situation, the goddamned stringers get all twangy on you (they're freely extending up into vertical space with zero lateral bracing of any kind, anywhere), and they twang back and forth frighteningly, side-to-side, as you curse the stupid motherfucker who spec'd out the evil fucking ⅜" by 3" flat bar, and...
You should be so lucky as to get to experience shit like this in person, but I'm guessing you're not gonna, so...
You'll just have to take my word for it, ok?
Meanwhile, back at the drawing, back at M-45 The Third, you'd think it might be kinda hard to fuck something this simple up, right?
I mean, there nothing to this thing. Small rectangular flip-up platform, C10x15.3 perimeter framing members, and a single W10x15 member running down the middle, hinge-end to Orbiter-end, to stiffen it up a little, and, aside from the daffy ladder that's welded on to its underside... that's all there is.
Nothing more than that.
Here's Image 031 again, this time without any OAA stuff pasted in, and instead, our little flip-up with its ladder, is highlighted and labeled so as you can have no doubt as to how this thing wound up, in the form of real steel, in the Real World, and yes, it's just exactly what you'd expect it to be, and yet...
And you would be hard-pressed to imagine how a drawing that shows you this thing could ever result in paper flying back and forth between NASA engineering, and those of us tasked with putting the stupid ladder on this thing (which occurred back in Wilhoit days, so you're talking Dick Walls, Tom Kirby, Cliff Reeves, Red Milliken, and Elmo McBee puzzling over the drawing down in the field trailer, trying to make sense of it, and, following that, even more reluctantly coming to the realization that we're gonna have to submit paper on the sonofabitch, with all the hate, discontent, and lost time associated with such a thing once it arrives at somebody's desk over on the NASA side of the house, and...
Now that you're fully aware of the manifest weirdnesses around here, this is where I get to tell you about the weirdness of the only two examples of hidden (continuously-dashed) lines.
And the first hidden-line weirdness occurs in the East?West? "Elevation" view, and consists in the use of it to tell us which way our newly-grown C10x15.3 out on the Orbiter-end of things is facing, and yep, that's a hidden line they're using there to tell you that the back of the channel is flush up against... I guess it's another channel, just like I'm guessing the rest of that ladder flip-up perimeter framing is channel iron, but of course they're not specifically telling us any of that with the use of additional hidden lines to clue us in to the orientations of those "channels."
And then we slide back on over to the South?North? "Elevation" view to get a gander at our ladder as it is being shown with the flip-up in its lowered position, taking note of the fact that the flip-up itself, being in an "alternate" location, is properly shown in phantom line...
...all except for the goddamned ladder down there underneath it, which we get to see in hidden line, for no fucking sensible reason at all, and that goes double because in this particular view of things, there is absolutely nothing intervening in between us and the ladder which is shown attached to the flip-up in its lowered position, which could possibly be hiding it, thus dictating the use of hidden line!
And how. And why. And who. And what the motherfucking fuck, anyway?
And we'll never know.
It just is, and that's just that, and this seems like a really good place to, hopefully, get the hell out of here, to someplace else that maybe makes a little more sense, and is maybe just a little more sane.
Except that we can't, not yet anyway, because I was forced into taking you over here to the Right Side of Hell, to the South?North? "Elevation" view of things, in order to let you see the dimensions on that goddamned ladder, and in particular the 1'-3" which they give you for the distance from the bottom edge of the flip-up channel iron to the far edge of the ⅜" by 3" flat bar ladder stringer. That's the number you need to find out that there's only 0'-5½" Clearance between the ladder which is hanging there underneath this little flip-up platform in its lowered (which is nominal) position, and the top of the Orbiter Access Arm Environmental Chamber.
Remember the OAA? We were trying to hang the OAA on the tower, remember? And who knows, maybe we'll eventually get to, before this page is over and done with. Maybe.
And things are actually even a little worse, because the tails of the ladder stringers extend beyond the location of the platform hinge-pins, which means that when you go to raise the fucked-up platform, those "tails" are going to be rotating downward a little bit at first, chewing into our pitiful little five and a half inches of clearance before we start banging into the top of the Environmental Chamber, and...
Ok.
So the OAA really does fit in here. It really does manage to nestle into this bewildering steel forest over here without hitting anything. But not by much! So we gotta be careful with this thing, ok? Let us not smash it to bits as the RSS is wagging around, and the flip-up platform is wagging around, and the OAA itself is wagging around, ok? And oh yeah, don't go hitting the Space Shuttle with it either, while you're at it. Not allowed.
Our Wag Envelopes are pretty tightly constrained around here, and we must never exceed those constraints lest we fuck everything all up.
So ok.
So enough already!
Get me the hell out of here already!
Next picture.
Please.
And now thing's are happening, but we're not quite there. Not just yet.
The OAA is in free suspension, but this is not the first proper frame of the lift.
Instead, what you're seeing is a final repositioning, prior to the lift.
The Arm had been placed up on the Pad Deck, as close as possible to the final location where it would be lifted straight up from, but that position, in the narrower confines of the Pad Deck a bit southeast of the FSS, which remains out of frame to the right, turns out to be just a little bit too much in everybody's way, so it was located south from there for Environmental Chamber work and no end of further structural, mechanical, and electrical trim-work to get it ready.
And now we're mere minutes from the beginning of the lift itself, and the crane roars, spits out a cloud of diesel exhaust, picks the OAA up off the Pad Deck (note that both of the Support Stanchions for the Arm remain attached to it, hanging in the air with the rest of it), and as the OAA gets swung around into its to-be-lifted orientation, the crane is now crawling forward to its final location from where the lift will proceed, where the Arm will be set back down, one last time for the very last of the pre-lift preps, and then we'll have ourselves a lift.
You are no longer viewing things from out in the middle of the Flame Trench on top of the Flame Deflector, and have continued all the way across it to the east side of the Pad Deck, where you hopped the removable handrails over there, and continued on farther away from things to keep both the crane cab and the OAA in-frame for this photograph.
You may help locate yourself by taking note of the platform up above you, the corner of which protrudes into the frame, top left.
That platform gives access to the top of the SSW Riser for the Orbiter Exhaust Hole in the MLP. 79K10338 sheet M-56 shows it to us pretty well, and you may also see it (partially obscured by a dangling air line) up in the far top-right corner of Image 035, which leads Page 34, where you can also see the whole Flame Deflector which you had to traverse to get over here to the east side of the Pad Deck in order to take the photograph.
Elsewhere on the Pad Deck, visible as a marker in time, the Centaur Porch can be seen, just barely, facing away from us, extending out of frame to the left, near the bottom-left corner of the frame, directly beneath the SSW Riser Access Platform I just told you about.
We first met the Centaur Porch back on Page 63, and were given a good look at the front side of it in Image 084, complete with a bright-eyed child who also just happens to be my son Kai, and who was fully aware of just how lucky he was to be standing where I took the photograph of him at the time. And at the time, the Centaur Porch had not yet made it up to the Pad Deck, where we see it now, prior to it also being lifted, and bolted on to the existing structure. Alas, I have no photographs of that lift, so we'll just have to content ourselves with what we have, here and now, and be glad we've got what we've got.
