The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 28: VAB Between RCS Room And Hoist Equipment Room.
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Yet another "one of those views" that you'd get every so often out on the pad, and if you weren't careful, you'd become completely numb to it and lose all of your sense of joy and wonder at being in such an impossibly cool place, getting paid for it, all day, every day.
You're way the hell up in the air, eagle-height, standing on the top of a cyclopean marvel made of cold steel, the Great Rotating Service Structure at Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B, and that sensation alone could be more than just a little bit arresting, in and of itself, nevermind that a goddamned thing that size traveled overland every once in a while. I mean, yeah, that's enough to make your head spin right there, but that's not the point, or at least not right now it isn't.
You're looking across toward the Column Line 7 end of things from just past Column Line 3, and you're in a bit of a narrow area, shadowed from the brilliant Florida morning sunlight, between the back of the RCS Room and the front of the Hoist Equipment Room.
All around you, apex-of-the-pyramid heavy industrial-class work is ongoing, being done by a bunch of apex-of-the-pyramid heavy industrial-class people, all of whom are good-as-it-gets world-class at their trades, and none of whom will put up with the least trifle of shit from anybody, and that small fact alone, coupled with the fact that those self-same world-class people regard you with at least enough minimal respect as to cause them to tolerate your presence amongst them, is enough to send an occasional shiver down your spine.
Ladders, scaffolding, a large stand-up fan, wires, hoses, piping, conduits, cable trays, brackets, supports, welded steel checkerplate decking, explosion-proof lighting (which, by the way, was constructed to prevent an explosion caused by hydrogen or other flammable gases in the air inside the electrical box the light plugged into from getting out of that box, and creating a risk of fire or further explosions in the outside environment where the light fixture was located), insulated metal paneling, mineral-insulated cable, and all the rest of it.
And there, nestled snugly right slap in the middle of things, three-miles distant, nearly blending in with the sky behind it in the haze, sits the Vertical Assembly Building, which is where they built MOON rockets for god sakes, one of which was fired from the very pad deck you are standing above, over a hundred and fifty feet beneath the soles of your disbelieving workboots!
All around you the work goes on, and grumbling and curse words are sprinkling the air, and the bosses are bossing, and the workers are working, and the engineers are engineering, and the inspectors are inspecting, and the safety man is trying to kill everybody, and nobody seems to be able to see past the end of their own immediate little circle of day-to-day worries, cares, minor triumphs and minor catastrophes, and yet there the goddamned thing sits, off in the hazy distance.
And if anybody else ever harbored thoughts such as this while I was out there, they, every last one of them, were very careful to keep that under wraps, completely hidden from everyone else around them.
And I'd get a little frisson of realization that I was, in certain very real ways, all alone, just me and the Moon Rocket Building, all alone together in a vast wilderness.
I cannot explain it.
I do not know why I even try to explain it.
The whole left side of this frame is owned by the back side of the RCS Room. Near the top left corner, a pair of dark rectangular cut-outs accept the two slanting dark lines of the wire rope feeding off of the LRU Hoist drum, which was located right next to the drum for the 90-ton Payload Canister Hoist, and those two big hoists lived inside of the Hoist Equipment Room, some of the front wall of which can be seen on the top half of the right side of this frame.
The LRU itself (Line Replaceable Unit) lived in the Payload Changeout Room and provided access to the interior of the Orbiter Payload Bay for the main purpose of manually cleaning it, prior to the commencement of payload operations, and the LRU was... a difficult thing.
Nobody ever liked the LRU that I remember.
In addition to being difficult, it was also very dangerous, and eventually, under the guise of enhanced cleanliness, they got rid of it and replaced it after I was gone, with something else called the CAP (Clean Access Platform), and that sounds just about like them, insofar as the damned thing probably tried to kill a few more people along the way, or perhaps only tried to break an Orbiter, and I'm sure I'll never know, because all of that happened long after I was gone, and we're definitely not done with learning about how things get swept under rugs in those cases where cats do not quite get out of bags, and.. feh.
I can't speak for the poor schlubs who had to actually stand on the thing, forty or fifty feet above hard steel inside the PCR, working on the Space Shuttle, but for all I know they never suspected a thing...
...about its real nature.
One of the modifications they had us do to it before the Pad went operational almost killed a few people. The ironworkers HATED it, and we tried to warn NASA engineering and management...
...but nobody listened, and we were summarily hand-waved away without further consideration or deliberation on their part.
Until it went BANG! one day.
The event seems to have been almost completely swept under the rug by NASA, but, while researching a completely different subject on Feb. 17, 2024, I blundered, by pure chance, across the following on one of NASA's public-facing "Lessons Learned" web pages and I immediately downloaded it, and you can see what I managed to snatch from them (with yellow highlighting added by myself) when you click on this link to the LRU Telescoping Tubes Fall at Pad B.
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Addendum: May 19, 2024.
I just blundered across a trifle more of additional corroborating information about this event elsewhere in the public-facing side of NASA (yellow-highlighted, down at the very bottom of the page that link takes you to, so you might have to scroll down some to find it), and of course immediately downloaded it, too and this time it gives us a hard date of September 18, 1985 for the day the LRU went BANG!
