The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
A Cable Tray Tale: Where the Weird Things Are, and How They Got There.
I shall presume that you've bounced over here from
Page 72 where we were delving into the mysteries of where MacLaren took that
photograph of Wade and Kevin Ivey from, which shows them on the Lower Hinge Access Platform, the day we hung the Orbiter Access Arm on the FSS.
But if not, and you've arrived here via other means, no worries, this page should stand alone, on its own merits, just fine.
We're gonna learn about Electrical Stuff by following a single Cable Tray (Well...
maybe only a "single" one, but... you know how things around here have this weird tendency to sort of...
grow, right?) from where it begins, to where it ends, and in so doing gain better insight into how
all of the Electrical Stuff on the towers works, ok?
Ok.
This will be our one and only walk down an Electrical Pathway through the drawings in this series of photo essays, and for a lot of you, I'm sure it will be one walk too many, but oh well. The whole place is
crawling with cables, and a bit of sense as to how it gets done isn't going to kill any of you. I promise. And of course, never forget,
all of these digressions and side-branches to the overall
story are,
every one, just by way of concocting enough of an excuse to further
elucidate the Launch Pad, down at the level of detail which a proper history of things requires.
To begin with, we have arrived at something called the "Cable Tray Access Catwalk", which runs out across the Struts between the FSS and the Hinge Column at Elevation 187'-0". On its far end, our Catwalk takes us all the way out right next to the Hinge Column, where it stops dead, pretty much in the Middle of Nowhere, right next to a
Three-Layer-Deck of oddly-shaped Electrical Crossovers, but the structural drawing that shows us the Catwalk is actually
worse than useless for that simple-enough task because it's
misleading.
So here's
79K14110 sheet S-4, again, labeled to let you know how they're trying to trip you up with sly depictions of things that fully and completely satisfy the
letter of the law, while at the same time completely flouting the
sprit of the law.
This three-layer-deck of small, round, closely-spaced platforms wrapped around the Hinge Column, despite its dimuative size when compared with everything else around it, along with another four-layer-deck which can be found farther down on the Hinge Column, is one of the
defining features of the Pad.
These are the things that, once you notice them, they give the Pad a healthy kick in the direction of the outlandish science-fiction overall look and feel which the whole place is pretty much
dripping with.
They look
fakey.
Like something you might encounter in the lurid cover art of one of those cheapie sci-fi paperbacks that were printed back in the 1950's.
Or maybe, I dunno,
Frank Lloyd Wright snuck in while everybody was on morning break, and in the very few minutes he was in there unseen, he just kinda
grabbed a drawing that was being worked on, dropped these little nuggets in there without saying a word to anybody, and then snuck right back out again before anybody returned from their break,
and nobody noticed, and the drawing got approved and included into 79K14110. Maybe. I dunno.
Whatever the deal might be, I
love 'em!
And in addition to the Crossover Deck "Stacked Dinner Plates," we're also being given access, right alongside our Catwalk, to a stack of 3
Cable Trays running parallel with it along its southern margin, and the drawings I have in my possession seem to do well enough with the
bottom TWO of them, but the top one has so far eluded me. And since I'm the Village Idiot, I'm just gonna go with the bottom
one, only, in the hopes of keeping it simple enough for even the Village Idiot to be able to follow and understand, as he holds you by the hand and walks you through The Dark Forest to the unsettling sound of wolves faintly howling somewhere off in the far distance.
79K14110 sheet E-12 takes us to the scene of the crime up at the 200'-0" elevation of the FSS (yeah, I know, the Catwalk is at 187'-0" but this is the drawing that shows us the relevent Cable Trays), and since I'm such a helpful young man, I've pasted in the Catwalk itself, from 79K14110 sheet S-4, which you've already seen, and this electrical drawing is pretty poor quality to begin with, and pretty thin on the ground with otherwise useful information, so that's why I went ahead and slapped that thing in there, ok?
And E-12 might be a bad drawing, but it's good enough to tell us that a trio of somethings called "F-1, F-2", and "EF-1" live in the "Lower Power Tray" and that's all we're gonna need, to let us dig down a little farther into The Strange and Wonderful World of Electricity, and maybe learn a little something about our weirdie Catwalk to Nowhere at Elevation 187'-0", along the way.
Out here at the Launch Pad, electricity comes up out of the ground. Jesus makes it, or maybe the Devil, or something, and after it comes up out of the ground, they grab hold of it with big copper cables and make it go where they need it, and make it do what they want it to, when they get it there.