Elsewhere in our photograph, The Monster That Lives Under The Bed is giving us a light tap on our shoulder as it comes upon us unawares, from behind. And that Monster is known to you as the Guide Columns, and I've been evading the damn things for the most part (so far, but back on Page 66 we took a pretty good drink of this stuff even though we didn't want to), but they're not going away, and sooner or later...
...but not now, goddamnit!
For now, it's enough to know that the Left Guide Columns have been framed-out, all the way to the bottom end of their run, and from here on, it's either fill-in work (which is never to be confused with any kind of straightforward, or perhaps easy work) or it's already done, and we simply have not yet turned our full attention toward it, ok?
This part of the Left Guide Columns is more or less impossible to see in the photograph, it being small, it dangling down into the top of the frame from far above, and it suffering badly from that well-known-by-now propensity for structural steel to hide itself, in plain sight, by merging with its background of additional structural steel with too many coincidental alignments to ever give sensible belief or credence too, but...
By now, we're... aware, so here's Image 131 with just that portion of the Left Guide Column which is visible, highlighted and labeled, just so as you can find it, and see that it's framed-out all the way to the bottom of its run, all the way down to the little platform that hangs off the side of it down there.
And really, Image 131 is very suboptimal, and you're only getting the barest tail-end of the thing, down where the little platform is, but it turns out that just figuring out how to build that platform is a giant 79K20408 Pain In The Ass, and just for the stupid platform, I get to show you four separate drawings, which also include the whole schmutz that the platform is hanging off the bottom of, but I'm not marking anything up, and I'm not telling you anything about it (right now, anyway), and I'm just letting you see more Guide Columns Bullshit, ok?
79K24048 sheet S-245, Miscellaneous Details (how's that for an informatively-helpful drawing title?)
79K24048 sheet S-246, Left Hinged Guide Column Extension.
79K24048 sheet S-247, Left Hinged Guide Column Extension (two different drawings, same exact name, just fucking lovely, eh?)
79K24048 sheet S-260, Left Hinged Guide Column Extension Details.
And isn't that just the lovely... monstrosity?
Yes. Yes indeed. It's a very lovely monstrosity indeed.
And now that you've initially laid eyes upon it, we're gonna get the hell out of here right now, and get back to hanging the fucked-up OAA on the tower.
And this would be the last image ever taken of the OAA before it rose up to its final location, bolted to its strongback on the side of the FSS.
The lift rigging is taut, straining under the upward tension being applied to it by the crane, but it's not quite enough to cause the Arm to break contact with the Pad Deck, and begin rising upwards into the air.
Ivey's crew of ironworkers are working on the support stanchion closest to the Hinge Boxes, unbolting it from the Arm. When the Arm departs the Pad Deck, the support stanchions will remain behind, to be taken away to whatever location NASA had originally stored them in, prior to the work you see being done in the photograph.
The cover which seals the opening in the end of the Environmental Chamber which the Shuttle Crew passes through on their way to the Hatch in the Orbiter has been put in place, but that end of the Arm is facing away from us, and we cannot see it in this frame. In our next image in this series, we'll get a good look at it, as the Arm travels upwards toward its final destination.
I'm pretty sure that's Kevin Ivey, Wade Ivey's (owner of Ivey Steel) son, learning the trade, down there as the leftmost member of the little group of people going at it with the unbolting of the stanchion near the Hinge Boxes.
Farther along the length of the Arm, heading toward the Environmental Chamber, Harvey Dixon has once again insinuated himself into a work effort which was solely directed by Rink Chiles.
Harvey does not need to be there, in similar fashion as he did not need to be holding that tag line attached to the Beanie Cap in Image 117, which leads Page 67, up at the top.
But he was unable to control himself, and had an insatiable, never-ending, compulsion to place himself in the center of things, whether or not he needed to be in things at all, center or otherwise.
So there he stands, giving me a buffoon-like wave from across the Flame Trench, and when he did so, I said to myself, "Ok, buffoon, you want to be in the middle of things? You want to be in the picture? Very well, you shall be in the picture," and I hit the shutter release, and the camera went "click," and here you see the results of that.
Rink Chiles is no doubt already up on the FSS near the Strongback where the Arm will be bolted-on, and although I'm quite sure he would have rolled his eyes, yet again, had he even noticed Harvey down there standing directly in front of the Arm, so long as Harvey did not directly interfere with things, Rink could not care about any of it in the slightest.
Behind Harvey, to his immediate left in this image, another ironworker is giving the other support stanchion, the one closest to the Environmental Chamber, further attention.
When the OAA gets picked up, those support stanchions will stay right where they are, firmly in contact with the Pad Deck which they're sitting on, as the unbolted Arm rises up and away from them.
This is our best image of the overall look and layout of the Arm, so we're going to stop here for a while, and get as familiarized with it as much as we can, before proceeding with the Lift. The similarities and differences with the GOX Arm, which we've already met and have learned about in detail, are quite interesting. As with the GOX Arm, this is reused Apollo hardware, but at least this time the damn thing rotated in the correct direction when it was first tested, up on the tower.
And since it's reused Apollo hardware, let us go back to the beginning and give it a look when it was attached to a LUT instead of an FSS.
And as with the GOX Arm, I do not have a set of proper drawings for this thing, so we once again will have to make do, using what we have on hand, ok?
And some of what we have on hand is pretty kludgey, and I've had to butcher it up, and I've had to make frankendrawings out of it, but in the end, there winds up being just enough to let us see and understand things...
...well enough
And when I said I have no set of proper drawings, I wasn't kidding, and what's out there to be found, is outrageously sparse on the ground, considering that this is the last thing, that the goddamned first human beings ever walked through to get to their goddamned spacship, and was, perforce, the last thing firmly attached to Planet Earth which the soles of their boots trod across, prior to... departing Planet Earth.
So ok. So we start out, as we've started out with the GOX Arm and the IAA, with a low-resolution (and in this case, low-quality, too) isometric view to get an overall sense of where we are and what we are. And our low-quality view is showing us the Apollo Command Module Access Arm, as it existed originally, up at the 320' elevation on the LUT, in its extended position.
And I've decided to use this poor-quality rendering of things because it's taken from a containing document that tells us, (indirectly, but it's better than nothing considering the amazing dearth of hard information about this stuff out there), that the Apollo CM Access Arm was in fact converted into the OAA for the Space Shuttle.
And of course by now, with our present level of generalized understanding of things, we can easily see that we're dealing with a familiar-enough looking object.
But there are two significant differences between this Swing Arm and all the other Arms on the LUT.
The first difference is that the CM Access Arm has a cable, extending out into the middle area of the Arm, providing additional support from a bracket located higher up on the LUT, above and beyond the Hinges, which are all that holds up LUT Arms 1 through 8.
The second difference is that the Hinge Boxes are located just around the corner away from Side 1 of the LUT, which faces the launch vehicle, (where all of the other Arms were attached to their Strongbacks), over on Side 4 of the LUT, and this Arm was retracted from its Service Position to its Stowed Position by moving in the opposite direction of all the other Arms, and wound up flush against the face of Side 4 when it was latched back out of the way for launch.
