Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B Construction Photos

Page 32

Monorail Beam and Transfer Doors, RCS Room Platforms, RSS Platforms, RSS Left OMS Pod Cutout (Original Scan)


Top left: Monorail beam and doors, just under the RCS Room floor. There's a story with this thing, and basically it was a whole lot of trouble and effort to fabricate and install this stuff, all jammed up underneath here, with a pair of doors that opened inward and had an unpleasantly weird fit, and right after we'd gotten it all in there, nice and pretty, they decided they didn't want the damn thing anymore, had us weld those doors shut, and that was that. Ah well.

And by the way, as you're shinnying along against the unyielding steel of those doors, with the loose floppy handrail safety chains brushing against you on the other side, it's an unimpeded sheer drop of about 150 feet, all the way down to the concrete of the pad deck. So you don't really want to be looking down as you work your way along this too-narrow bit of platform decking. The first time I ever set foot on a float was right here, several years before this photo was taken, going down about six feet of roped-up ladder which was resting on the float at its bottom end, beneath the too-narrow platform you see in this picture. The whole rig, ladder, float, and all, swayed alarmingly when you touched it, and swayed even more alarmingly when you put your full weight on it. But I went, and I did, and I survived, so I guess it's ok, right? Survive, I may have, but forget, I will not.

Top right: RCS Room interior platforms. Technically, this thing should have been called the FRCS Room, because it provided access to service the FORWARD RCS Thrusters, and there was a pair of ARCS platforms down on the bottom of the RSS to service the AFT RCS Thrusters, but for whatever reason, the RCS Room was the RCS Room and not the FRCS Room. Nobody ever got the two places mixed up that I ever heard of, so I suppose all's well that ends well, right?

Bottom left: Looking up toward yellow load block of the Hammerhead Crane in the far top left corner of the frame, nearly 200 feet above you. Lots of platforms and framing all over the place in this area between the Hinge Column and Column Line 2 on the RSS, including the curiously-shaped Crossover Platforms that surrounded the Hinge Column at various elevations.

Bottom right: Left OMS Pod cutout at the 135 level, with the left-hand PBK & Contingency Platform silhouetted against the sky to its immediate right displaying the curiously-curved end of its monorail beam, in its flipped-up position.

Additional commentary below the image.



Top Left: (Full-size)

And once again, we're right back to one of my least-favorite places on the whole tower, that dreadful little ledge of a platform which would support the rolling ladder (not visible in this image) which was hung from above on a trolley which ran along the bottom flange of that funny-looking curved monorail beam (Not visible, above top of frame in this image.) we've talked about previously, giving a technician access to the outside of the Space Shuttle cockpit windows and their immediate vicinity.

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Addendum March 3, 2020: I think I've finally gotten sufficiently to the bottom of the matter with this deeply-aggravating set of doors, which is something that's been bothering me way more than it should, for over thirty-five years, as of this writing. In the paragraphs below, I shall, as much as possible, leave things as originally written (perhaps with a few strikethroughs here and there), as illustration of the occasional amazingly-difficult tasks involved in finding out about the very things we were constructing, even as I include such enlightening additions regarding the story behind these doors as might seem reasonable, in an attempt to increase understanding, for those who would seek to understand this ever-so-outré stuff. Bear with me on this, please. It's neither going to be straightforward nor easy, and I'm sure I'll be returning again and again, in my attempts to organize it all in a sensible-enough (barely, no doubt) form to read. Much of what gets referenced in the addendums below comes from a single document: The Space Congress® Proceedings 1976 (13th) Technology For The New Horizon Apr 1st, 8:00 AM Shuttle Payload Processing At KSC James D. Phillips Mechanical Design Division, NASA, Kennedy Space Center, Kennedy Space Center, Florida 32899
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This picture gives us a good look at the external end of the other monorail beam in this area, the one that protruded outside of the PCR through a nit-picky cutout and seal arrangement in the pair of doors just above The Ledge.

Multiple items of interest in this area, with this system, which was a real pain in the ass to get properly fabricated and installed per the plans and specifications, thus necessitating far too many visits from yours truly to go up there and talk with the ironworkers about the latest Stupid Thing that was preventing the work from getting done.

I'm sure it was because I never liked the sonofabitch in the first place, and so, as punishment, the Fates decreed that I visit the damnable thing as often as possible.

Boy, I dunno.

