Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B Construction Photos

Page 37

OMS Pod Heated Purge Cover Lift From Bottom of Flame Trench (Original Scan)


These things were a bear. Really complicated shape, with foam-in-place insulation, and temperature probes, and who-knows-what-else. Fabbed by a subcontractor (SMCI, I think) and delivered to the pad. Hung up on either side of the RSS down at the 135' level, on a weirdie smooth haunch that they could be maneuvered around a little bit upon, manually, bare-handed, using turnbuckles in several places, because of the ridiculously tight clearances with the OMS Pods on the orbiter they were there to "protect." As I recall, one of these took a fall to the pad deck after I had departed (cannot remember if it was Pad A or Pad B this happened on), and by blind dumb luck, nobody got killed in the process, and they didn't break an orbiter, either. Shortly thereafter, the damned things disappeared and they were not missed by anyone except maybe the folks who went to all the horrendous work involved in designing and fabricating them.

Additional commentary below the image.



Another one of my favorite shots.

The aesthetic alone, makes this one a winner, but there's so much more than that.

However, let us not leave the aesthetics behind just yet, shall we?

You are hemmed in by a great brick wall, and an equally great (and steep) ramp, looming high above you.

Beyond, looming vastly higher yet, a great construct glowers down upon your unworthy body, looking almost Egyptian in its colossal blocky presence. Whatever gods might be payed homage to in a place like this must be very potent, very powerful, very oppressive.

On top of the wall, dwarfed by all before and behind him, an overseer keeps a watchful eye upon his minions, laboring down at ground level.

Beneath the soles of their boots, an inscrutable white object, something that would not look particularly out of place in a Dali painting, lays procumbent, allowing itself to be tied up, to be readied, but for what?

Who are these people?

What is their business?

And what is this place?

The image is mute, and offers nothing more.

Yeah, this is definitely one of my favorite shots.

I'm sitting here at the keyboard, just starting this one out, having no idea whatsoever what words might wind up running off the ends of my fingers and onto the page, and already I've got a feeling that the word count for this page might wind up being the highest of all of them. And I shall start typing, and the words shall flow, and I'll leave it up to the words themselves, and they shall tell me what needs to be said, and then I shall speak it.

There's just so much to see, to ask about, to learn about, to ponder, and to give ample time to.

They're getting ready to lift the first OMS Pod Heated Purge Cover and set it in the midst of the steel high above them.

Rink Chiles, Wade Ivey's general foreman, watches carefully from the parapet high above, giving hand-signals to the operator of the crane behind him, precisely controlling the location of the spreader beam and the lift rigging it carries, hovering just above the Pod Cover down below him, which is completely invisible to the crane operator.

Down in the Flame Trench, standing on the Pod Cover, that might be Rink's brother Reuben to the right, but I cannot be sure of that. Our other ironworker, on the left, must remain nameless, alas.

We'll start with the pod cover itself, being readied for the coming lift.

I've discussed the difficulties in fabricating them earlier, and in this image, we get a better view of why things were difficult.

Click the image for the full-size view, zoom in some, and give that white OMS Pod Heated Purge Cover a nice close look. My previous mention way back on Page 14, when we were lifting the PGHM Bridge Beam, regarding the difficulties in fabricating these things mentioned that they were not just weldments but that they were "weldments with a lot of closely-spaced bracing welded on to their opposite sides, away from the side that faced the OMS Pods" and in this image you can see at least some of that "opposite" side. This is by no means the best image of the "opposite" side of the pod cover, but I have the sneaking feeling that it might be the only remaining image of that side of the pod cover.

The internet rages with a neverending blizzard of cats, memes, fools, and maliciously self-serving con men and liars, but it can also be as lonesome as a desert for some things, and the side of the OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers that faces outboard, away from the Space Shuttle, is an especially barren tract of desolation and emptiness. I have literally never been able to find a single image showing this side of the pod covers.

Not one.

Apparently, I'm all you're ever going to get.

Somebody please prove me wrong. Somebody please send me better images of these things. Please

Looking back, I kind of wish I'd done a bit more thorough of a job with photographing these things.

If I'd only known...

Ok, so we can at least see some of the back side of the cover, and the part we can see in the image above is adequate for giving you an idea of how these things were constructed.

You're looking more or less end-on at the pod cover, with the top of it facing you more or less directly.

You're looking at the Left pod cover. The one that covers the Space Shuttle's left OMS Pod.

The top of the cover you're looking at is flat, and has a complexly curved cutout in its shape that matches the curve of the Space Shuttle where it comes into near (but not quite) contact with the RSS at the 135' level, which is also the level of the Payload Changeout Room floor.