Which is something a lot of people never seem to notice with the CM Access Arm as it existed on the LUT when a Saturn V took off, so let's look at a picture that shows us how that works, ok?
Apollo 11, departing the Pad, with all of the 9 Swing Arms identified and located with arrows.
Here's a very generalized look at the LUT on 75M05120 sheet 47, where you can see the locations of the Strongback and Latchback for the Command Module Access Arm.
And while we're here, although the actual Arm itself is very hard to find supporting documentation and/or drawings for, technical documentation for Environmental Chamber out on the end of it (which, never forget, we do not have for the one on the end of the OAA) is/was/whoknowsbynow? freely available from NASA, and here you go, drink up, KSC TM-509A, Technical Manual for the Command Module Access Arm Environmental Chamber.
And the crazy quilt inclusion/exclusion criteria (for which I sincerely doubt there is any single internal NASA controlling document) which results in things either being findable, or not findable by those of us who research this stuff, is just about an INFURIATING motherfucker, and I know for a fact that the Export Control drones, and the Public Affairs Office drones in NASA, have no fucking clue as to what may or may not constitute publically-releasable information, but the merest dip of a toe into this fetid pool of murk immediately reveals that the innermost guts of things, down to the finest level of detail imaginable show up all the time on NASA's public-facing internet pages, even as the most dumb-ass crap imaginable, which third-graders in elementary schools worldwide already know all about, is locked away forever, as if it was the fucking keys to the kingdom, and...
Jeesus FUCK, what is it with you people anyway? What the fucking hell are you people doing over there anyway? Is anybody in charge who actually knows anything? Everybody screams endlessly about ITAR, and although I've already flogged that one more than enough, if you READ ITAR, you discover that it allows for pretty much anything which falls under the heading of...
...here, check this out...
22 CFR Part 120
Title 22 —Foreign Relations
Chapter I —Department of State
Subchapter M —International Traffic in Arms Regulations
Part 120 Purpose and Definitions...
§ 120.3 Policy on designating or determining defense articles and services on the U.S. Munitions List...
(c) A specific article or service is not a defense article or defense service for purposes of this subchapter if it: (1) Is determined to be under the jurisdiction of another department or agency of the U.S. Government (see § 120.5) pursuant to a commodity jurisdiction determination (see § 120.4) unless superseded by changes to the USML or by a subsequent commodity jurisdiction determination; or (2) Meets one of the criteria of § 120.41(b)...
§ 120.41 Specially designed...
(b) For purposes of this subchapter, a part, component, accessory, attachment, or software is not specially designed if it: (1) Is subject to the EAR pursuant to a commodity jurisdiction determination; (2) Is, regardless of form or fit, a fastener (e.g., screws, bolts, nuts, nut plates, studs, inserts, clips, rivets, pins), washer, spacer, insulator, grommet, bushing, spring, wire, or solder; (3) Has the same function, performance capabilities, and the same or equivalent form and fit as a commodity or software used in or with a commodity that: (i) Is or was in production (i.e., not in development); and (ii) Is not enumerated on the USML; (4) Was or is being developed with knowledge that it is or would be for use in or with both defense articles enumerated on the USML and also commodities not on the USML; or (5) Was or is being developed as a general purpose commodity or software, i.e., with no knowledge for use in or with a particular commodity (e.g., a F/A–18 or HMMWV) or type of commodity (e.g., an aircraft or machine tool).
And as we skipped down through Part 120 to get to 120.41 (b), we skipped right over 120.34, so let's go back and give that a look while we're here, and while we're having so much fun with this stuff.
§ 120.34 Public domain.
(a) Public domain means information which is published and which is generally accessible or available to the public...
(7) Through public release (i.e., unlimited distribution) in any form (e.g., not necessarily in published form) after approval by the cognizant U.S. Government department or agency (see also § 125.4(b)(13) of this subchapter); or (8) Through fundamental research in science and engineering at accredited institutions of higher learning in the U.S. where the resulting information is ordinarily published and shared broadly...
And a fucking flip-up platform, or a fucking hoist, or a fucking vacuum-jacketed line, or a fucking steel-reinforced concrete foundation, or a fucking cable tray, or a fucking any of the rest of this whole goddamned place, falls clearly into the categories above these words that I've highlighted in bold text...
And while we're at it, as of the day of this writing, February 10, 2025, and while we're aware of (7) Through public release (i.e., unlimited distribution) in any form (e.g., not necessarily in published form) after approval by the cognizant U.S. Government department or agency, maybe go do some digging into... oh... I dunno... maybe the publically-facing side of the NASA Technical Reports Server at https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search (and if they wipe it all out tomorrow, fuckem, 'cause it's all SAVED elsewhere), and those cats are so far out of the bag as to make any protestations on the part of any officialdom a truly laughable proposition, and maybe punch "apu" into that thing, and give the level of detail which it spits back at you some considered thought as to what's already freely available and is therefore considered as having well and truly met the criteria of "...public release (i.e., unlimited distribution) in any form (e.g., not necessarily in published form) after approval by the cognizant U.S. Government department or agency..." and yet they still want to suppress drawings of fucked up concrete, and rebar, and maybe a common-construction steel truss or two, and...
And I'm not gonna go any further with it than this right now, but... this constitutes your foundation and jumping-off point for such further investigations you may wish to indulge in regarding the particulars of exactly how the entirety of this treatise is already clearly and plainly not to be considered as covered by ITAR, and this includes the goddamned drawing packages that are as of yet unreleased by the previously-referred-to Export Control drones, and Public Affairs Office drones in NASA, and...
...who knows?
Maybe one day the light of Reason and Historical Significance will shine down upon all of it.
Yeah right. Sure thing.
...wipes foam from corners of mouth...
Ok, where were we?
Oh yeah, the OAA.
We were gonna take the pittance of what's available, and try to make a kludged-up frankendrawing or two, to let everybody know how it was constructed, so as we'll maybe have a somewhat better appreciation of what was going on the day we hung it on the tower.
So ok, so let's look at the original Apollo Command Module Access Arm, taken from the demolition drawings which finished off the last LUT.
79K30000 sheet 62. And this is the thing (or, actually, the same type of thing, of which only 3 were ever made, but not the exact same Arm), that got heavily modified and rebuilt into the Orbiter Access Arm on Pad B, which you see us lifting in my photographs on this page. And as about the only note of properly good news with this stuff, unlike the GOX Arm for which we have no way of ever learning what the exact Swing Arm source hardware from which it got assembled and built was, we actually know the provenance of the original hardware that got reworked into our item of interest. So that's kind of nice, eh?
And here's 79K30000 sheet 62 again with what became the OAA highlighted, Truss Segments and Hinge Boxes.
And wait'll you see what I had to do and had to go through, to cause this CM Access Arm to render itself as the OAA, in the complete absence of a proper set of OAA drawings!
We'll start off by noticing two significant differences between the CM Access Arm and the Orbiter Access Arm, which is what it became.