It also gives us a close look at to just how very vague, and downright misleading, some of NASA's own documentation about stuff really is. Which, when we give this thing a closer look, kind of make sense, 'cause it appears that NASA has simply inserted pieces of a story from one of the local newspapers that ran the day after the event into their "Chronology of KSC and KSC Related Events for 1985" just as if it was their own material (and yeah, they actually do identify as such, but the fact that they chose to include it, gives it a weight and substance that it would never have had, if they did not do this, so... draw your own conclusions, I guess), and whoever wrote it mangled things, and... in particular...
"The tubes, a foot in diameter and 25 feet long, each weigh 1,000 pounds, Young said." --- ok, so far, so good.
"They support a moveable [sic] platform workers cross to reach a room used to store satellites before they are placed aboard a shuttle."
--- And right here is where they just veer directly off into the far hinterlands of Fantasy World.
The LRU Telescoping Tube Assemblies did no such thing. They "supported"... nothing. And the "moveable platform" they allegedly "supported" most manifestly did not provide access to some "room" or other, "used to store satellites before they are placed aboard a shuttle", and in fact the whole goddamned thing was already inside that "room" and you and I already know that "room" much better by its proper name, Payload Changeout Room (PCR), and... how they managed to get such a simple description of such a simple thing (a platform inside the PCR that was raised and lowered to provide technicians access to the inside of the Orbiter's Payload Bay so they could clean it, before payloads might be placed inside of it, and... fuck all if I can figure this one out at all, but it's enough to know they got it badly wrong in their very brief retelling of the event, and if they could get something this simple and straightforward that wrong, then you really have to start wondering... what else?
What else did they get wrong, and then blithely proceed to spout that wrong bullshit at the wider world around them, thus causing that wider world to wind up knowing less than nothing at all, because not only is the actual information missing, but it's been replaced by... bullshit.
Gah.
The LRU Telescoping Tubes were a change order (incorporated into Drawing Package 79K24048, which you are going to learn too much unpleasant stuff about in Part 2 of this narrative). They were something that got tacked-on after they discovered that the original LRU Hoisting System (original design per 79K14110) was a nasty motherfucker, complete with totally-exposed and far more than just a little bit grease-covered wire ropes that ran around sheave blocks inside the PCR, bending and flexing those grease-covered wire ropes coming off of the big LRU Hoist Drum up in the Hoist Equipment Room which then passed through open air as you see them in the photograph at the top of this page, collecting no end of potential unpleasantness, birdshit included (and no, I'm not kidding) as they did so, constantly dislodging no end of god-knows-what into the clean room environment of the PCR every single time the LRU was raised and lowered (which is every single time they used it).
And you've already seen all that, and learned the basic sense of the whole system, implicit nastiness and all, via the links I gave you just a very few paragraphs above this Addendum, and you're already full-aware that the LRU, without benefit of any Tubes, did a plenty-adequate (but dangerous and dirty, nonetheless) job of support, all by itself (sort of), and the goddamned Tubes were concocted as a way of keeping those nasty wire ropes covered at all times, thereby reducing their propensity for contaminating the PCR and any Payloads that might be getting handled inside of it. The Tubes also were invoked to give a little stability to the hooks that dangled on the ends of the wire ropes, which were of course attached to, and holding up, the Line Replaceable Unit platform, with the sense of the thing being that the tubes would reduce the unrestrained as originally designed side-to-side motions of those hooks dangling down there at the ends of the wire ropes, thereby reducing unwanted motion in the LRU Platform itself (which of course is inside the open Payload Bay of the Space Shuttle, with people standing on it, trying to clean the goddamned thing before they start putting satellites in there).
All of which was very laudable, but none of which managed to fully solve the problems which it was designed to solve (things still moved around too much, and things still got too dirty inside the PCR). And as a special bonus, it also managed to introduce multiple new and exciting unforeseen, unexpected, unsafe, and downright-dangerous additional problems, even as it so signally failed to do what they wanted it to do in the first place. Sigh.
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And all of what I just gave you about How the LRU Went Bang! is not very much at all. Precious little, in fact. And it serves best to illustrate the kind of things they don't say, as opposed to the things they've properly owned up to and have said.
Ah well, so it must be.
We'll try to get to it in greater detail at some future point, but not now.
The LRU deserves its own page. Two, even.
Whether it gets one or not...
...well... I don't know.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
Back to the photograph. Please.
Those cutouts you see the wire ropes going through in the top left corner of the photograph had a neoprene seal in them that held a short cylindrical plastic sleeve which is barely visible in the photograph, and some kind of baggy waterproof fabric stuff (which, again, you can sort of see in the photograph, but does not show at all on the drawing I have), all of which left just the bare-minimum of opening for the wire rope itself, to keep the weather out of things they'd rather it not get into. We furnished that stuff, and I got to lay hands on it before it went up on the tower and got installed, and I distinctly remember thinking how very low tech it all was, and how many different ways that things could get through it and thereby gain entrance as contaminants into the PCR.