Anyway, this monorail beam (which it took me until March, 2020, before I could find it on the structural-steel drawings that I have, because I stupidly assumed that it would appear on a framing steel rendering, somewhere, but instead, it shows up, hiding extremely well in plain sight on the main framing steel for the RSS Top Truss at elevation 208' instead) was designed and built for some damn thing that could be lifted on a hoist which ran below this beam, held up by a trolley attached to the bottom flange of the beam, and could travel across the boundary that runs between inside and outside the Payload Changeout Room.

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Addendum: March 3, 2020. Some damn thing turns out to be the IUS of all things! And maybe a payload or two, to go with it!
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But I never learned exactly what it was that they might be picking up from one side of these doors or the other, and then rolling it along for a bit before setting it back down on the other side, keeping in mind, that side was over sixty feet below this side. Never saw the hoist, either. It never got so much as furnished, nevermind installed.

And, when you think about it, what could they be wanting to place in this nasty little cramped space, nearly flush up against the windows on the goddamned orbiter, in the first place?

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Nothing would be in this "space" because there would be no "space" because there would be no orbiter. Only the proposed (but never built, to my, limited, knowledge) enlarged canister).
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I have no fucking idea. None at all.

But, with or without an idea, I certainly can do a little estimating of things just based on the size and weight of the monorail beam, and holy good gollamighty, whatever the hell it was, it was HEAVY!

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The Inertial Upper Stage weighs in at a very hefty 32,400 pounds, so yeah, that monorail beam had to be sturdy, and it's kind of nice to see that finally, at long last, all these decades later, my gut feelings regarding this thing turned out to be pretty accurate, just based on looks alone.
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Zoom way the hell on in there, just as close as you can, and take a gander at the 'I'-shaped end of that monorail beam sticking out there into the sunlight.

It's an "S" shape (The 'S' standing for "standard" beam, which of course, by the 1980's, it wasn't anymore, and wide-flange beams had become "standard" and were what was used in almost all circumstances, but that's a story for another day).

And this particular S-shape is no flimsy thing in any regards whatsoever.

Just look at it. The flanges are narrow, but the web is deep, and if you look really close, you can see that they've welded a stiffener plate flat down along the length of the top and bottom flanges, making it noticeably stronger than it would have been on its own, which was already pretty damn sturdy for the purposes of holding up a wheeled trolley that would roll along the top surface of the bottom flange with some kind of hoist hanging down underneath it somewhere.

Look some more, and take note of the weirdly-contrapted support hanger it's being held up with, in suspension. It's a bizarre-looking thing, to be sure, but bizarre or not, it's also strong. And, as a final touch of obsessive compulsive lunacy, it would appear as if they've welded on yet another bit of stiffening steel, up high on the web of our S-shape, behind where the support hanger is attached, going from there on into the seal cutout, and who knows how much further beyond that? Is this even really a stiffener? I do not know. Is the bit that continues down from the hanger assembly, below the top flange of the monorail beam, some kind of stop for the trolley? I do not know. It's quite thick and substantial in construction, and seems a bit overmuch for a mere stop, but again, I do not know. And those funny-looking angle cuts on the hanger/trolley-stop/whatevertherfuckitis. Above and below the top flange. What's up with that? I do not know. I do know this whole damn thing is just weird, but beyond that..... nothing.

Hook the Empire State Building onto this thing and I'd bet the deflections would be less than the thickness of a sheet of paper for god's sake.

Hell, with this thing, you could pick up the whole world and have strength to spare, for the fucking Moon, or maybe even Mars.

So what the hell was it that they were thinking about moving around up here, nearly flush up against the ever-so-delicate TPS tiles and windows of the Space Shuttle?

I have no idea.

None at all.

But whatever it was, it was fucking heavy, I can at least tell you that much with confidence.

And this whole set of doors was just weird, all on its own, without ever bringing a requirement to be able to move blocks of lead by the cubic yard, or whatever the hell it might have been, into the question anyway.

Just below this very set of doors, just the thickness of this ridiculous ledge of a platform lower down on the structure, lived a set of bi-fold doors that were SIXTY feet high!

But noooooo, they didn't want to use those doors. Not at all. So instead of using those doors, they went ahead and made these doors, which granted whoever or whatever passed through them, access to the exact same place, which of course was the interior of the Payload Changeout Room.

What the fucking fuck?

The only thing I've been able to figure, is that it had nothing at all to do with the orbiter in the first place, and instead was somehow associated with the Payload Canister,

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Almost, MacLaren, oh so very close. But not quite. Read on.
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and granted them lift access to the PCR from somewhere outside, just above the top of the canister (Why? Why would they want to be able to do such a thing?), when the canister was hard-mated to the PCR and those sixty-foot high PCR doors were blocked by that hard-down canister.