First off, the easy part, is that the Hinges are clocked very differently with the CM Arm, and, as far as that goes, the whole Arm rotates in the opposite directions for extend/retract operations.
So that's gotta be addressed, right?
And then, once you're hip to that end of things, you realize that with the CM Access Arm, when the Arm is sitting on its Latchback, flush against the side of the LUT (Side 4, just as a reminder), the left side of the Arm ("left" being the direction you'd get when walking out along the length of the Arm, headed away from the Hinges and facing toward the Environmental Chamber) is what is snugged up against the structural steel of the tower.
But with the OAA, the opposite applies, and with the Arm stowed on its Latchback, it's the right side of the Arm that's going to be facing the structural steel of the Latchback Strongback, and some other stuff over that way, which we'll get to in just a minute, ok?
For our present purposes, it's simply enough that the locational orientation as regards the tower it's hanging off the side of, for the latched Arm, is reversed when we go from CM Access Arm, to OAA.
Make a mental note of it, perhaps.
And here's 79K30000 sheet 62 with our pair of significant items which will need to be addressed, before this thing can become an OAA, hanging off the side of an FSS, instead of a LUT.
And ok, reclocking the Hinges is easily-enough understood, and since there's way less to it conceptually, we'll leave that alone for now, but the second of our two significant differences is...
Whuffo?
Whuffo they gotta move all of that ECS Duct schmutz and the other stuff over there?
Why in hell would they need to go to all of the very-much non-trivial time and effort to rip that stuff off of one side of the Arm, and then turn right around and put it back on, over there on the other side of the Arm?
That seems a bit much, if you ask me.
But of course there's a good reason for it, and...
Remember for about the whole goddamned first half of this already-too-long page, how we got so damn tangled up in clearances for stupid and sneaky shit that was gonna be in the way if we weren't really careful to keep from smashing the OAA into it?
Remember that?
Of course you do. And I believe you read and understood every single word of it, too. Scout's honor. Right?
Well...
We're not quite done with fucking clearances just yet.
There's gonna be some more of it.
But not as much as the last time, I promise.
Oh joy!
Look at 79K30000 sheet 62 again, and you'll see the little note that tells you that the ECS Duct is 10"Ø. And of course its hanging on brackets, and those things are going to have some size margins to add to the 10"Ø Duct, too.
And they're never going to tell us exactly just how much additional envelope we're gonna have to add to the width of the Arm because of that Duct along with its support brackets, but...
...we'll make do, anyway, so fuckem.
We're hereby calling the place where the Duct runs along the side of the CM Access Arm, as shown on 79K30000 sheet 62, the RIGHT side of the Arm, just like I mentioned to you up above these words when I first introduced the interestingness of how the CM Access Arm retracts against the tower with its Left side facing the steel structure, even as the OAA from which it was made retracts against the tower with it's Right side facing the steel structure. Walk away from the Arm Hinges, headed toward the Environmental Chamber, and what's on your RIGHT is... the RIGHT side of the Arm.
Any questions?
If so, too bad. There's nobody around to stop me from doing this, so I'm doing it, and as of now, and hereinafter and forevermore, the Arm has a Right and a Left side, and you are from now on and forevermore held responsible for knowing that shit.
So anyway, since we had so much fun with clearances before, let's turn our attention to That Which Dwells on the OAA's Right Side, when it's Latched to the tower.
It was bad enough out there on the far end of things, dealing with the Environmental Chamber as it more or less threaded its way through the Steel Forest over there just beneath the RCS Room, next to the Big W36, and the idiotic flip-up platform with a goddamned ladder on its underside, and all the rest of that Happy Crap, but I allowed you to whistle right past a different graveyard, as you stepped merrily along the length of the Arm Truss, boots clanking on the grating panels, headed toward that Steel Forest and the Chamber deeply embedded within it.
And now...
The Right side of the Latched OAA passes pretty damn close to some other stuff, which we originally ignored as we went to do battle with all of that other ridiculous shit out there near the far end of the Arm where the Environmental Chamber is sitting.
So we back up a little, and it's now time to give the OAA Latchback Strongback Columns a closer look, and in addition to that, we also need to look at...
The Hinge Column Upper Bearing Service Platform?
Where'd that come from?
What the fuck is that thing doing here?
Stick around. Soon enough, but not yet.
First, the OAA Latchback Strongback Columns.
And we first met them back on Page 45, and I gave you a pretty thin overview of things at that time, but you are presumed to at least be aware of them, and where they live, out there on the Struts between the FSS proper, and the RSS. And here's Image 046 again, marked up to show you both Strongbacks, for your review, just in case it's slipped your memory a little bit.
And of course the Latchback itself hangs off the side of the Latchback Strongback Columns, and in order for the OAA to make any use of the damn thing, sitting over there bolted on to that Strongback, it's going to have to swing on over there to sit down on top of the Latchback and get latched, and in the doing of that, the OAA is gonna be cosying right up to those Columns, nice and close.
How close?
And once again, we find ourselves having to sift through the clues, most of which are not quite rock-solid and many of which are indirect, but in the end we can assemble them into a coherent whole that turns out to be plenty good enough for understanding why that goddamned Duct had to get removed and relocated to the Left side of the OAA.
And we'll start the investigations by asking ourselves, ok, what is the dimensional envelope of the Arm, in Cross Section?
How wide is the Arm Truss, and how tall is the Arm Truss?
And we return once again to 79K30000 sheet 62 (what a godsend this thing is), and we see that the rear end of the truss (which is the part we're going to be interested in), referred to as the "First Element" on the drawing, has a cross-section of 7'-11" high, by 4'-9" wide, on-center, for the structural pipe sections which make up the Truss.
And we don't get the diameter of those structural pipe sections, but I'm gonna just wing it by giving that drawing a close look and comparing the size of the known 10"Ø ECS Duct and the known 4"Ø Water Deluge Lines with the size of the unknown Ø Truss Pipe Segments and say they're either 4"Ø or 6"Ø and my gut feeling is that they're 4"Ø, and for what we're about to do, that difference of 2 inches in possible diameters isn't going to hurt us at all, so we can press on with things either way, ok? And really, we don't even properly need the precise particulars of that Truss Piping, but it's nice to have, and will allow for a bit cleaner presentation of things later on, by ensuring that all of what is going to get presented, is all nice and located right where it's supposed to be, instead of just sort of slapping at it, worse even than what we're about to do, anyway.
But before we go any further, please remember that I've already issued more than one stern warning to never do it this way, ok?
When you're on the job, and you're trying to bid the job, you very much want to come in as low bidder, and in so doing get the job, but...
Low bidders go bankrupt when they're too low.
And even Little Shit has a wicked nasty habit of occasionally becoming a Big Deal.
And you want your Time and Material Cost Estimate to be dead-nuts accurate.
But once in a while...
You find yourself trapped, and in order to escape the trap, you have to... fall back.
And what you fall back on is your prior experience.
And people who are good at it, can get away with it, in time of need.
The Cecil Wilhoits, and the Wade Iveys, and the Dick Walls of this world have developed a fine-tuned sense of when, and where, they can break their own rules, and keep right on stroking, even though they do not have fully-complete information about something.