And I have no structural drawing of the 135' level of the RSS, alas, so we're just going to have to work without it and try to visualize things as best we can, in its absence.

Ok. So now you know where you are with things.

Now, let's get back to weldments, bracing, and aluminum.

A quick glance could cause the unwary to believe that the pod cover is curved, but it's not. It's entirely constructed out of flat aluminum plates and straight-as-an-arrow aluminum structural shapes. Below, a crop-enlargement of the image above, contrast-enhanced as far as I sensibly could, with labels showing, some, but by no means all, or even most, of the places where the flat and straight pieces had to be cunningly cut, fit, and welded together, to match the disorientingly-complex curves of the Space Shuttle's OMS Pods.



Which means, there were a lot of cuts, and a lot of fitting, and all of it had to be welded together.

Which means, of course, a lot of welds. And a lot of heat. And a lot of residual stresses. And a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong.

But things did not go wrong with the fabrication, per the plans and specifications, of the OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers.

These things are masterful constructions.

Whoever was in charge, in whatever shop, whoever measured and cut, whoever cleaned and prepared, whoever fitted and clamped, whoever controlled heat and distortion, and whoever was down there on the shop floor with the TIG welder in their hand, was pretty damn good at what they were doing.

These things were also constructed exactly as dictated by NASA engineering.

NASA inspected the hell out of these things, and had there been any defects, any warping, any cracking, any thing, then somebody would have red-tagged them and they would have never shown up out on the launch pad.

Now let's turn our attention to part of what was welded on to the covers.

Our ironworker on the right is taking a pretty wide stance, and the lower part of his right leg is almost, but not quite, obscured by a piece that kind of sticks up into the air a little bit. That piece is behind him as he stands, which puts it nearly level with the top of the pod cover. And as it sticks up into the air, the dark bricks of the flame trench wall provide a nice high-contrast backdrop to let you see that this piece that sticks up a little bit has a hole in its end. Using our ironworker for scale, I'm guessing he could get his arm through that hole, but not his leg.

Got it? If not, give it another look. We're gonna be here with this part of things for a little while, so it's nice if you can actually see what we're talking about, and what we're talking about is in plain sight, so yeah, make sure you got this thing, ok?

The thing, that sticks up, and has a hole in it, is one of the two brackets that mate with the haunches we welded on to the floor steel at the RSS 135' level.

The other one of these things is also plainly-visible in the full-size image at the top of the page, but it's much harder to see, owing to the fact that it's white, and everything else behind it is white, and there's no contrast for your eye to grab hold of and use to locate yourself with it.

Between our two ironworkers, there's a dark piece of wire rope, part of the sling they're preparing, that kind of snakes down and left, between the two of them, and it terminates on a fairly substantial, equally dark, loop of steel that's bolted to the pod cover. You're a little below waist level on our left-hand ironworker when you've located it.

From there (imagine doing this stuff for a living, day after day after day, dealing with the complexities of this stuff), look down and a little right, and just before you encounter the smooth top surface of the pod cover, you'll see our second bracket.

Please note that the two brackets do not face in the same direction. They are angled ninety degrees to each other. The easy one to find, on the right, points up and a little bit to the right. The hard one to find, points mostly left, and a little bit up. They are both identical in construction, including the nice hole in them, which was there to accommodate the actual steel piece that made physical contact with, and slid around on top of, the support haunch.


Ok.

Now notice the size of these two brackets, please.

They're pretty small.

They had to be pretty small, because of where they were forced to live, in the cramped confines of the too-narrow space between the steel of the (previously designed and built, blissfully unaware of any future considerations for some damn thing that might, someday, need to be stuffed into the nearly-nonexistent space between the floor steel and the orbiter) RSS and the astoundingly fragile TPS tiles of the Space Shuttle, but still, they're small. And they're not steel. They're made out of aluminum. Softer. Weaker. Aluminum.

And they're all we're ever going to get when it comes to supporting the pod covers.

We will be revisiting them later on, and we'll be getting a look at the haunches (also most unfortunately very small in size) they hung from, but for now, at least you can see the lay of the land with these things. It all comes down to not so very many square-inches of bearing-surface to keep these things up in the air, hanging off the side of the RSS by their fingertips, where they belong.

The lifting sling that's being prepared is four-leg, with two legs each coming off of either end of the spreader beam. Each of the wire rope legs of the sling is going to a lifting loop that's attached to the pod cover where the turnbuckles that would be used to adjust the horizontal position of the pod cover would go, once the covers were hung, just beneath the floor steel of the RSS at level 135' elevation.