Electricity is funny stuff. It very
defintiely wants to kill you. It's evil shit. It has murder in its heart at all times, and it's smart, and it's devious, too. And it's invisible, so you'll never see it coming when it seizes its opportunity in the blink of an eye, and
kills you.
I don't actually
believe in electricity. I think it's all Evil Spirits, and I respect it in the exact same manner that I respect Evil Spirits, and I stay the fuck
away from the shit, every chance I get.
But if you're
crafty enough, you can turn the tables on it, and make it do your bidding, and it's exceedingly
powerful stuff, so they invest a
lot of time and trouble into creating the weirdly-complex apparatus to corral it, and once they've got it good and roped-down, they can do truly
amazing stuff with it.
NASA employs some pretty smart people, and they seem to have devised a pretty good system for grabbing hold of the electricity just as it comes up out of the ground, and turning the tables on it to get it to do all the different stuff they do with it.
79K14110 sheet E-1 shows us where the electricity comes up out of the ground, right where they grab hold of it, at a thing called Switching Station 1002.
There's
so much electricity coming up out of the ground here that they had to build a gigantic two-story multi-room heavy steel-reinforced concrete
facility called the PTCR (
Pad
Terminal
Connection
Room), right over top of it, to keep it from getting away from them, and blowing the whole place clear to hell with a giant Blue-white Spark of Death.
79K14110 sheet E-3 shows us where the cables in our Cable Tray which runs alongside the Cable Tray Access Catwalk at Elevation 187'-0" come from, and how they have to be worked in amongst a whole bunch of other stuff, and as a sort of "Oh, by the way," it's also telling us that Switching Station 1002 runs the Electrical Show for
the whole Pad.
Everything.
The whole place.
E-3 is where we get introduced to a couple of "
Feeders" that supply electrical power to the whole top of the RSS (where you can find quite the collection of Heavy Hitters), and those feeders are named, creatively enough, "F-1" and "F-2" (which are two of the three inhabitants that live in our Cable Tray), and some of these electrical drawings have got some pretty obscure and arcane symbols on 'em, so here's
79K14110 sheet E-2, with the Cable ID Symbol (which looks for all the world like a little
Pill, and after you've done enough of this electrical crap, you're gonna be needing to
take some goddamned pills, preferrably the
strong ones) highlighted, so as you can recognize it for what it is, when you see it again, in some of the other drawings we'll be looking at, as we wind along down The Electrical Pathway, through The Dark Forest.
From here, the electrical package kind of jumps forward, and we're going to go right ahead and jump forward with it, all the way to the RSS Power Substation which is located inside the Hoist Equipment Room, which is where our good friends F-1 and F-2 wind up going, and you get to see that on
79K14110 sheet E-5 (and we're skipping E-4 because it doesn't have anything useful to add to our Cable Tray Story). Which means that we now know what's up with the beginning and end of the cables in our Cable Tray, so it's fill-in work from here on.
But before we go, maybe you noticed that little "Existing Oil Switch" notation up there just beneath where it tells you this stuff is coming from Switching Station 1002 in the yellow-highlighted areas.
What's an "Oil Switch"?
Is it like how you change the grade of gasoline at the pump when you're gassing up the car, by pressing the button that changes the type of gasoline from Absurdly, Stupidly, Expensive to Still More Expensive Than I Want To Pay?
Hardly.
79K14110 doesn't get into it, but 79K10338, which got here first, of course,
does.
And they show you an "Oil Switch" (not the
exact one, but it'll do just fine as an example) on
79K10338 sheet E-10.
Wicked-looking things, aren't they?
Probably don't wanna go messing around with any of
this stuff unless you can prove that you're fully checked-out, certified, and qualified for the operation and maintenance of Weapons-Grade Evil Spirits.
That shit'll fuck you up pretty good if it finds a way to get hold of you, so let's just continue right on with staying the hell away from it, ok?
And I guess we'd best sort out "EF-1" while we're at it here, too, 'cause that thing's right there in our Tray with the other guys.
Turns out that the "EF" in EF-1 stands for "Emergency Feeder", and this thing picks up the slack when the main power goes pfft and everything stops working. Read all about it on
79K14110 sheet E-6.
So ok.
So now that we have positive ID for all
three denizens of our Cable Tray, may we
please see how we get from "here" to "there" with it?
But of course.
And we'll work from the bottom up with it, ok?