But I'm guessing, and in truth I have no goddamned idea at all.

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...and, in truth... well... truth turns out to be stranger than blind guesswork on this occasion. Here, have a look at this.

Four drawings, all on one page. Ok, fine. I'll separate them out for you, so you can see things a little better, ok? These images were taken from a very old .pdf, and whoever, or whatever, rendered the original material (which itself was very likely a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy...) was being looked over by someone who did not want to spend a single minute more on this task than the absolute bare minimum, so the poor schlub who did the work just kind of slapped it through, and we today, viewing their work from over forty years later, wish that their impatient, penurious, boss had been a bit more forgiving of his multi-decadal descendants, and put a little more time into things, but alas, it was not to be.

So I work with what I've got today, and I do the best I can by trying to clean it up some and make things more legible, and hopefully my multi-decadal descendants will look upon my efforts with a bit more charity.

Here's the first image, and here it is again, highlighted.

You're looking at an elevation view of the PCR part of the RSS, and slap up against the front of the PCR, is a payload canister, but it's not a normal payload canister. It goes all the way up to the underside of the RCS Room! And inside of it, you can see a hoist which is holding up an IUS, down at the bottom of the canister. Hmm.

Look close, and you'll see that our monorail hoist inside of the canister is supported on a monorail beam which is inside the canister. Hmm hmm.

And that monorail (which is labeled "Hoist Track" in the drawing) extends right out into the PCR, just beneath the roof, all the way back to the very far end of things to where it sits up there, up above a fully-retracted PGHM, which seems to have "staying out of the way" as its primary function in these drawings, which is kind of a funny way for PGHM's and Payloads to be working together, yes? Hmm hmm hmm.

Ok, now here's the second image, and here it is again, highlighted.

This image is more or less a reproduction of the first image, but in cutaway isometric view, to maybe help us along with understanding what it is that they're trying to show us here, and what they're showing us here is an IUS, inside of a canister, suspended underneath a nice sturdy hoist, that itself is suspended underneath a nice sturdy monorail beam.

And now we get to our third image, and once again, here it is, highlighted.

And this one is another cutaway isometric view, and it's making things pretty clear that they're working this stuff through open doors in the bottom of the canister, and the hoist line goes pretty much all the way down to the pad deck, where you can see a couple of eency teency Lego minifig-looking people on an eency teency Lego truck kind of thing, and the fact that our Lego minifig people are standing more or less directly beneath a suspended load (which appears to be some sort of secret, hidden beneath a shroud) tells us that the guy who did the drawing, as well as his bosses who had to approve it as it wended its way through the system, have never been outside in the real world, and do not know that standing beneath suspended loads is both stupid and dangerous.

And now we come to our fourth and final image, and here it is, highlighted.

Which is another cutaway isometric view, and seems to add little to our already-sufficient understanding of things, but they went ahead and changed the look of the secret payload for some reason or other, and they also decided to let us see that they were lifting who-knows-what-else, over on the back side of the RSS, using a different monorail hoist, about which we can learn many other strange and wonderful things, here, if perhaps we choose to do so.

So what actually winds up happening here is that they were going to make a special canister. Quite a bit taller than the one they actually wound up with for normal payload operations, and which also had inside of it, up in the very top, a substantial piece of iron which was intended to match our monorail beam exactly, and which perforce was going to have to butt up, flush against, the end of our monorail beam, with sufficient strength, rigidity, and precision as to permit the pair of trolleys which supported a monorail hoist which itself was supporting over thirty thousand pounds of live, fully-fueled IUS to roll back and forth across the gap, and there's always going to be a gap, and I don't care if it's only a half-millimeter, it's a fucking gap goddamn it, and between differential thermal expansion and contraction, flexures of the special canister caused by wind-loading and variable center of gravity loading induced by a mobile load, flexure of the goddamned RCS Room main framing steel along with the canister support boom pendants (and oh by the way, does this mean we're going to have to furnish and install a separate, special, shorter, set of boom pendants to accommodate the greater elevation of the lifting lugs they'll attach to, which will be on top of our special canister, and how the hell are we going to go about the business of switching the fucked-up pendants back and forth whenever we switch from our normal canister to our special canister, and then back again, and you can bet your ass we're gonna have to figure out every last bit of that stuff, and lots more that I'm not even gonna bother you with right now) with respect to the rest of the fucking RSS/PCR structure, and maybe the fucking phase of the moon, that gap is never going to fully trustworthy, and now you've gotten yourself into a situation where the wheels on the monorail support trolley have decided to hang up on that gap, which has become ever-so-slightly misaligned, but still plenty more mismatch than might be minimally required to interfere with the smooth travel of something that's being pulled down onto the upper surface of the lower flange of the monorail beamS by the multi-TON load its bearing, and how hard are you willing to bang on things to get that fucking trolley wheel to jump the goddamned misaligned gap it's hung on, and you're fucking around with thirty-thousand pounds of goddamned dynamite here, and what the fuck were you people thinking when you came up with this, anyway?
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Maybe one day somebody who knows will see this and send me an email explaining more of this stuff.