In this image, three of the mounting plates, that would eventually carry the steel attachment plate and lugs, where adjustment turnbuckles would be connected to the pod cover, are visible, each with a (temporary, just for this lift and nothing more) lifting loop already attached, and they consist of a flat plate of aluminum, maybe 8 or 10 inches square, by a half to perhaps a full inch thick, and well-supported by the rest of the mounting brackets which are made out of the same material, and each one custom-fabricated, fitted, and welded to the pod cover to give sufficient strength and ease of access for the people who would be working those turnbuckles when it came time to tweak the precise position of the pod covers when the RSS swung around and mated with the Space Shuttle.

Using nothing more than an eyeball-examination, you can see that all of this stuff was designed and built for static, as opposed to properly dynamic (as in anything above and beyond those minimal dynamic loads imposed by slowly working the pod cover this way or that, across the top surface of its supporting haunches) loading. This may or may not have been a good idea, and when we reach the denouement of the pod cover story, it may or may not come into play, but either way, stuff like this has a funny way of reverberating into the future in ways that people do not, and most times can not foresee. I endlessly give engineers and engineering a healthy ration of shit, with good reason I might add, all throughout this series of stories, but let us not kid ourselves. Those people are doing the best they can in most instances, and if a mistake gets made because of something unforeseeable, or because of insane directives from management and/or ownership, as opposed to the day-to-day hubris you encounter all too often when dealing with engineers, well then, who's fault is that?

As I've already said, we shall return to the pod covers with their brackets and haunches and turnbuckles at a later time, but for now, let us move on, shall we?

Beyond the left side of the pod cover, you can get a fairly good look at the ramp which deflected the exhaust from the Space Shuttle (and, before that, the Saturn V and Saturn 1B's that flew from here) up and out of the flame trench.

This end of things was lined with refractory bricks.

The flame deflector that sat in the center of the trench was coated in Fondu Fyre, but the rest of the flame trench was lined with bricks.

Look close at the wall of the flame trench, and you can see the individual bricks. Blackened, but still discernible as discrete individual objects.

But on the ramp, it's different. The individual bricks are no longer visible. The surfaces of the individual refractory bricks had all been rendered into some kind of temporary near-liquid which melded them all into one uniform glazed surface, slick and black, before that which was doing the rendering had ceased doing its work. It's all just one big smooth black surface.

And this surface is testimony to the staggering forces of heat and pressure that were applied to the bricks of the ramp on launch day.

You could walk down the ramp, but it was quite steep, and the slick surface would be trying to cause you to slip and fall. You had to mind yourself.

I skateboarded down there one late-afternoon when everybody else had departed for the day, and I did so barefoot, because that's how I liked to skateboard, back in my skateboarding days.

And as I walked barefoot across it, either down, to retrieve a skateboard that had gotten away from me, or up, to get to the top and start another downhill run, the feel of the surface of those bricks, glazed slick and black into a sort of smooth and near-seamless ceramic by the exhaust of the rockets that had flown from here, was telling the bottoms of my bare feet a story.

And it was a story of an incomprehensible fury of flame and wind that my sensible mind was without the ability to grasp.

But my feet knew.

Yet another one of those places out on the pad where you get a little shiver, or shudder, and then it passes and the world goes on as if nothing at all had happened. And it leaves you wondering...

Returning up and to the right, back into the Egyptian end of things, we encounter Rink Chiles slouching dangerously over the less than fully-firm support of the removable handrail, using hand signals to direct the crane operator out of view behind him, carefully controlling the placement of the spreader beam that's hovering in close proximity to the pod cover five stories beneath him, calmly ignoring the lethal drop beneath the steel toes of his work boots.

Rink is fully-qualified to do this sort of thing, knows exactly what's going on, and will never hurt himself, nor anyone else, in doing so.

You and I had best be a bit more circumspect about our interactions with handrails in high places, and that goes double for removable handrail.

When you're on, you're on, and I was on when I took these three photos, and behind Rink, even the crane boom is in agreement with this. We just happen to be viewing it from precisely the right angle to allow the farthest vertical member of the boom to align exactly behind the nearest vertical member, causing it to disappear from view, thus giving the whole latticework of the boom an unusual, and much cleaner visually, symmetry and overall look and style. I dunno. Some times...

Immediately to the right of, behind, and extending farther into the sky than the crane boom, the RSS glowers down upon all before it.

Up at the top of the great gash in the RSS that would be filled by the Space Shuttle when work was being done on it, extending up and into the belly of the RCS Room overhanging everything else beneath it, three separate platform elevations can be seen, and delineate well the shape of the front end of the orbiter which would be filling that three-level space, when the RSS was rotated around to the mate position, and being thusly rotated, completely fill and block all vision of the sky that can be seen in this image.

