The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B

A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.

Page 29: RCS Room Interior Platforms - Forward Reaction Control System Area.

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And from where we were standing when the photograph on the previous page was taken, we step back just a bit, turn left, take about two steps, turn right and go through the door to the RCS Room, and this is what we see.

We are inside the RCS Room where the hypergolic propellants which powered the rocket engines of the Space Shuttle's Forward Reaction Control System were handled.

That you are over 200 feet up in the air might at first be difficult to ascertain, but a close look at the photograph reveals that we, quite by chance, are looking down at an angle upon the entranceway cutout for the Azimuth Alignment Facility, which was originally installed out on the Pad Slope between the two Crawlerway Tracks, halfway from the toe of the Slope out at the Perimeter Fence, and the top surface of the Pad Deck, to house the theodolite which the Saturn V used to precisely align its Guidance Platform Gyroscopes, shortly before launch.

You're standing right next to one of the two LRU Lifting Line Protective Tubes (which are rendered just a little bit too tall in this drawing), that stood up above the floor in here six feet tall, cocked at a funny angle, went right on down through the floor, and extended all the way down through the next level below which was the Antenna Access Platform at elevation 198'-7½", and you can see just a sliver of the left-side LRU Protective Tube, running up the right-hand margin of the photograph, but not all the way to the top.

They really did not want somebody (on a completely different part of the RSS, who they could neither see nor hear from where they were working on the LRU Platform) inadvertently blundering into those lifting lines with a piece of equipment or even just themselves, jerking the LRU Platform around as they did so, potentially banging it damagingly into the Orbiter or possibly knocking one of the techs off it it and having them fall to their death on the PCR Floor, and for that reason, they made these things stout. 18"x14" tube steel. Sturdy. Very sturdy. You could probably drive your car into it and it wouldn't budge. The folks down below, standing on the LRU, were safe from any idiocy or plain old bad luck, up above in the RCS Room.

There's a lot going on in here.

The RCS Room was one of those places.

One of those places where...

...well, let's just say that things had to go right, ok?

Things were not allowed to go wrong in the RCS Room.

If the RSS was swung around and mated to the Space Shuttle on the pad, that big oval opening that we can see all the way down to the ground through, would be completely filled with the very front end of the Orbiter, forward of the Crew Cabin, with the cockpit windows one level below where we're standing right now, which were accessible from the Antenna Access Platform, which which we will be going to in our next photograph, but for right now, we're up here where some pretty nasty stuff got dealt with.

If the Orbiter was on the pad, we'd be dead-even, eye-level, with a set of pressurized tanks, loaded with well over a ton, in total, of some stuff, that if it ever got loose, even by the teacup, could really ruin the whole day.

And, thinking about that, imagine what it was like for the crew. Ok, sure. Here we sit. With over two-thousand pounds of pressurized hypergol, more or less right in our laps.

Ok. Sure. Sure thing. Whatever you say.

But actually it's not "Ok. Sure. Sure thing. Whatever you say."

And we're going to stop here a minute and take a short digression through a very informative and scary presentation which covers some ground that deals with those hypergol tanks, sitting more or less in everybody's lap on liftoff, which would be serviced from inside the RCS Room, in the area shown in the photograph at the top of the page.

This digression is for the purposes of attempting to instill in you a sense of just how close they're cutting it, sometimes.

Just how far they're reaching, sometimes.

The engineering and construction of this stuff is so good, and can be expected to work so reliably, that it can blind us to the fact that never, ever, does any person or organization actually know the whole story regarding how their systems may or may not diverge from expectations and calculations.

And after enough time goes by we just sort of go numb to it.

And every once in a while, we come close.

We come very close indeed, to exceeding the abilities of that which we design and build, to hold together in all circumstances.

And that's exactly what happened, on the very first Space Shuttle mission, STS-1.

We damn near lost the whole thing. Crew, vehicle, pad, all of it.