Not visible in our photograph, out of frame above, a second set of wire ropes would eventually be coming off of the Payload Canister Hoist (which got installed after our photograph was taken), and we're going to be taking a really deep dive into that whole Canister Hoisting System, but not till we get to Part 2 of this thing, ok? For the time being, here's all of this LRU and 90-ton Hoist stuff together on 79K14110 sheet M-49 highlighted and labeled, just to let you see how it all fit together.
For now, it's enough to know that the Canister Hoist was going to be there at some not-too-far future time, and to also know that it did not enter the clean room environment of the PCR because it arched up over the top, and then back down in front of it on the outside, and therefore did not constitute a problem for cleanliness inside the PCR that the LRU Hoisting System did.
Inside the RCS Room, that second set of wire ropes for the Canister Hoist angled up and into the 24-part sheave and load blocks which carried the hook that connected to, and raised and lowered, the Payload Canister between the ground and the face of the RSS where it would be mated to the front of the Payload Changeout Room in order to do its job. That whole Canister Hoisting System was a brute, and surprisingly-complex brute at that, and we'll be getting into that end of things in much greater detail, but not right now, ok?
Below the top center of this frame, you can see a cable tray, on a pair of support stanchions, coming in from around behind the Hoist Equipment Room (Nobody ever called it by the acronym "HER" for some reason. It was always the "Hoist Equipment Room."), sprouting a branch that wants to run across a couple of support brackets along the front of the Hoist Equipment Room, and then it keeps going out over empty space to the RCS Room, where it takes a 90-degree turn, heads back in our direction well above eye-level while branching down into three "drops" and then keeps right on going and disappears out of the top of the frame. So it's actually a pretty good example of the convoluted weirdness that was Cable Trays. This one's got almost everything.
Cable trays were always a pain in the ass. Never liked the damn things. But they were all over the place, were endlessly branching off in no end of weird and confusing directions, punching through walls and disappearing, and then popping up unexpectedly on the other side without warning, snaking around like... snakes, I guess, and they carried power, communications, and instrumentation to all of the places that required that kind of stuff, and good golly Miss Molly, but was there ever a LOT of it.
So let's stop here and use what's in our photograph to help us learn a little something about how all that stuff works, ok?
Even if we don't like it.
This one is exceedingly unfinished, and because of that, we get to kind of see how they built 'em, in segments and pieces, as they went along with the work, tying them down to the iron that supported them as they did so.
We'll go to one of the electrical drawings for a horizontal and vertical point-of-view depiction of the horizontal cable tray, 18" to 12" offset reducer drops, and wall-mounted support-brackets on the Hoist Equipment Room. The two large stanchions do not appear to be properly depicted on this drawing, but we're used to that sort of thing by now, right? And some of this stuff is small on the drawing, so you need to look for it, ok?
Here it all is, nice and marked up for you.
And since we're having so much fun with drawings of cable trays, here's some more of it, just for you, and we're going to take it off of the Pad A drawings, 79K04400 (mind the elevations), because the quality of the drawings is noticeably better, and what they're showing us for Pad A is exactly the same thing over on Pad B.
And while we're at it here, I'd better warn you that cable tray drawings lie.
As an example of that, we'll take the first one below, E-28. Which claims to be "SSAT (which we know as the FSS on B Pad) AND PCR CABLE TRAY ISOMETRIC."
Which would, in the utter absence of any indications to the contrary, give us to believe that it's the whole thing.
But it's not.
Not even close.
Check the RCS and Hoist Equipment Room area on top of the RSS if you don't believe me. Up at the top of this page, there's a photograph showing us, clearly numerous cable trays that do not show up on this isometric.
Cable tray drawings routinely omit things, oftentimes very important things, and never a word is spoken about any of it.
So be warned, ok?
E-28
E-29
E-30
E-31
Like I said earlier, cable trays are a pain in the ass, and I'm pretty sure that's enough of that for now.
Behind the right-hand tall cable tray support stanchion, a fair bit of the elevator equipment room for the PCR Elevator, which ran beneath it in its shaft all the way down to the 135' level of the RSS, can be seen. The door to the elevator equipment room is open, and can be seen on the equipment room's left side as viewed in this image. You already know about the PCR Elevator. We can let that go.
In the middle distance, between the elevator equipment room and dark lines of that temporary scaffolding which is holding up some wooden planking against the back side of the RCS Room, the thin whitish lines of the plumbing which carried water as part of the emergency eye-wash and safety-shower for this area can be seen. Remember, this is a hypergol area, and any time you're dealing with hypergol, you're going to have a lot of associated safety equipment there with it at all times.
We've got a much better photograph of one of those safety-shower areas, and we'll be getting into that stuff in greater detail, once we get to that photograph, ok?
To the right of that, one of the double-doors to the Hoist Equipment Room can be seen, open.
And looming in the far hazy distance... the VAB.
I'll close this now with a link to a pair of photographs you've already seen on Page 9 and Page 10, which show us this same area from up above, over on the FSS, at a time when the construction was much less complete.
It's good to have different perspectives on things, right? Spatial perspectives and temporal perspectives, too.
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