The F-1 F-2 Train leaves the Station down at ground level in the PTCR, headed for parts unknown, and you get that end of things on
79K14110 sheet E-7.
And it snakes its way across the PTCR, picks up another passenger (EF-1), and then it goes right on through a concrete wall and enters the innermost bowels of the tunneling inside the Pad, aiming for the place where the Tunnel lurches straight upwards, headed for the underside of the FSS, and
79K14110 sheet E-8 gives you all of that.
And what winds up happening after it punches through that concrete wall, turns out to be some pretty-substantial
modifications to the original Apollo-vintage concrete guts of the Pad, to accommodate that fact that there's no more LUT, and instead, all of the electrical
Power is going to have to be routed up through this brand-new FSS-thing they were going to have to build for their Space Shuttle, and they wound up using
some of the existing Apollo stuff inside the guts of the Pad, but they also had to make a bunch of
new stuff down there, too.
79K10338 sheet S-14 shows us how they had to dig a pretty goodly
hole down into the Pad, where they then made themselves a nice reinforced-concrete
shaft that bounced off to the side, down at its bottom, where it broke through the wall of the existing Apollo concrete, and this is a good time for a little review of all that stuff, just to make sure we
really know where the hell we are.
Sheet S-305 of the original Apollo Program Pad B drawings, Volume 9, Civil and Structural, gives us a cross-section right through the middle of the pad, right through the centerline of the Saturn V, on an east/west line, and lets us see that the original Apollo Electrical Tunnel (which headed from the back of the PTCR to the underside of the 9099 Building, and which you are presumed to already be plenty familiar with, but if not,
here's where you learn all about it on Page 41) was embedded quite-deeply into things, running along the "back" wall of the PTCR, and I've labeled it for you, letting you know where our new Space Shuttle Cable Tray Tunnel is going to be punching into it.
Now that you know how
deep it was, here's another look at it, in plan view,
Sheet S-301 of the original Apollo Program Pad B drawings, Volume 9, Civil and Structural, to let you see where it was in relationship to all the rest of the stuff on and under the surface of the main body of the Pad. I wan't you to
know where this thing
is, ok?
And the reason I wanted you to know where it is, is so that you can make useful sense of
79K24048 sheet E-346, which is
very instructive, but complicated enough that you need to bring a proper sense of
where things are along with you, before you take a look at it.
And I've colored, and labeled, the
exact Cable Tray we're interested in, but beware. We're bouncing back and forth all over multiple drawing packages, which were all put together in different
years, depicting different
stages of the evolution and development of the whole Space Shuttle Program, and quite a few of them were done
before anything was ever built,
when it was all a bunch of semi-vague concepts. So there's going to be
inaccuracies, and there's going to be
self-inconsistencies, and you're
already supposed to be fully aware this stuff, but... I am here and now
reminding you of this,
yet again.
And as we step through things, I'm going to do my dead-level best to show you where the goddamned Cable Tray actually
wound up, as opposed to some vague generality on a drawing that was created literal
years before the first Sparky ever started dragging Tray Segments up on the
structure, and assembling them into what wound up being used (for a while, at least, and maybe for the full duration, but I cannot know, and again, you're being
put on notice with this stuff) on the towers.
I want my shit to be
accurate! I want my shit to be full-tilt
Historian-Grade Resource Material.
And if I have doubts, or if I see
obvious inconsistencies in the
Contract Documents, I'm going to
warn you (and any proper Historians who at some point find themselves having to
deal with this thing). And if I
know beyond the shadow of a doubt (maybe using the you-can-see-it-for-yourself contents of the photographs I took, or other equally rock-solid source material), then I'm simply going to
tell you, and that's just about as much as any human can ever do, so... ok.
You've been
warned.
Again.
Alright, where were we?
Oh yeah, the F-1 F-2 EF-1 Train had just blown a hole in the side of the back wall of the PTCR, twenty-five feet
underground, and was now headed
upwards, ready to sprout from the surface of the earth underneath the FSS like some kind of goddamned
petunia or something, coming up vertically out of the top of that Cable Tunnel, over there near the southwest corner of the FSS, west of the FSS Elevators, along with all the rest of the petunias, and you got to see that on
79K24048 sheet E-346 (which you get to see again, here, because, it's
quite helpful) just a minute ago.
And we were worried about having any faith or trust in
exactly which Cable Tray F-1 F-2 and EF-1 might be going into, and you get
nervous about that stuff because...
79K10338.