But you are not Cecil Wilhoit, ok?
And neither am I.
But for now, we're going to pretend that we are, ok?
But we're never going to get cocky about it, ok?
Ever!
And for now, trying to figure out why the stupid ECS Duct had to move from one side of the Arm to the other, and doing it by using fall-back methods, is not going to bankrupt the company, ok?
But don't do this when it's your ass on the financial line.
Because you run a very real risk of losing your ass if you put a bid together this way, ok?
OK!
And maybe one day I'll tell you the tale of how me and David Boyd were backed into a corner with the bid submittal date rapidly closing in on us, and we found ourselves having to do a Square Foot cost-estimate for a great goddamned big fucking AUTOCLAVE (I don't remember this one being quite walk-in size, but it might have been. It was pretty big.) of all weird-ass things, and we were by turns suffocating with laughter and shivering in fear at the beyond-abject stupidity and absurdity and danger of doing such a thing, and we actually wound up getting forced into doing it, and we entered it, as a line-item price in the bid, which was for a substantial multi-floor addition to a hospital, if memory serves. I do not remember what the square-foot cost of a goddamned autoclave was, back in the mid 1980's, but it was very definitely some pretty pricey gear, per square foot, anyway. And we wound up not getting the job we were bidding, and in the end, that was probably a good thing.
And then again, maybe one day I won't tell you that tale.
So. In addition to what we already have as regards the cross-sectional dimensions of the Arm, we need to find out where that Duct is, in elevation, as it runs down the side of the OAA.
And to get that, we're gonna have to play pretty fast and loose with things, but not too fast, and not too loose, and if we're careful, we should wind up with a good-enough elevation for the Duct as it runs along the side of the Arm.
And for this, we fall back to Image 132, and we'll crop in on it, and I'll locate a few things for you and label them, and in so doing we're gonna wind up with a good-enough elevation for that goddamned Duct.
So here you go, a SWAG'd rendering of things on a cropped version of Image 132, with labels for the guesstimated elevations for the bottom of the ECS Duct on the OAA, and the centerline of that ECS Duct on the OAA, along with the known surroundings which I used to extract the SWAG from, shown on 79K24048 sheet M-327 which I've also labeled for you. No, the elevations I used for the labels pointing to the ECS Duct on the cropped version of Image 132 are not exactly right, but yes, they're good enough. For what we're doing right now, anyway.
So now we can take our newfound dimensions (they're horseshit, but they're also good enough) for this stuff, and we can finally start in on creating that which we need, because what they've given us is woefully inadequate for our present task.
And of course, you must continue to bear in mind that for all of this bullshit, we're only interested in the goddamned Duct, to the exclusion of everything else, so...
79K24048 sheet M-333 is the best we'll ever do for this part of things, and I'm going to alter the sonofabitch, but before I do, give it a look and familiarize yourself with all of the main players here, which I've helpfully color-coded for you. And please notice if you will, that they've omitted the ECS Duct over there on the left side of the OAA Truss you're seeing in this section-cut view of it, complete with its Latchback Skid underneath it. And maybe also please notice that the Arm is not sitting on the Latchback, in its stowed position, and we're gonna have to do something about that, too.
So ok. So we'll just have to work all that in there for ourselves, and we're going to be doing it over on the Right side of the latched Arm Truss, where the Duct lived when the Arm was a CM Access Arm hanging off the side of a LUT, to let you see and understand why it had to go, and get moved over on the other side of the Arm Truss.
And when it's all said and done, what we wind up with is a perfectly and easily understandable altered drawing that shows us in no uncertain terms that if they'd left that ECS Duct over there on the Right Side of the OAA, it would have smashed into the Latchbck Strongback Columns when they went to retract the arm and stow it on its Latchback, and here it is for you, on Altered 79K24048 sheet M-333.
And all of the ridiculous Tangled Tale of the CM Access Arm ECS Duct you were just put through was by way of explaining why the frankendrawing you're about to see has to look the way it looks, ok?
So we start with 79K30000 sheet 62.
Then we trim away all the parts we're not going to be using in our frankendrawing (which is plan view, by the way, which means the CM Access Arm elevation view is never going to get involved with this stuff).
And we get 79K30000 sheet 62, trimmed of excess bone and fat.
Then, in order to get the fucked-up ECS Duct over on the Left side of the Arm, we simply flip things over, vertically, and of course, in so doing, we have to clean things up some, and fix the resultant mirror-image-reversed text that remains, but when we're done, the ECS Duct is over there where it belongs, on what will become the OAA, keeping in mind that from now on, the diagonal bracing on the Arm Truss which is visible in our plan view, is now, and forevermore, reversed. Which means that as we're making things better, we're also making things worse, so don't go saying I didn't warn you, ok? It's up to you to keep track of all this shit. Period.
And with that done, we get 79K30000 sheet 62, flipped and mostly cleaned up.
And now we have to go to 79K24048 sheet M-334 to steal a plan view cutout for the Environmental Chamber, and paste that down on to the end of the Arm where it belongs, correctly scaled, cleaned up, yadda yadda yadda.
Which yields 79K30000 sheet 62 CM Access Arm become OAA, with original flipped and unclocked CM Arm Hinges.
And forget thee not, this thing is bullshit, ok? It's not really the OAA at all. The merest glance at Frankenstein's Monster from now on, and for all the rest of this narrative, wherever you may encounter it, will reveal it to be a sewn-together... Monster. And we're going to be employing our Monster, and we might be dressing our Monster up in nice clothes, and if we're not careful, we might get lulled into thinking it's a real person, but it's not. It's always going to be a Monster. So. Forget thee not.
And the only reason we're putting ourselves through all of this crap is because the Wise Operatives at NASA PAO and NASA Export Control, refuse to release the real drawings, of the real OAA. And this is because they're too stupid, too short-sighted, too terrified of losing their worthless jobs, too blind to the fact that NO Bad Guy, in NO country, could ever possibly compromise the security of The United States with this stuff, and utmost above all else, are waaay too blind to the Historical Significance of this thing, which, let us never forget, is the last thing firmly attached to the Earth that the Crews who were just about to board the Space Shuttle, would ever touch, prior to Launch (and in two separate instances it would be the last thing firmly attached to the Earth they would ever touch while still living), and if you were ever to try and tell one of those Wise Operatives about the mana this thing held, you would get the most condescendingly pat-on-the-head reaction of highly-purified bovine stupidity that this, or any other, Universe could ever have to offer.
So ok.
So now we have to deal with the clocking of the Hinges, and we're going to do that one twice, because the Hinges are one way when the OAA is extended, but they're another way, when the OAA is retracted.
And on the first clocking of the Hinges, we're gonna wind up with 79K30000 sheet 62 now fully converted to an ersatz OAA in the Extend Position, and please note over there on the far left of things, that's the open Crew Hatchway Door of the Space Shuttle extending into the envelope of the Environmental Chamber, and isn't that just the nicest little extra touch they decided to give to things?