In particular, I'd really love to know how the very delicate process of backing out of this crack-brained scheme was handled, in a way to let everyone involved save face, as I'm sure is how it wound up happening.

Not to mention the process whereby, the whole fucking thing, monorail transfer doors and all, was allowed to be fabricated and installed, and remain in place, literal years after they had already long-since bailed out on it, but I smell more than just a little bit of face-saving going on there, too.

Fat fucking chance.

And we're not done yet, either. These doors were stout. Very heavy construction. Way stronger than outward appearances would give you to believe. Eight-inch channel-iron framing, if I recall. Heavy eight-inch channel-iron framing. Closely-spaced heavy eight-inch channel-iron framing. And they were then hung from a series of outrageously-sturdy all-welded "prison butts" (Can you believe the names of some of this stuff?).

Look close. Look very close at the far right-hand side of the right door in this image, level with the shadow of the hook on the snatch block. It looks like a hinge, but it's not. The doors opened inward, so clearly this could never work as hinge.

The hinges, the prison butts, were over on the far side of the doors, blocked from view, on the PCR interior side of things.

So if it's not a hinge, what is it?

It's a clevis deadbolt lock, made out of what has to be at least one-inch thick steel, with a one-inch diameter detent pin inserted into it, with a stainless-steel chain lanyard attached to the detent pin.

Look farther down, and you'll see another one, partially in shadow, just a trifle above the shadow of the lower handrail safety chain that's being cast upon the door down there.

TWO of these things on each door, either one of which would handily prevent Godzilla himself from forcing entry through these doors.

Why?

I do not know.

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And once again, lo, all these many years later, for deeply-mysterious reasons that must forever remain unknowable, at the behest of the Hand of Fate, a hidden memory, a memory that has literally been sitting right there the whole time, hidden inside my own mind for over thirty-five years, has suddenly been dislodged from its hiding place by dent of the work I'm doing with this page, and now suddenly it's in plain sight, easily visible to me, and it consists in the fact that The Ledge, the goddamned stupid dangerous fucking ledge that I've always hated, which you can see as plain as day in the image above, complete with its set of removable-handrail posts parked in their wobble-inducing sockets, connected together by their ghastly set of "safety" chains, that ledge was PART OF THE DOORS.

And every last bit of what I'm on about, as regards things being waaay stronger than they "need" to be, here in this essay, which you are reading above and below, follows neatly and reasonably from that nightmarishly-simple first premise.

The Monorail Transfer Doors, and all that was associated with them, all of it, were as strong as they were, because they were supporting my own sorry ass (along with everybody else's sorry ass), whenever I (or they) walked across that goddamned motherfucking hateful little ledge, and none of it was an integral part of the framing steel which surrounded it on all sides.

Prison Butts, Clevis Locks, Heavy Door Framing, all of it.

Including seal-welding, when it came time to shut this drug-induced hallucination down, for once and for all.

Somebody, didn't want us to die. Somebody, wanted to make sure this whole area was just as strong as everything else around here. Somebody, was aware that at some time, in an opaquely-unknowable future, somebody might come along this way, very reasonably assume they were dealing with the typical platform steel you might find anywhere else on the towers, and in some way, perhaps place loads on this area that it might not be able to withstand.

And for that prescience, my forever-to-be-unknown benefactor, I offer you my belated thanks for doing what you did, and apologies for failing to understand what it was that you did, and questioning so harshly that which you did to keep my unworthy ass out of unknowable trouble.

And in my mind's eye right now, I can see, just as clear as if I'd just come down off of the tower, the curved seam/gap in the checkerplate of the ledge, which curve represented the arc through which one door had to swing, inward, until it was completely clear of the area and out of the way, before the other door could also be swung out of the way, welded solid.