Which got to the Pad
first, after all, back when Wilhoit was erecting Sheffield's steel, and...
And it's the Responsible Party for blowing a hole in the bck wall of the PTCR and building the goddamned tunnel to the surface, and we just saw that on
79K10338 sheet S-14, and we're minding our own business, but we're right there
in 79K10338 anyway, and...
What's
this?!?
Son of a
fucking bitch, but why does this stuff need to be so goddamned
difficult?.
79K10338 sheet E-4 is,
clearly, showing us F-1, F-2, and EF-1, just like
79K14110 sheet E-3, (which is basically
the same drawing) showed them to us, but...
And here is where we learn that the bastards are happily reusing the exact same little Pill Symbol, with the exact same goddamned
ID number in it, but...
It's for a
wholly different thing!
God in heaven, why?
Why do a thing like that, and say not a single peep about it anywhere?
And no answer is given, and I suppose you're just supposed to
know that kind of stuff, and...
Clearly,
electricity is not dangerous enough in and of itself, and I guess they figured they'd maybe...
spice it up a little, just to kind of keep us on our toes, and make sure we really
really really know what goddamned wire it really really really is, before we go
hands-on with it.
And about the only ray of light that I can see in
this district of Nightmare City, is that
these 79K10338 F-1 and F-2 cables turn out to be the MLP Jumper Cables, and we crossed paths with that, glancingly, but still... way back on Page 41, and now here we are, all these pages later, and all of a sudden, we discover we're going to find out where MLP Power came from, and...
...that's actually pretty cool, and if The Hand of Fate is
giving it to me, I'd be a fool to turn it down by ignoring it.
So.
Here we go with the MLP Jumper Cables. The things that furnish electrical
power to the whole MLP, with, of course, a ready-to-launch Space Shuttle sitting directly on top of it.
And the
precise 79K10338
item that set off this whole Cascade of Bullshit, is
their rendering of these items on 79K10338 sheet E-23, which I was looking at to see if it contained any additional useful information on our Cable Tray
Tunnel, and on E-23, the kinds of people who really
look at things, working to make damn good and sure they've
got it right, before they
commit to it, just might
notice that for our good friends F-1 and F-2, the Cable Tray
Numbers which are given on them
Do Not Match, and...
It's off to the races we go!
And I'd stumbled upon the Power Cables for the MLP completely by accident, so now that we're here, let's go look at 'em, how 'bout?
And of course the world
immediately goes crazy, once again, and we find ourselves dealing with
three significant cycles of modifications that got incorporated into the drawings of this stuff, and I need to tease out
only the thread which is in full agreeement with my
photographs of the place, and, once again to the trampoline we go, to bounce off wildly on yet
another divergence, and...
In The Beginning, there was Pad A, and the lord saw that it was
not good, and so he immediately started scribbling, and scrabbling, and scrubbing, and erasing, and drawing lines on top of lines, and issuing EO's (
Engineering
Orders), and haphazardly slapping shit all over the place into older drawings, and younger drawings, and drawings that nobody had even
made yet, and...
Fuck me.
Once Upon A Time...
...it looked like this...
...on Pad
A Drawing (because there is no counterpart to this thing in my Pad B Drawings and also because we need to start out with Pad A to see how this thing
changed going forward in time)
79K04400 sheet E-9. And they're specifically telling us to reuse the old MSS Power Feeders on this drawing. Make a note of it, please.
Look things again, in plan view, on Pad A drawing
79K04400 sheet E-6. And notice, please, in addition to the old MSS Feeders, we get to see the old LUT Feeders too. Keep that in mind, ok?
And since we're here, and since we seem to have developed a curiosoty about the old MSS Feeders, let's look at the Arming Tower (Which got renamed into the
Mobile
Service
Structure midway through Project Apollo, and just that
renaming is quite the story, but not now, ok?), just so you can see why those power cables that you just saw on E-6 wound up as far south, away from where the FSS got built, as they did.
The MSS, in its service position, was parked south of the LUT, forcing all of its stuff to the south right along with it.
And you can check out where the Electrical Interface was on
Original Apollo Engineering Drawing A-1 from the Rust Engineering Arming Tower package, and the only reason you can
do that, is because,
impossibly, The Fates deemed that yet another Anonymous Benefactor step forward from the enveloping mists, unannounced, without warning, and put the Architectural Drawings for the Mobile Service Structure into my hands, unasked for, and...
