The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 19: James MacLaren Beneath the RSS.
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I wish I knew who took this picture.
If only I knew!
But it has been too long, and an old-man's memories can only take you so far.
The young man you see in this image blinked out of existence the instant the camera's shutter closed, never to return, and we shall never get to talk to him about this day, this picture, this life.
Was the photograph taken by Richard Walls?
Was the photograph taken by Gene Hajdaj?
Was the photograph taken by Elmo McBee?
Was the photograph taken by Ray Elkins?
God DAMN it, if I only knew!
If I only knew what we were doing this day!
What words?
What laughter?
What exasperated stories of fools attempting bullheadedly to do things that were flatly impossible?
What did we eat for lunch this day?
Where?
How long had the falsework been gone from beneath the tower?
A Great Turning Point had only very recently been passed, and I have nothing to show for it.
Nothing to tell me of the work that was done.
Nothing to tell me of the Great Mass of the Rotating Service Structure groaning, settling into its camber perhaps with a few metallic pops or pings, ever-so-slightly downward into its true position, holding itself up, holding itself level, plumb, square, and true.
The engineers were right, and the steel held. Exactly as it had been calculated to hold.
All we'll ever have is a poor-quality photograph of this look from a man no longer anywhere around to tell us about it.
A man who, despite the grain, color-damage, and low-resolution of the image we're looking at, can clearly be seen to be metamorphosing, right before our eyes.
The man in our photograph wears a shirt with "Bernard's Surf" emblazoned above its pocket. Bernard's Surf, a restaurant where at one time you might find yourself rubbing shoulders on a barstool in the lounge with one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts. Or perhaps Walter Cronkite, or some other famous name of the time, visiting a little backwater town filled with rusting cars and sandspurs, come to see a thing that could be seen by the general public nowhere else in the world. Come to see men take very real risks with their own lives. Come to see men fly on rockets.
Bernard's Surf is the place he was working when The Hand of Fate unexpectedly picked him up off the beach one day, and tossed him where you see him now. Kitchen work. Restaurant work. Hard work. Low dollars. A place that's good to be from, as in, you're no longer there anymore. But it's a Good Place, too. You feel the hard unyielding ground beneath your feet, working in a restaurant. The grit and sweat found in a place like that will do you good, if you let it. It is good to remember. It is good to remember the bottom end of things, wherein the struggle is very real, and not everyone survives it. And it informs who you really are, keeps you from thinking you are somehow special.
Bernard's Surf was torn to the ground, many long years ago. Few remember it. Soon enough they will all be gone, and no one will remember it at all. Not the slightest trace of any of it.
And in our photograph, the metamorphosis of our subject is already underway.
Right next to the words "Bernard's Surf" on the shirt, clipped to its collar, can be seen the sort of badge one must get issued if one is to enter high-security territory such as this.
And he is in the process of becoming.
You can see it in his eyes.
Far behind him, blued with horizon haze under a clouded sky, the Vehicle Assembly Building stands mute. Has nothing to offer. The last moon rocket it ever held was rolled out of it to the Pad and disappeared into the Florida Sky, never to return, a decade before, and that which it holds now has yet to fly for the first time. We are between. we are becoming.
Scattered around the subject of our photograph on the long-unused launch pad, a few leftover bits.....
.....of what?
Pickboards.
Rope.
A metal frame..... for what..... leans against a pipe stub-up, painted a warning yellow and black around its top rim, sitting at the far edge of a smallish area of further yellow and black warning stripes, the purpose of which is not known.
Behind him, compressed gas. 1,000 PSI Nitrogen. Exactly the sort of thing you might expect to see in a place like this. Up on top of a launch pad.
And past that, the lower reaches of Column Line 7, bearing their impossible weight, silently.
The bottom of Stair Tower 3.
And to its far right, people are working on the Drive Controllers for the pair of Truck Drives which urged the RSS along its curved track from where you see it here in its retracted position, across the empty gash of the Flame Trench to its Mate Position. And back again.
The Truck Drives were very unusual insofar as they were one of the very few things that were excluded from the blanket "Buy American" clauses in the contract.
Apparently, nobody in the United States of America had the expertise to build something like this, so it was sole-sourced to, Kocks Krane International GmbH in Germany, who fabricated them and had them shipped to the pad, and, I think, their field representative's name was Wernher Indorf, and me and Wernher got along famously, and although he was a seriously high-powered operative of a seriously high-powered international manufacturing concern, he was also like a little kid in a candy store when it came to being out on a goddamned Space Shuttle launch pad, out where the goddamned Moon Rockets once flew.
So yeah, we got along pretty good, since we both shared a fine appreciation for the wonders amongst which we were walking every day at work.
I distinctly remember him on our phone, standing directly in front of the makeshift drawing table, as I was sitting at my desk in the Sheffield Steel field trailer, in conversation with the home office, back in Germany, and the strong tone of wonder in his voice as he was informing them of his whereabouts, at the Kennedy Space Center, and he was flipping back and forth between his native German, and his excellent English, and in particular, his pronunciation of the word "NASA" with a heavy German accent, with softly-rounded vowels, and an equally soft rounded pronunciation of that "S" in the middle, and it came out sounding like "Nahzhah" or maybe "Nahzah" and he had to repeat it a couple of times, apparently because whoever it was he was talking with was unaware of his present assignment with the Truck Drives, and was not fully believing that Wernher was really out on some goddamned Moon Rocket launch pad, and the whole little tableau was burned into my memory with utter fidelity and sharpness, as if it had happened only just an hour ago, and yeah, Wernher was an ok guy.