And I'm gonna go out on a limb here, and make a testable statement that, with luck, I'll get to verify somehow, maybe by looking at some other image somewhere, or maybe finding yet another deeply-obscure .pdf document buried deep inside the internet somewhere, and that statement is this: The door on the hinge-column side of this area had to be swung around inward and out of the way first, and I can say that because my mind's eye, now able at long last to see this hidden memory, sees the curve of that seal-welded gap in the checkerplate of the ledge as being concave in the direction of the Hinge Column. And were it convex in that direction, then the column-line-7-side door would be first to open, and last to close.

So. March 8, 2020. I have thrown down a gauntlet for myself.

We shall see.

I do dearly hope. That we shall see.
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And then, just to put a cherry on top, they, after having gone to a lot of time, expense, and engineering, to get this set of Mystery Doors (they were actually called the Monorail Transfer Doors) installed and tested (Yes, we had to test the fucking things, of course we had to test the fucking things along with their hideously-overdesigned Limitorque oil-drilling-platform-class actuators.) in the first place, they had us remove the freshly-tested actuators and welded the doors shut! Boom, gone, no more doors!

And it wasn't any kind of fly-by-night light welding, either. We seal-welded them. They could have tack-welded the goddamned things. They could have left the detent pins in the deadbolt locks. Hell, they could have gone to the hardware store and gotten a lock and hasp, and put that on there, and that would have done the job, or they could have simply left the doors closed, but once again, nooooooo, that's not good enough!

Welcome to the land of Crazed Overkill, where they build steel bridges to missile specs. When they're not building them to bank-vault specs, or nuclear-war shock-wave survival-bunker specs.

Welcome to NASA.

But don't go feeling bad for NASA here, ok? Across the river, over on the Air Force side, working under Martin Marietta for the Titan IV Project, it was even worse!

And no, this is not the only Pad B story I have that deals with installing substantial and expensive things and then promptly tearing them right back out again, either.

I have more of these stories.

And one of them is a real beaut.

Stick around. We'll get to it here eventually.


Top Right: (Full-size)

Ok, let me wipe this foam away from the corners of my mouth, and we can proceed here.

There, that's better.

Let's go inside the RCS Room.

In this image, we find ourselves one level above the image above, standing on the floor of the RCS Room, looking across and out, in almost the exact opposite direction as the image of the Monorail Transfer Doors, above.

If the RSS had been rolled around into the mate position, with an orbiter sitting on the pad, the nose of that orbiter would be filling up all of the space inside of those curved cutouts in the steel below you, as well as additional curved cutouts in the steel a couple of feet above you, that you cannot see very well at all from this vantage point.

But you can very well see the sharply-slanted removable handrails that would surround the reinforced carbon-carbon nose cap, keeping somebody from inadvertently stumbling and falling against it, likely destroying it.

This is the area where, had there been an orbiter on the pad, you would find the Forward RCS thrusters, and where you would service those Forward RCS thrusters.

The thrusters burned hypergolic fuel and oxidizer, which was almost invariably referred to on the job as simply "hypergol" with no further descriptive wording being required, since that word "hypergol" alone was plenty enough to put people on full alert as to the outrageous level of nastiness associated with the stuff.

Across the way, you can see a sort of intermediate-level braced fold-down platform with a set of removable stairs leading to it, and sockets for removable handrail posts along the side facing you in the picture.

That platform, and a lot of other stuff in this area, isn't the same shade of dark gray that most of the rest of the steel on the towers was, because it was hot-dip galvanized, and the surface you see reflecting light isn't steel, or paint, but is instead, zinc.

Apparently hypergol and any rust that might form on less-than-perfectly-coated steel do not get along very well.

We were advised that if the hypergol was to come into contact with rusted steel, that rusted steel would catch on fire!

So yeah, I guess having your steel catch on fire would not be such a fun thing to have to deal with, especially in the presence of a gas or liquid which was so reactive that it would try to eat the flesh off of your bones and further be trying to kill you by destroying your lungs before the fire it caused could kill you, and.... well, yeah, that kind of stuff. And such jolly stuff it is! So they very reasonably coated the living hell out of any steel that was in the immediate area of where hypergol might get a little loose from its handlers and maybe go some place they'd rather it not have gone.

And yes, that very thing actually happened with a bird on the pad one time, and they managed to spill a significant amount of the stuff down the right side of the orbiter from the Forward RCS area before they managed to bring things under control. The good news is that nobody got killed, nor, so far as I know, injured, either.