And finally, we'll clock the Hinges again, and we'll get 79K30000 sheet 62 as OAA in Retract Position, and while we're at it, since it is, after all, retracted, we'll remove that extraneous Crew Hatch from things, 'cause with the Arm Retracted, that Crew Hatch had better not be anywhere near the Environmental Chamber, or otherwise we've got ourselves a serious problem in progress.
And of course none of this stuff is perfect, and all of it is slightly different from one version to another, and the Water Deluge lines and whoknowswhatelse may or may not be where they belong, or may even exist at all, but I'm done with it, and if you don't like it, then you make the goddamned thing "perfect" and then send it along to me so I can insert it into the narrative, and that way neither you, nor any of your like-mindedly persnickety and overfussy friends will break out in a case of the hives when you all of a sudden notice something, and it starts driving you crazy because it's not...
...perfect.
And while I was at it, once I had created my Monster, I figured what the hell, let's drop the goddamned thing into one of the 79K14110 structural sheets, and let everybody see this thing as it would exist after it had been hung on the tower and pulled over into its Retract Position, sitting on its Latchback.
And before we do that, I advise that you return to my altered 79K24048 sheet M-333 and take note of how the OAA sits on the Latchback, and pay attention to how far away it remains from the Strongback Columns, because the Shock Absorbers are sitting there keeping things from going hard-iron on hard-iron, and maybe notice that on M-333 the compressed size of the Shock Absorbers plus the Shock Impact Plates on the Arm turns out to be just about exactly the shown depth of the W14x53's which the Strongback Column is made from, which becomes a very handy thing to have for making sure the pasted-in Monster is really-o truly-o where it belongs in relation to those Columns.
And since neither the Latchback, nor the Shock Absorbers, nor the Shock Impact Plates show on the 79K14110 structural drawing, there's gonna be a significant space in there between the Arm and the Strongback, and if I do not point this out in advance, people are going to think I've fucked it all up, and failed to fully retract the goddamned Arm, even though that's not the case, ok?
Ok.
So here's 79K14110 sheet S-13 with a grafted-on OAA in the Retract Position, to let you see how it all fits together up there at the 200'-0" elevation on the FSS, going across the Struts, and on past the Hinge Column, and, for me anyway, this somehow serves to give a much better impression of just how goddamned BIG that OAA really is. Fucking thing is BIG. A Monster even.
So ok, so that explains that whole mess with the ECS Duct (god, let's hope so) all well and good, but I also mentioned the Hinge Column Upper Bearing Service Platform back when I was first introducing you to all of this bizarre arcana, and that too, enters into the picture.
And by now, with the muscle-memory you're being forced into developing through repeated bludgeonings with this stuff, I should expect you to have a fighting chance of making partial, or even complete, sense of highly-altered 79K14110 sheet S-13 after I've pasted the Hinge Column Upper Bearing Service Platform taken from 79K14110 sheet M-2 into it, along with the OAA Monster sewn together using pieces from 79K30000 sheet 62 and 79K24048 sheet M-334 (but I cut its head off, so the M-334 piece doesn't show), and then labeled all of the resulting nightmare with elevations, and...
...boy, that's all pretty fucking close, and some of it underlaps, and some of it overlaps and all of it is stuffed in there cheek-by-jowl, and...
...nah, that fucking ECS Duct never had a prayer, over there on the Right side of the OAA. Fuhgeddaboudit.
And then we look at it all some more, and a slow dawning occurs, and when the dawn breaks, we come to the astonished realization that it was the Hinge Column Upper Bearing Service Platform that secretly ran the whole show, from the very beginning of things, when they realized that's what constrained them, for just how far they would ever be able to retract the OAA.
Rip the Duct off all you want. Slap it back on, over on the other side of the Arm. Go right ahead!
And you're still only gonna be able to go so far and not an inch farther with that Arm, 'cause careful there Lou, you're just about to hit the goddamned Service Platform with it, so maybe you'd best stop with swinging that thing around, right here.
Which then goes on to explain, perfectly, why they left the OAA clocked 6 degrees (which always struck me as a particularly weird number, and yes, you can see it there on S-13 if you look for it) away from being exactly square with Side 1 of the FSS and the Struts running southbound across from there to the Hinge Column when it's in its retracted and latched position.
Which of course further explains why the Latchback, with its Strongback Columns holding it up, is protruding so oddly far out there away from Side 1 of the FSS, and of course since that thing has to be out there to keep the latched Arm clear of the Hinge Column Upper Bearing Service Platform, and the OAA Hinges are bolted flush to FSS Side 1 over on their Strongback Columns, the Latchback Columns wind up having to get twisted around, toward the OAA Hinges, in order to maintain a nice square and true aspect with the centerline of the OAA, which can never be made square with the rest of the tower.
And I found a wide-angle photograph taken by NASA that turns out to be fucking excellent, complete with Columbia rising into the air during its STS-75 launch, as viewed from the Left SRB Access Platform hanging off the side of the RCS Room over on the RSS, to let you see this stuff.
And now that we know what we're looking at, and also what we're looking for, in this wilderness of Dogs That Will Never Bark, we get to click the link and see the photograph, and suddenly all of this beyond-outré stuff we've been delving into so very very deeply is sitting right there in plain sight.
I've taken the further step of labeling it with elevations, forcing the goddamned dogs to bark, and now there can be no doubt whatsoever about any of it. Be sure to click the image to render it full-size, and then give things a close look, between the Hinge Column Upper Bearing and the OAA Environmental Chamber. We now get to clearly see that the OAA retracts only so far as the Hinge Column Upper Bearing Service Platform allows it to (along with a reasonable margin of additional space, of course), and now the whole sense of the thing becomes crystal clear, and we may from here on count ourselves, with full justification, as being among those few who really understand.
So now you know!
But. Now that we understand the oddball non-square aspect of the OAA with the tower, the question immediately comes up: What's going on with the GOX Arm? Which is also non-square with the tower, and also sits at a bit of an angle when it's latched, and up there, the angle is ever so slightly different! And they give that angle to you on 79K24048 sheet S-106 (Latchback Strongback) and 79K24048 sheet S-107 (GOX Arm Hinges Strongback, and while we're at it, I'd like you to tell me where in the name of hell Sections 'A' and 'C' are cut from...) as rise over run, and it's expressed on both drawings as a ¾ over 12 slope, and that works out to 3.58(!) degree angle, and for now, all I can surmise is that it's to provide clearance for the Camera Platform which also shows on 79K24048 sheet S-106 sticking out at an angle to the southeast from the Side 1 / Side 2 corner of the FSS down at elevation 260'-0", but the Bottom Chord of the GOX Arm Truss is given on 79K24048 sheet M-355 as being at elevation 270'-6" so that's kinda high to be wanting to clear that Camera Platform, which leaves me scratching my head over it, not knowing for sure.
And on top of all that, unlike with the OAA, which has an Arm Hinges Strongback which is square with the tower, coupled with a Latchback Strongback which is at an angle to the tower, the damnable GOX Arm has both Strongbacks sitting at that goof-ass angle to the tower, which means the Arm itself gets to be square with both Strongbacks, and... arrrgggghh! What the fuck, over? And since we've come this far already, we may as well make mention that ALL Strongbacks on the original Apollo LUT (which is where all this stuff came from in the beginning, never forget) were square with the tower, and you can see that here on 75M05120 sheet 59. No slope, no angle, no nothing on any of it.