The tale of a beer-soaked celebratory dinner with Wernher following buy-off of the Truck Drives, just the two of us, at a local restaurant in southern Titusville, on the Indian River, where I had their wiener schnitzel (the one and only time in my life I've ever ordered such a thing in a restaurant, and which Wernher pronounced as being surprisingly good, considering it was prepared so very very far away from its native cultural home), shall go unrelated, and the subsequent sub-adventure of my less-than-fully-sober drive home, involving the guardshack on the NASA Causeway, and the late-night advice from the guard within, to the effect that perhaps I'd best take the long way around, to get back home to Cocoa Beach, and maybe I shouldn't be lingering any longer on Federal Property than I already had, shall in particular not get related, not here, not now anyway.
And on top of Truck Drive 1, the absurd yellow shape of the Drive Cab.
Drive Cab.
As in, a place where you control something that gets driven.
Nevermind that the something is twenty-stories in height, weighs 4 million pounds, and is creeping along on a set of steel rails at a maximum speed of 4 inches per second (one-quarter mile per hour).
The whole gigantic Rotating Service Structure.
Had a driver.
For in case maybe it jumped off the rails? In which case perhaps the driver could drive it back over to those rails, and get back on them, and then keep on driving to where they needed to go?
This thing always astounded me.
Why not a few buttons somewhere, on a control paddle, maybe like they have for large bridge cranes or other such similar items?
But nope, the RSS needed a driver and by god it was going to have a driver.
And so it did.
And our driver sat there in the little driver's cab, on the little driver's seat, and HAD TO WEAR A SEATBELT.
There was a seatbelt in the damn thing!
Old-style, two-point seatbelt. Not three-point like you see in cars nowadays.
God, I wish I was kidding, but I am not.
I am dead serious.
The driver's cab on the Rotating Service Structure at Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B, at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, had a goddamned seatbelt.
For safety.
And I know this because I climbed up in there a few times (And what little kid could possibly resist a thing like that, I ask you? It was even better than getting to sit in the front seat of a firetruck!) and laid personal physical hands on it.
On the seatbelt. Made out of proper seatbelt material complete with a nice little shiny-metal seatbelt buckle and everything.
One of the darker corners of my mind has always suspicioned that this seatbelt was to make sure that the captain went down with his ship.
And if the whole thing suddenly came raining down from above with a deafeningly-percussive metallic roar... well then, we're gonna make sure the guy who was driving it when that happened, is not going to be able to get out of that claustrophobic little enclosure in time to do anything about it.
To save his own skin.
The ship's going down.
And you're going down with it, too.
But that's just me, and of course I will never find the least shred of evidence that a thing like that might actually be the case.
But still.....
And one last little oddball snippet of information was that the gearboxes for the Drive Trucks used some kind of very special gear oil (which looked, and acted, like some very black, very nasty, Vaseline), and Wilhoit's Union Ironworkers needed to dump a bunch of it into those gearboxes before we could functionally test things by rolling the RSS around for the first time ever, and we got to searching for somebody, anybody, who actually had some of the stuff, and it came to pass that yours truly wound up driving his ratty yellow VW Bug way the hell out State Road 192, out somewhere in the middle of nowhere, not quite to Kissimmee (which, back in those days was still not much more than weeds and mosquitoes), and picked up a 5-gallon metal can of the stuff at the most ridiculously-dilapidated and isolated little redneck Texaco gas station out in the sticks you could ever possibly imagine as being the supplier for NASA's high-tech gear oil to use on one of their launch pads. To this day, I still scratch my head over that one. Oh well.
And just as a little extra icing on top of an already more-than-weird-enough cake, one of my mileage sheets survived, and on that mileage sheet, an entry for September 14, 1981 appears, with 202 miles showing for a trip to Kissimmee (it wasn't, but that's the closest town with an actual name that could be used) to pick up that gear oil.
I never cease to be amazed at how the most obscure fragments of lives once lived, now long-gone never to return, can suddenly flash a glint of reflected sunlight directly into your eyes which is so bright that it has the power to momentarily blind you.
And now that we're momentarily blinded, we may as well give the fragment of shattered glass a bit more looking at, and when we do so, we see a lot of trips to the "BUS STN" and why might a thing like that be? It's because back in the early 1980's, it was cheaper for Sheffield Steel to ship rolls of Detail Drawings, and Erection Drawings, via Greyhound Bus. Each roll could weigh ten or twenty pounds, all by itself, and it turns out that the very cheapest and fastest way to get new drawing packages down to the pad from Sheffield Steel's headquarters and steel fabrication shop, in Palatka, was to have a guy (who wasn't getting paid much, needless to say) in Palatka, take the rolls of drawings to the bus station up there, and have them bussed down to the bus station in Cocoa, where they had another guy (who also wasn't getting paid much either, and I know that for a fact, because that guy was me), who they could have drive out there to pick them up, and the total expense for the whole operation, mileage expenses and wages included, for both guys, was cheaper than doing it any other way.
So that's how we did it.
And down on the bottom of the mileage page, you start seeing "SPIF" a lot of times, and that turned out to be the next stop on my journey, the Shuttle Payload Integration Facility, over on the Air Force side of things, but I had not yet finished at B Pad, so it was a case of twixt and tween there for a while, late summer and early fall, of the year 1981.
But that's a story for another day.
Unless you decide to read it right now, of course.
And back at home...
...while all this was going on...
...lives were being lived.
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