This only happened mere
days ago, and the Uncanny-O-Meter is fully pegged, and...
I remain unable to thank these people
directly, but let me tell you, the thanks runs pretty goddamned DEEP.
And there's not really anything more I can say about that miraculous end of things, so it's back to the narrative we go, with maybe a slight shiver as we do so.
And now we have a better idea of where we're coming from
electrically, but it's
still tricky, because the Electrical Interface for the MSS on Pad A, wound up being completely
different from Pad B, and by luck, we get to actually
see that difference.
On Pad A, the Electrical Interface was a sort of stub Power Pedestal. It consisted of a framework that stuck up above the Pad Deck, but
at Pad B they removed the Electrical Interface framework altogether, and it was a covered Pit, instead. Note that in the Pad B image, the LUT is still in transit, and has not quite reached its final destination where they can set it down on top of the Mount Mechanisms.
So ok. So once upon a time,
while we're still at Pad A, there was a Mobile Service Structure, and just like everything else out here, it needed
electricity.
But then they got rid of the MSS, and they got rid of the LUT and turned it into an FSS, and commandeered the electricity for other purposes, and patched it over to the base of that brand new FSS they just got finished cobbling together from cannibalized pieces of the LUT that it once was.
And they ran the commandeered electricity from what used to Feed the MSS up to Elevation 72'-6" (Pad
A elevations, right?) on their FSS through a Cable Tray that came vertically up through the Pad Deck, via a pair of very misleadingly-named Feeders, named F-1 and F-2, that suddenly became F-3 and F-4, half-way to where they were going, but apparently that wasn't enough (in more ways than one), and they also ran commandeered electricity from what used to Feed the LUT, and that took an entirely different route up to the scene of the crime, and became EF-7, which was Emergency Power, in addition to everything else that was going on, and am I even speaking English anymore? I can't tell. This shit's starting to
get to me.
So whatever the fuck it was that I just said, in whatever goddamned weird-ass language it might have been, you get to see it for yourself on
79K04400 sheet E-10, and isn't she a
beauty?
Whew!
Which is all well and good, I'm sure, except that, over on Pad B,
they did it in a completely different way!
On B Pad, that vertical Cable Tray that sprouts up out of the ground over there near the FSS Side-1 / Side-2 Perimeter Column, over there near the southeast corner of the FSS down on the concrete of the Pad Deck,
does not exist.
Not there!
And no, I
don't know why it's so different. It just
is. But while we're at it here, I oftentimes hear people asking, "Which Pad is that?" when they're looking at a photograph of the place, and this is one of the very small, very sly, little details that let you distiguish one from another, A from B.
A Pad has the Power Feeders for the MLP coming up out of the ground through a vertical Cable Tray very near the southeast corner of the FSS, whereas B Pad does not have that vertical Tray, and the Power Feeds in from underneath FSS Elevation 80'-0", coming across from Side 3, where all the other petunias are sprouting up out of the ground. But watch out! Later on, they put
other vertical Trays in there,
between where the vertical MLP Power Tray at Pad A lives, and the southeast corner column of the FSS, and they did so on BOTH Pads, and that one will trip you up, if you're not hip to it.
Here's a (I wish it was better, but this is one of those places where good photographs apparently don't exist) look at the
Canister Lift for STS-122, on Pad A, labled to let you see that vertical Power Feeder Cable Tray, along with the "new" ones, that are only there to confuse the hell out of you.
And here's a look (again, very poor image, but... sigh) at the
Canister Lift for STS-115 at Pad B, also labeled, but boy is it ever hard to see down in there, and maybe overzoom the image if you can, because that vertical Power Tray
is not there.
And now,
finally, we get to go back to Pad
B, which is of course the place where we got into this insane snarl of Electrical Trouble, and then we go look at the Empire State Building (well... that's what it looks like to
me), and we get to follow our bogus MLP Power Feeders with the damnable ID's that are the
exact same as the ones we're
looking for, but they're...
not, goddamnit.
79K10338 sheet E-8 tells the tale.
And now, at long last, we get to go see the Pad B drawing that corresponds to Pad A drawing 79K04400 sheet E-10, which you just saw, and which is what tells us that, over on Pad B,
things were different.
Pad B drawing
79K10338 sheet E-22 shows us how they went at supplying Power to the MLP differently than they did at Pad A, and when you compare it with
79K04400 sheet E-10, which you've already seen, the differences become stark.