And, most likely, the MLP would be up there too, and this image would have looked nothing like what it looks like here, with the RSS retracted.

The Temple of Karnak, it would appear, is on fucking wheels, and can be moved, either here, or perhaps there.

The Pharaoh would have been completely mind-blown to encounter such a thing and most likely further be reduced to, first, drooling incomprehension, followed quickly by a deep and unquenchable terror at the thought of what might be the cause of such a manifestly impossible and supernatural phenomenon, and yet here we are today, finding ourselves to be not quite so superlatively thunderstruck with things as one might, when considering all the implications of this stuff, imagine.

I oftentimes find myself wondering why such a thing might be the case, but I do not know. I do know that it's not the case for me, but apparently I am an outlier, and can not be reliably used as an indicator of what so very many other people might believe, or think, or wonder.

And what about the door to the RCS Room?

It is very clearly offset.

Why?

And the answer to that is given by simple geometry, but for some reason most people find simple geometry to be uninteresting, or even distasteful.

I strongly suspect that the Entertainment Industry is somehow at fault here, but this is neither the time nor the place for me to launch off into the why's and wherefore's of the general population's having been led, having been guided, to places that not only give them no benefit, but actually hinder them in their thinking and their appraisal of all the world around them.

In similar fashion as the left side-seal panel, but even moreso, the RCS Room was forward of Column Line B, and therefore forward of the Hinge Column, and thus was rotating into the orbiter as it was closing in with it, as it traveled in an arc.

I've created a highly-schematicized illustration of the effect with a viewpoint looking straight down, from directly above, showing a schematically-rendered RSS, complete with an RCS Room having an open door frame to accommodate the orbiter, in three different positions. Fully mated, rotated back into the interference zone, and rotated farther back completely out of the way. Clearly, a door opening in the RCS Room constructed exactly on center (in black), is going to be hitting the orbiter as it closes in with it. A door opening that has been offset on one side, with the portion of the door frame closest to the Hinge Column, closest to the pivot point, relocated farther away from the orbiter into that offset position (in green), will not hit the orbiter at any point during the rotation of the RSS.

So this is what they did, and that's why they did it, and that's also why it looks the way it looks, ok?

And if any of you, in looking at this, and having looked at the floor framing plans for this area, have suddenly realized that "Hey there, wait a minute, this doesn't add up, this guy's bullshitting us," then count yourselves as amongst the truly observant, and please allow me to further elaborate, to clear such lingering traces of perceived bullshit as you might still be picking up.

Returning to the floor plan that gives us the (offset) dimensions for the location of the door frame, you should be noticing that yes, the door is offset, but what about everything else?

A quick look at this (very crummy quality) drawing might give you to believe that even though the door isn't going to be a problem, it sure as hell looks like everything else up there is going to be a problem, and you'd be exactly right, except for one thing.

Flip-up platforms.

Everything in the RCS Room that could have interfered with the orbiter as the RSS was mated or demated, flips up, out of the way, and it's locked in that flipped-up position when the RSS is moving.

As I've already said at least a hundred times, everything out here was adjustable in some way via flipping, rolling, swinging, lifting, and there are times when I wonder if they'd considered flying, but that's probably taking it a little too far. It's enough that the fucking Space Shuttle flies, isn't it?

The angle of this image also lets you see the location and general layout of the SRB Access Platforms better than just about any other image in this series, too. They protrude into open space on either side of the RCS Room, looking like a couple of dog ears. I've cropped in on the main image, and have additionally over-processed it, just to make things stand out a little more with high contrast and overdone edges. You can see exactly where the SRB Access Platforms are located, here.

And while we're here, we may as well take advantage of this image to let you see exactly what, and where, the right orbiter side seal panel I've been talking about so much is, too.

And notice, please, the complete lack of Orbiter Weather Protection, Guide Columns System, or any of the other confusing welter of encrustments which we find ourselves dealing with in in images that were taken later on. Nice clean RSS. I always liked it better that way.

And there's more. There's so much more. But at some point, I have to stop. I have to quit piling it on. I'm burying you guys underneath an avalanche of detail. So ok. So I'll quit for now.

But if anybody has any questions. If anybody sees anything in this image that I have not described, have not addressed, have not whatever, well, there's an email link down at the very bottom of this page.

Send me an email if you'd like. If I can answer a question, I'd love to be able to do so. And if I cannot, I will tell you that I cannot.

I will do the best I can.

It's all that I can do.