And I need to look into all this weirdness, but not now! Leave me alone. We're trying to hang the OAA on the tower! Isn't that enough for right now?
And now we're underway for real.
I'm attempting to keep things in-frame (as much as possible, anyway) as the lift proceeds, and have rotated the camera to take this photograph in portrait orientation, and I've also stepped farther back away from things.
The small SSW Riser Access Platform that we saw part of in the upper left of Image 131, can be seen again in this frame, protruding in from the left margin of the photograph, directly above the cab of the red Manitowoc crane, with the steel elements of Column Line 7 and Stair Tower 4 directly behind it as a very-confusing backdrop, and this gives us a bit of sense/scale as to where I've had to back up to, in order to keep things in-frame.
More and more of the Guide Columns Lunacy has become visible on the RSS, but... no. No wanna. Not gonna. Later. Much later, hopefully.
And bewildering appearances to the contrary, this is actually a fairly good image for seeing a lot of the things we've learned about on our journey up to this point, constructing a Space Shuttle Launch Pad at Complex 39-B. Once you click the image for full size, and start slowly working your way around in there, allowing things to catch your eye more or less at random, many of the differning elements we've previously been introduced to can be seen with surprising clarity. And now, knowing the stories (some good, some bad) behind so very much of that stuff as well as you do, it becomes quite pleasurable to... look. To... consider. To... know.
You are looking at an almagam of Apollo, and of Space Shuttle, and there is much wonder and awe associated with both of those Great Programs wherein humans dug deeply inside of themselves and somehow managed to pull from within themselves...
Amazements beyond belief...
Things the like of which were universally considered completely undoable...
Until they took on an uncanny material form and substance...
And were done!
And as we look across the image, as with the lifts we've already seen, the whole place is deserted.
Lifts are dangerous, and worksites get cleared of people while they're underway.
Aside from Ivey's crew, no one else is visible on the pad deck, or any of the structures above.
The crane operator leans over his controls in the crane cab, urging the OAA skyward.
Below him, and just a little to the right, much closer to the camera, east of the Flame Trench, one of Ivey's ironworkers, partially obscured behind the tailgate of the gray pick-up truck, can be seen holding the tag line which is attached to the ascending OAA.
And back across to the west side of the Flame Trench, very difficult to pick out from their surroundings, three more ironworkers can be seen standing in front of the FSS Elevator doors, waiting for it to arrive, so they can get in and be taken up to where the action is about to recommence, with the bolt-up of the Orbiter Access Arm to its Support Strongback on the Fixed Service Structure.
If you're having trouble locating them, first take note of the SSW Spray Header laying on the Pad Deck, extending out of the lower-right portion of the frame, looking like some kind of gigantic sci-fi metal millipede, with its spray nozzles forming the legs of the "millipede" coming out from the center of the main header pipe and extending downward.
Start counting "legs" from the left end of the Spray Header, proceeding rightwards as you go.
Our trio of ironworkers can be seen, waist-up or so, just above the line of removable handrail that guards the west side of the Flame Trench, directly above the area defined by fifth and sixth legs of the "millipede."
The leftmost pair of ironworkers have sunlight across their upper backs and shoulders, visible beyond an Ivey welding machine, and the third, tallest, member of the trio is in shadow, right next to them, and all three of them are facing away from us.
Elsewhere... nobody.
Until the OAA is firmly bolted to the tower.
And the OAA has now rotated around to where we can see that the opening through which the Flight Crew will enter the Space Shuttle, that was plainly visible in Image 130, which leads this page, is now covered over, sealing the interior of the Environmental Chamber against any dirt, bugs, birds, bats, pollen, rain, younameit, which might otherwise enter it and become... problematic, in so doing.
Meanwhile, down on the Pad Deck close in front of us, filling the left side of the frame, we see an object which is no longer there!
Oh no, another dog that didn't bark!
Right back to that shit again.
The poor old East Stair Tower, which we learned about way back on Page 41, had been moved from its initial Apollo Location by Wilhoit, back before I first showed up, working for Sheffield Steel. Here it is on sheet S-339 of the original Project Apollo 1963 Pad-A as-built drawings before Wilhoit moved it. The East Stair Tower was initially relocated to make room for the RSS Line B leg of Column Line 7 and the Truck Drive that carried it, when the RSS was in the mated position, shown here on 79K14110 sheet V-9. And then it got kicked northward across the Pad Deck a second time, and we get to see that on 79K24048 sheet S-201.
As an aid in locating yourself in Image 133, I've labeled the Abandoned RP-1 Trench (which you've already met, back on Page 41), and you can see the south end of that trench, complete with a removed panel of the very heavy grating which covers it, leaving a pretty unsafe opening in the Pad Deck, which somebody has placed a barricade over, in an effort to keep you from falling in the hole.
And of course you can go look at image 043, cropped to include just the East Stair Tower and everything visible to the right of that, with the last vestiges of the RP-1 Trench labeled and see where the first relocation of the East Stair Tower placed it in relation to the south end of that Abandoned RP-1 Trench), and in Image 133, the Trench is still right there...
But the East Stair Tower has floated off to somewhere else, and no longer lives here anymore.
And what's going on with that, what's going on with the DOUBLE move of the East Stair Tower, is a story I do not know the full details of, but it is a story that we can pursue anyway, even if only a little bit, using the materials we have at hand, to at least see the broad outlines of things, even if we do not know what all of those "things" actually are.
And so, I shall once again bounce away from the tale I'm telling, to tell a different tale for a while, before returning to the original tale.
And in the begining was the LUT, and the Stair Tower served the LUT, and we must therefore go all the way back to Project Apollo, and give what we have from that bygone age a look.
And in the Apollo material, in Drawing Package 75M05121, we get to see the LUT as it was originally built, prior to being modified into an MLP for the Space Shuttle.
And of course the LUT sits on top of the Pad, and in this instance, it's all about the Pad Interfaces.
And we saw a lot of that stuff back on Page 41 of this narrative, but not every last bit of it, so back we go, once again, to see where we came from In The Beginning.
And in the beginning, our East Stair Tower was both a Stair Tower, and also an Elevator Tower, and it sat next to the LUT, and we learned back on Page 41 that for unknowable reasons, on Pad A it was called "Stair and Elevator #1" but over on Pad B, Elevator #1 kept its original name but our Stair Tower got renamed to "Engine Servicing Platform" and how and why a thing like that ever happened is not for me to know.
But it happened, and we mind ourselves around here with this stuff, lest we become irretrievably lost in a Wilderness of Nomenclature from which there can be no escape.
The LUT itself had more than just this one access point, and you get an overview of the whole works here on 79M05121 sheet 25, which I've labeled up for you, with not only our East Stair Tower (Engine Servicing Platform), but also a bunch of other stuff that we learned about back on Page 41, and have encountered, to greater or lesser degrees, elsewhere in this narrative.