E-22 does not tell us
why they chose such a different design philosophy for routing the Power Feeders on Pad B, but my gut feeling is that the
existing stuff left over from Project Apollo, which fed Power to the MSS, was in some way deemed unfit for the task, most likely due to degradation, or even damage, of some kind, but maybe not, maybe it was something else, and we'll never know, but this is an excellent demonstration of how things
change, from place to place, from time to time, and you must
always be ready to turn on a dime, and go at it a different way, when existing things simply look right at you, and with a very soft voice, say, "No."
Alright, already!
Enough already! Can we
PLEASE get back to our original
story? The one were we were attempting to follow a couple of goddamned
wires through a Cable Tray, which turned out to be the reason that the Catwalk I took the photo of Wade and Kevin Ivey from, got built in the first place?
Pretty please?
With cream and sugar on it?
Yes, Tony, you may
now have your goddamned motherfucking
pony, and I hope you're happy!
Which
now takes us to
79K14110 sheet E-23, which is the "Empire State Building" drawing for Drawing Package 79K14110, which built the
RSS on Pad B, instead of 79K10338, which was the Drawing Package that built the
FSS on Pad B (which was called the "SSAT" back then), to let you see things
schematically, and of course somebody's come along and grafted an RSS on to the side of the Empire State Building, so it's a little different-looking, but what you
really need to be paying attention to with this one, is that
all of a sudden, we're seeing Power Feeders with
the exact same names we saw going to the goddamned
MLP in 79K10338, now going up to the top of the RSS in 79K14110!
Whole different thing.
Whole different
system.
And of course we also managed to get ourselves mixed up with all of this stupidity over on Pad
A, and between 79K04400 which built
all of Pad A, and 79K10338, which built only the FSS on Pad B, and 79K14110, which built only the RSS on Pad B, we have learned a valuable lesson, and that lesson consists in the fact that, with these different
Electrical Packages, the sonofabitches will
cheerfully use
the exact same names, for
wildly-different things, and woe unto those who are not aware of this malevolent proclivity on the part of the Electrical Designers of this crap, because the dirty bastards never say a single word about it, anywhere, and...
...careful there Lou, this thing might be
hot, and if it is,
it's gonna kill us all!
And now that we've finally put that one to bed, we can return to our original task of tracing the pathway of our F-1, F-2, and EF-1 Power Feeders up to where they get to the Cable Tray Access Catwalk at 187'-0", and head on out to the Hinge Column, and from there, across to the top of the RSS.
And luck is with us, because despite the fact that the actual
cables themselves can have reused names, of other stuff, in other places, and can, even with the same stuff, change names when you go from "here" to "there," the cable
Trays themselves, seem to maintain their names. Or at least that's the case when you go from Drawing Package 79K10338 to 79K14110, and we're going to take full advantage of that fact, because the 79K14110 drawings which show this stuff are quite a bit less well-preserved, and a lot of stuff is either faded away to nothing at all, or is "only" faded away to a state of illegibility, and
both of those two options are no damn good, so...
Let us now, step upwards through the FSS, level by level, looking at it in plan view as we go, and watch in fascination as the Cable Trays bob and weave, and morph and disappear, in a bewildering array of different permutations, as we head up the tower.
In the Department of First Things First, now that we've
finally assured ourselves that we're dealing with the
correct versions of F-1, F-2, and EF-1, we're going to need to look into things down at the root level, where a whole boquet of these Cable Trays come sprouting up out of the ground beneath the FSS like a bunch of petunias.
79K10338 built the FSS, and it built the Cable Tunnel, and we'll need to look at those drawings first, always remembering that even though the
cables themselves get renamed bewilderingly, the Cable
Trays, keep the same exact names throughout.
And the surface of the slab covering the top of the Cable Tunnel is at Elevation 54'-0", exactly one foot above the concrete of the Pad Deck at El. 53'-0", and it's five-inch-thick steel-reinforced concrete, and I guess that oughtta be strong enough for anybody, right? See it here, on
79K10338 sheet S-9.
And we begin our Follow The Bouncing Cable Tray Journey skipping away from 79K10338, heading back to
79K14110, sheet E-10 (which by luck is of sufficient quality), just for a moment, where we start the process of learning many new things, that we never knew we didn't know, and for the moment, we're just going to sort of glance at it, and take note of the fact that it's telling us that our good friends on the F-1, F-2, and EF-1 Train are going to be taking the Cable Tray Number 9 Route, heading vertically up out of the Cable Tunnel, on their way to the top of the RSS. And the nomenclature is more than just a little obscure, but for the moment, you just have to trust me on this one, ok? The
nomenclature will get proper attention paid to it here in just a minute, I promise.