Bottom Left: (Full-size)

And here we find ourselves down near the bottom of the RSS, looking up and across toward the FSS, which, except for a very small bit of the Hammerhead Crane way up in the top right corner of the frame, and another little bit over on the upper left-hand side which is identifiable as such because it's painted red (or actually orange, really), is blocked from view by the Hinge Column and all of the platforms and framing that hang between it and Column Line 2 on the RSS.

Angling down and to the right, coming in from out of frame to the top, a rectangular catwalk is partially obscuring the hinge column, and doesn't quite make it as far down as the lowest pie-shaped crossover platform on the hinge column.

Beneath the dark silhouette which is the shadowed underside of that crossover, a small bit of handrail can be seen on a more-distant catwalk which disappears out of frame to the right, which is mostly covered by the topmost member of a stack of four more circular crossover platforms beneath it, and is further obscured on its left side by the hinge column.

You're looking at the OMBUU access platforms at elevation 160' from below, and you can see them highlighted in this drawing.

So now you know exactly where you are, right?

And when the RSS swings around, these two separate catwalks will be right up against each other, and they'll take down the safety chains and you'll be able to walk right across the gap between them that no longer exists, just as if you were walking along a sidewalk with a small and unobtrusive crack in it.

Nothing to it.

Below, with its shadowed underside dominating the lower third of the image, a part of the crossover platforms for accessing the main floor level of the RSS/PCR down at elevation 135' blocks the view of everything behind it. Elevation 135' on the RSS was where a hell of a lot of stuff went on, and alas, the set of drawings I'm using does not include it. The best I can do for this platform can be viewed here, but it's pretty deficient in more than one way. Highlighted, you're getting just the barest little sliver of things, and it's not even the part which is dominating the lower third of the image on this page that we're looking at. Ah well, so it must be.


Bottom Right (Full-size)

Looking back up toward the Hinge Column side of the RSS from the Column Line 7 side of the RSS, from the 112' elevation.

The curved and notched cutout in the steel to accommodate the OMS Pod, at level 135' is plainly visible in this image, and you can see that it's more than just a little bit complex, encompassing as it does, both the OMS Pods themselves, as well as the very base of the orbiter's tail, on its leading edge.

The bottom end of the orbiter left-side, side seal panel, which extends vertically all the way up to that dreadful little shelf of a platform just beneath the RCS Room can also be seen, along with the small flip-up platform (in its nominal, flipped-down, position) which had to be lifted up out of the way to allow the side seal panel to be rotated (to the left, in this view) out of the way to allow the RSS to close in on, and mate with, the orbiter as it sat there on the MLP. Same deal down here, exactly, as up at the top end of things on the far end of that shelf with making room to allow the side seal panel to rotate out of the way.

Inboard (to the left in this image), toward the interior of the Payload Changeout Room, with a ladder running vertically up and out of the frame, you can see one of the bi-fold PCR Doors (sixty feet high, everything's giant out here), folded and retracted inward into its "open" position, out of everybody's way.

At the base of the door, just beyond the curve of the OMS Pod mold-line cutout, you can see that somebody has a spider basket resting on the PCR floor.

I do not recall whose it was, or what it was being used for at the time, and, if it wasn't ours (and we didn't use them very often), I'm pretty sure I never did know whose it was or what it was being used for.

To the right of the side seal panel, silhouetted against the blue sky, can be seen the bizarrely-curved end of the monorail beam (out of the way, in its nominal flipped-up position) which supported the hoist that was part of the PBK & Contingency Platforms. I do not know why it was shaped that way. I wish I did, but I do not.

Below all of that, down one level at the 125' elevation, behind some dangling hoses and lines, a pickboard which was part of the contract, part of the pad, and there were a pair of them down here, one on either side, (which provided access, if need be, to the nozzle of SSME Number 1, which is the top engine in the cluster, with number 2 below it to the left, and number 3 below it to the right, as viewed from behind the orbiter looking into the openings of the nozzles) can be seen extending from the floor steel at this level, out toward the center of the frame, overhanging nothing at all, supported on its far cantilevered end by a single shackle and thinnish wire rope (which is also clearly not fully in tension, not doing any real work at this time.

Somebody is feeding more hose over the safety chains that run between the removable handrail posts. Pretty sure he's not one of our ironworkers, but I'm not dead certain about that, either.

And at the very bottom edge of the frame, near center, off in the distance, the water tank for the SSW water can also be seen.

Just another one of those nondescript photographs that upon first glance do not seem to be showing much of anything, but which, upon closer examination, reveal a beehive of activity and a multitude of individual points of interest.