And your present familiarity with what you just saw on 75M05121 sheet 25 now allows you to look at a perspective view of the LUT, seeing the Box from above and to the southeast, where the East Stair Tower (labeled in this view as "Engine Servicing") sits in plain sight, along with its siamese twin, Elevator No. 1.
And I'm gonna mark it up for you, and show the marked-up Perspective View Drawing to you again, because this particular drawing (the original provenance of which I do not know, alas), becomes very instructive for our investigations into the perigrenations of the East Stair Tower, so we're gonna use it, no matter where it came from or who originally made it.
And the Elevator, and the Cantilevered Parts, along with their Flip-up Platforms, all got torched off and thrown away when they decided to use what was left of things for the Space Shuttle.
And when this stuff serviced the LUT, for Apollo, the LUT had a pair of doorways which you could access either via the Elevator, or via the Stair Tower, which of course gave access to the interior of the LUT for whatever might need being done in there. And you can see them on the original Apollo Engineering Drawing 75M05120 sheet 8.
All well and good.
And when the LUT became an MLP for the Shuttle, they left those doors right were they were, still fully functional.
Just don't go opening 'em up from inside the MLP and stepping through them, because there was no longer anything there on the outside to step across to, and it's quite a bit farther down to the Pad Deck than you would ever want to fall.
And the photograph you just saw, which I took while hanging out of the passenger-side window of Jack Petty's BRPH company car, down in front of the High Pressure Gas area at Pad A bright and early on the moring of August 10, 1984, is jumping us forward in time a little too far, but I wanted you to see that those two doors remained, and remained fully-functional, in the MLP, after the Stair Tower was moved.
Ok, fine, but what's the deal with the intermediate location for the East Stair Tower?
What's going on with where the Stair Tower first wound up when Wilhoit moved it as part of the 79K10338 work they did before I ever showed up out there? Which is the location you are seeing it in at the top of Page 41, which I've already shown you.
And that turns out to be quite the mystery, and I have never been able to solve it, and...
Hell... besides my own stuff, there's damn nearly nothing out there that gives us any information at all, about the East Stair Tower when it was neither here nor there.
But a very few scraps remain.
79K10338 remains, of course, and sheet S-182 is very clear about moving the damn thing, and it gives no hint whatsoever of it being any kind of temporary deal.
Per 79K10338 sheet S-183, they tore up the Pad Deck, filled part of the RP-1 Trench with concrete, made proper new foundations for the Stair Tower, and set it down on those foundations after whacking the shit out of the original Apollo version of things, as what can only be described as a finished item...
...except that it wasn't.
The only operational photographs I've ever seen that include it were taken back when the Orbiter Enterprise, as part of a whole stack, was first rolled out to Pad A for system fit and function checks. A very few additional photos can be found (at the time of this writing, anyway) on NASA's images web page, but this one, despite its less than stellar quality, is the best one I could find.
However, by the time the first Flight Article, Columbia, attached to a white External Tank, made its way to Pad A, the East Stair Tower had already been moved a SECOND time and now resided in its final location, from where it never moved again for the duration of the Program.
And I find myself unable to refrain from wondering...
...Why?
Why did they do this?
And in the lonesome silence of a reply that will never come, we return once again to our original tale of Union Ironworkers hanging the OAA on the side of the FSS, one-hundred and fifty feet above the Pad Deck at Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B.
Another jarringly-fine example of Cubist Art from that period of time when the Movement was at its apex of power and innovation, shocking and scandalizing the Salons of Paris, and all the rest of the High Culture world, too.
The OAA has arrived at its final destination, and Union Ironworkers are now hands-on with it, making the connection.
Look closely at the image, and you will see a pair of ironworkers, one on either side of the Lower Hinge Box.
The one on the left is standing precariously with his right boot on the intermediate runner of the handrail that "guards" the south side of the OAA Lower Hinge Access Platform. Up above the top runner of that handrail, you can see his toolbelt and bolt bag below his torso which is clad in a light-colored shirt. Above the shirt, his dark hardhat is visible, and to the right of that you can see his outstretched right arm, and it appears as if he's hands-on with the Temporary Hinge Alignment and Support Hardware, using it as a grip to muscle the Hinge Box into place.
Dangerous does not even begin to describe what this guy is doing. What this guy is doing is so far beyond your ability to properly comprehend it, as to make the fact that I'm even discussing it absurd, ludicrous, and pointless. You can never enter this world. Not intellectually, not conceptually, and for sure as hell not physically.
You can look at this picture until your eyeballs fall out of your head, and you will never know.
And I will guarantee you that he's not wearing any kind of fall-protection gear at all. He needs to be able to move. He needs to be able to jump from here to there, in the blink of an eye, staying on top of a radically dynamic situation, and any encumbrance of harnesses, lines, or whatever else, is a thing that he wants no part of. None at all. All that shit could ever do would be to trip him up. To entangle him. And slow him down.
And this was back in the early 1980's before the lawyers took complete control, and this is how we did it, and we did it this way because, it's better this way, and if you can't hack it, then get the hell off the goddamned iron, get out of the goddamned way, and let Union Ironworkers do what they do best, on their own terms.
Know this.
Know this to be true.
We're about to go up on the tower, and before we do, let us begin familiarizing ourselves with what we will be encountering when we get up there.
Our ironworker with his boot on the handrail will serve as a good starting point.
That handrail runs around the OAA Lower Hinge Access Platform.
And you can see it here on 79K24048 sheet S-69, which I've marked up some to help you understand what you're seeing in Image 134, and which gives us a pretty good general arrangement view of things.
There is an unfortunately-located blemish on the photograph blocking our view of the ironworker to the right, interfering with our ability to see him from about the knees down, but he is otherwise visible, bolt bag on his left hip, facing slightly away from us.
And they're going at it, making the connection.
But before we go any farther, we need to stop and give that GOX Arm up there at the top of the tower a good, close, looking-at.
And when we do, we immediately see that, as I had kind of wondered about with a low-confidence guess just a little while ago, the GOX Arm sits at an angle to the FSS because of that Camera Platform at Elevation 260'-0", but it's not the Arm Truss, but instead is what's hanging off the side of the Truss.
Yep. Another Duct.
And this time they can't just tear if off of the Arm, and move it over to the other side because...
...the No Vacancy sign is lit.
There's already another Duct over there, occupying that space, so...
...that means we'll just have to give the Arm a bit of an angle as it sits on its Latchback, no longer square with the tower, to keep that Duct over there on the Right Side of the Arm from bashing into the Camera Platform at Elevation 260'-0".
Give that a look on this cropped-in version of Image 134 with labels, and you'll see what I mean.
And for the actual details on this one, I have quite a bit less than what I was able to scrabble together for the OAA, and in fact, I have nothing at all, and I'm not gonna belabor the issue futher with attempting pull any rabbits out of a hat to come up with useful dimensions.
What you see is what you get.
But it's enough.
So. Another mystery, solved.
Which leaves the oddity of why the OAA and GOX Arm Hinges Strongbacks differed in the angle they took against the side of the FSS, but I'm in no mood for it right now. You go figure it out. I'm done with it.
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