And now, armed with a proper Cable Tray
ID Number for the Route that the F-1, F-2, and EF-1 Train will be taking upwards through the FSS, we can return to
79K10338, and look at sheet E-23, to see just how our
petunias grow, coming up from underground, looking at them from a different point of view.
And please take particular notice of the words I've dropped into the drawing, in blue letters, over on the left side of it.
"Notice that each Tray in this area
(the narrow rectangles with the sort of 'X' in them),
has a little number next to it.
These are the Tray ID numbers."
We're going to need to properly understand how they
identify each cable tray on the drawings, and for the moment, it certainly seems simple enough, just spot the tray you're interested in, and take note of the little number next to it, and you're good to go. And that's exactly what we're seeing on E-23, in the area where the arrow coming off of those words is directing your attention towards.
All well and good.
So far.
Alright then, let's return to
79K14110 sheet E-10, and give
that one a second looking-over.
But this time I'm gonna
mark it up a little
differently, and show you some sneakiness that's been sitting there in plain sight the whole time, but which you were never going to be able to either notice
or understand, unless some Nice Person like me was to come along and point it out to you.
So
here's 79K14110 sheet E-10, yet again, but this time it's marked up to let you know that, out here, they even give HOLES their own specialty nomenclature.
Which, when you think about it, makes sense, because if you go threading your Cable Tray through the wrong
hole, it's very likely that Bad Things will happen as a result of it now being in the wrong
location, maybe costing you more money than you'd like spend on having to remove and reinstall it into its
correct location.
And in a place where they regularly deal with shit having the potential explosive yield of a small tactical
nuke... wayward electricity might be just a teency bit...
problematic, and yeah, let's make sure even the goddamned
holes we're punching through the grating panels and floor framing members on each FSS Level to allow vertical runs of cable tray to pass through, have all got Slot ID Letters,
too.
And of course things are
never complicated enough on their own, so we
must introduce
further complicataions with this crap, and one of the big additional complications is that we're dealing with a hodgepodge of new and
existing stuff, and it turns out that most of the existing Cable Trays on the FSS, are
left over from a previous bygone time, going all the way back to when they originally built the LUT for the Apollo Program in the 1960's, using drawing packages with Package Numbers that began with 75M instead of the 79K we're used to with the Space Shuttle.
And since they're
leftovers from back in 75M Ur-time, we find that with our newer sets of 79K drawing packages, they're not really all too concerned about
dimensional location for all of those existing Trays, and as a result, we find ourselves dealing with no end of plan views, and elevation views, and details, and section-cuts, and god knows what else,
none of which have any precise
location dimensions given for any of the Cable Trays we now find ourselves interested in, as we attempt to plumb the depths of all the how, why, and what, that swirls around our Cable Tray Access Catwalk up at Elevation 187'-0" as it merrily slants away from the FSS across the Stuts, on it's way to...
...
nowhere!
In The Beginning... (Haven't we
used that already? Yes we have. And we may not be done
reusing it just yet, either.)
There was Project
Apollo!
Back in the Days of Yore, when Retread-Nazis built Giant Rockets, all for the greater glory of... and right around here, sometimes you don't want to be looking
too closely at it, and... gee, things kinda still have an uncanny simularity to some of that stuff, even
today!
But enough about Nazis.
We're here to build the
future, not to dwell on the past!
But still...
Ok, enough of that.
We have to go all the way back to the very beginning of things, which you get a nice look at on
75M05121 sheet 1. The very first sheet in the Mechanical and Electrical Package that built the LUT which lingers on, to this very day, in remnant pieces, which we now find ourselves having to
grapple with.
And lemme tell you, that fucking LUT was
well-endowed with Cable Trays.
And we must come to terms with them, as originally built, because we're
still using 'em, decades later, on a whole different Space Program with a whole different Launch Vehicle, but including no end of pieces and parts of That Which Came Before.
Whew!
And it gets worse. It
always gets worse, doesn't it? Of course it does.
In The Beginning...
Yet again...
We find ourselves standing boots-down on an original Apollo LUT (they made
three of 'em), which was lovingly built by hand,
bespoke, back in the early 1960's, when everything was done
The Hard Way, without benefit of smartphones, personal computers, or even a goddamned pocket calculator.
