The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 23: Flame Trench.
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And from the same location that the photograph on the previous page was taken, we find ourselves looking away from the bulk of the structures we are standing on, and instead casting our gaze out across the landscape below us, to the northeast.
The views that could be had from the towers at Launch Complex 39-B were otherworldly, in both a figurative and very literal sense. This image does the view no justice whatsoever. None. None at all. But I must soldier on, and attempt to convey, even if only to the faintest degree, that which my eyes were bathed in, saturated with, every single time I looked up, away from whatever my immediate work concern up on the tower at the time might have been.
And it was arresting.
It would arrest me.
Instantaneously, on the spot, grabbing my heart, my soul, my entire being, roughly, forcefully, snatching me away from myself and taking me to some place.....
I cannot continue.
Words.
All I have are words.
And godforsakenly inadequate images, not a single one of which can ever..... ever.....
Do anything.
But I'm not going to stop trying, so please bear with me on some of this, ok?
It scarred me for life, and there is no getting over that fact, and it forever altered who I am, and I am now that person.....
Who, like it or not, was reworked by all of this.
And I'm all you're ever going to get with this stuff, for good or for bad, for well or for ill.
The Flame Trench.
And actually, only half of the Flame Trench.
The north half.
The south half is out of frame, down and to the right.
But when I took this photograph in the cool of the long-shadowed morning, the rest of it was plainly-visible..... tearing at my soul.
People. Flew to the Moon. From. Here.
And the fire that propelled them there is what has burned the refractory bricks that line this thing...
...blast-furnace grade bricks...
...black.
Which came upon those slumbering bricks suddenly, without warning, riding a thunderclap, as the metal immensity above them shuddered into freakishly-violent life.
I have walked, alone, with bare feet, across the blackness.
I specifically took my shoes off to feel it.
On more than one occasion.
I have felt with the skin of my own feet, its uncanny partially-melted near-glass smoothness.
And considered the rough and gritty pale-yellow look and texture of new firebricks, unburned, and then wondered to myself...
God DAMN, what kinds of unearthly forces were they unleashing in here?
And that place, that place right there, is where my imagination...
...was denied entry.
The smooth blackness of those bricks partially-melted together into a single sheet of near-obsidian under the soles of my bare feet was telling me a story that I knew from the beginning that I would never ever be able to understand.
But I tried.
I really did try.
I wanted to understand.
But I could not.
And it's just a big black industrial-looking hole in the ground anyway.
It's ugly.
Where's the heart, the soul, the spirit in any of that, anyway?
And I cannot answer those questions.
I can only feel.
Perhaps the spirit flew away to the Moon, and no longer lives here.
For you, perhaps, but not for me.
Let us put those considerations aside for the moment, and return to our tour of the pad, shall we?
Much of what is shown in this image has been touched on before, on Page 13, and we're looking at things from almost the exact same angle, with the essential difference being that we're now seventy feet up in the air above our previous location.
The Flame Trench yawns menacingly, and, as always with these photographs, it's much larger than it looks, and its sheer-walled five-story depth could easily accommodate a substantial apartment or office building with plenty of room to spare, all around.
Walking around down there in the bottom of it in the thickness of the beshadowed gloom near the toe of the flame deflector, hemmed in by the towering and not just a little bit intimidating cyclopean surroundings you find yourself in, complete with very ample evidence of dire pyroclastic violence in the not-so-distant past, can slowly and creepingly set off atavistic gut-level endocrine alarm systems, and cause the hairs on the back of your neck to start standing up as you linger there in the silence...
...wondering.
As left margin of the photograph, additional crossovers on the Hinge Column, from the Lower Bearing Service Platform at elevation 125'-1" all the way down to the very lowest crossover on the entire Hinge Column, which is there to carry hypergolic flex hoses at elevation 101'-6⅜", are visible.
They bear no resemblance to any normal or sensible Earthly thing you might encounter anywhere else on, or off, the Earth, and seem far more fit visually as backdrop on some alien world, that which flies from here, might visit. In a dream filled with sentient robots and other such sci-fi paraphernalia.
Immediately to the right of the lowest crossover, far below it down on the Crawlerway, someone has set up a bit of a temporary work area, complete with 50-gallon steel drum and sawhorse, in the area of the West Side Flame Deflector South Locking Tiedowns.
Each Side Flame Deflector weighed a quarter-million pounds, and the thought of what might require hold-downs such as these, to keep a thing like that from being knocked over, or blown away altogether, is a sobering one.
The SFD's were rolled into and out of their Launch Positions on a set of steel rails, and that system too was no lightweight thing.
All of it speaks to forces vastly beyond any kind of sensible understanding at all, and it does so in complete silence.
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