Plumb bobs, tape measures, pencils, paper, and
slide rules, and maybe a desktop mechanical
adding-machine, and
that was it. That's all you get. And it was
enough! So don't fucking
whine to me about how hard you've got it, as you stand there holding your stupid-ass
phone, when some asshole fails to respond to your fucked-up
text, ok?
And on that LUT, Cable Trays came from hither, passing us by, on their way to yonder, and our interest in things Cable Trayish on their journeys hither and yon, begins with the steel deckplates we're standing upon, at Level "0" (and that's a numeral
ZERO, and not a letter in the alphabet), of the Big Box, the "Mobile Launcher" Box, and Level 0 is the upper surface of the Box, and it's just about a half-acre in extent (lottal damn steel in that Box), which makes it just about
double the size of a typical single-family-home
lot, in Florida.
And even though it says that the half-acre extent of our level is "zero," we're actually standing nearly
fifty feet (and yeah, that's just about
five stories, which I'm guessing makes it just a weency bit
higher than the roof of your
house, sitting on its lot in some blighted tract-home McMansion subdivision in Florida), above whatever ground that might be surrounding us, out on top of a Launch Pad, or over at the Park Site north of the VAB, or mabye even
inside the VAB. Nearly fifty feet up, wherever we might be, when we're standing on top of our half-acre Steel Box.
Our Cable Trays, in the darkness which fills the inside of that ridiculous Box, have been
begat in ways that are not for us to know, or even give a shit about, and have now taken on physical form, by whatever occult processes, ever-so-neatly organized in three
rows, sprouting up vertically from inside the Box, as all good petunias must grow, heading upward into the lower understory of the "Launcher Umbilical Tower," a thing which can also be called a "LUT," in and of itself, but damn near
everybody calls the whole fucking thing, Box, Tower, and all, the "LUT" and that's what we're gonna do, too.
And that
Tower vaults skyward above our disbelieving heads, all the way up to a
severely acrophobia-inducing elevation of 380 feet above us, and that's not even counting the bizarre apparition of the Hammerhead Crane that dwells atop the Tower, nor the fold-down Lightning Mast which dwells atop the Hammerhead Crane, and the whole thing presents itself as a
completely non-believable Latticework Steel Nightmare, level after level after level, reaching farther and farther upward toward the sky, far far above us, and our Cable Trays come sprouting up from the Deckplates of Level 0, right there next to us where we can
touch 'em, reaching for that first understory Level of things, and just as soon as they sprout up from their Steel Potting Soil right beside us, many of them
immediately start individually lurching off to the sides, in exceedingly
bewildering ways.
Gah.
And of course it's our unfortunate lot in life to have to
make sense of it.
With the LUT, starting from Level 0, down on the Deckplates, each succeeding Level, going upwards, gets
smaller than the Level below it, until you get to Level 80, and from then on, all the way to the top, up at Level 380, all of the Levels are the same size, which is also the same size as our
FSS, which of course is what we were
originally trying to make Cable Tray Sense out of.
And on the LUT, as the Levels shrink in size, heading upwards, the Cable Trays
MUST move with them. Must slant off at an
angle, as they too head upwards. And since that's not bad enough on its own, some of the Cable Trays slant at an angle in directions which do
not match the simple scaling of size, with each succeeding Level as we head up to Level 80, where things finally settle down and the Levels quit
changing size going from one to another, vertically.
And the goddamned
holes, the
Slots, which the Cable Trays bob and weave through, headed ever upward, must
also move, keeping step with the decreasing sizes of the Incredible Shrinking Levels, as we reach for the sky, on our way up to Level 80, where things at last settle down and stay put, from then on.
And it all starts out so sane, so organized, so... understandable, down on Level 0 of the LUT, where three ranks of Cable Trays, with perfectly-understandable
ID Numbers, begin their Upward Journey. And
75M05121 sheet 10 lets us see just exactly how that works. And of course since Cable Trays are not particularly well-endowed with
structural integrity, and since a
departing Saturn V is quite the
energetic event, they wisely tried to hide their Cable Trays from the worst of it, by putting 'em over on the opposite side of the Stair and Elevator Tower which forms the
core of the Umbilical
Tower, in the hopes that they would not receive an undue amount of...
blast.
But just as soon as you come up off the Deck... things start
happening with our Cable Trays, and it starts getting
hairy, and
75M05121 sheet 19 tells the tale (although it certainly doesn't seem very interested in being any kind of
explicit about things, either).