I just linked to the best graphic I could find which shows us the location of the Hypergol Fuel and Oxidizer Tanks in the Orbiter's nose, and that graphic just happens to be a part of the "STS-1 Forward RCS Oxidizer Tank Subsystem Failure Assessment" report by Chauncy Wu, K. Chauncey Wu NASA Langley Research Center Hampton, Virginia, and John J. Zipay NASA Johnson Space Center Houston, Texas, dated January 2021, and it shows the tanks very well indeed, and if you read the whole document, you will know they had themselves a frighteningly close call on that very first mission.

I will give you this quote from the concluding remarks of that report. And yeah, you really should go back and read that whole thing if you have not already done so.

"In the end, NASA was very fortunate that none of the various incidents experienced on the Shuttle's inaugural flight cascaded into larger, systemic failures." (emphasis added by me)

And my included material in this section only covers a single near-catastrophic-failure on STS-1.

There were others.

We're not going to get into it right now, but suffice it to say that they came oh so very close in more than one place, with more than one affected system.

But they pulled it off, and the thing was sufficiently robust as to permit it to continue on to a successful landing, out at Edwards.

Chauncy was kind enough to permit me the use of his material, and he also sent me a link to a video of his presentation, and I'll link to that video here.

Things start to get going, following the introductions and preliminaries, right around the two-minute mark, and from there on, things become more and more interesting, but be advised, that this video is of a presentation where NASA-level people are talking to each other, and the presumption is that you are A.) Paying attention, and B.) Possessed of the requisite chops to assimilate things, as they are, instead of requiring the watered-down combination of intellectual mush, bullshit, and outright lies, you regularly encounter on the television, youtube, social media, and all the rest of those sorts of low-energy platforms for low-energy people who can't hack it.

This digression is not the point of what we're talking about regarding the photograph at the top of this page right now, but it deals with a system that we are talking about right now, but we'd like a little more visual detail if we could get our hands on it, to help us understand what the RSS Platform System was dealing with, up here in the RCS Room.

So anyway, this is what we have, this is where we are, and things are going to start stepping up, right here.

This narrative has been slowly ramping up in detail as we've gone along with the story, and we're just about to ramp it up some more, as we drill down into the nitty-gritty details of the Orbiter itself, and the components and systems it comprises, and how all of that stuff dictates and demands what our RSS is going to have to be able to deal with, how it will need to be configured to deal with it, which then tells us why the place looks the way it looks, and why it is made out of what it's made out of.

Ok, fine.

Here's that same area inside the nose of the Orbiter again, with the tanks much less easy to see, but with everything else much more well represented, even though both graphics depict the same place, from the same angle, showing, more or less, the same things.

Which is nice, I suppose, but this is a devilishly-complex area, and it's hard to make sense of it.

So ok.

Large-Scale-Graphic Warning, dead ahead.

The same area, the same graphic, but rendered out at 11,627 pixels by 7,733 pixels.

Big-enough graphic, I should suppose.

But you can zoom in on it to get a bug's-eye view of things from waaay down inside of it.

And before we head out into these weeds, we need to head out into a different set of weeds, first.

The time has come for us to learn about the Orbiter Coordinate System, also occasionally referred to as OSRS which stands for Orbiter Structural Reference System, and it's one of those things that gets forced on you, and you find that you need to sit down and come to terms with it, or otherwise you'll get lost trying to figure out where you are on the tower with reference to the Space Shuttle, which, of course, is the whole reason for the tower in the first place, so...

...ok.

But there are times when living in a three-dimensional universe can be quite annoying, and this is one of them.

Feast your eyes upon the Coordinate System for the whole stack, Orbiter, tank, solids, the whole works.

Gah.

Quite the mess, visually, if you ask me. And trying to figure out what it's telling us looks to be non-trivial.

Ok then, let's try it with just the Orbiter, itself. That's gotta be easier, right?

Well... maybe.

And now we're gonna just have to deal with it in hand-to-hand combat, and there are times when I find myself wondering if the people who set this thing up were pissed off at somebody else, and so they decided to adhere rigorously to the letter of the law, but in so doing were very careful to completely disregard the spirit of the law.

And whoever they submitted it to, approved it without actually realizing what had just been done to them, and now everybody gets to live with it in perpetuity.

Basically, it's a system for locating yourself in relationship to the Orbiter, anywhere you might choose to pick a location for something, along the Orbiter's length, width, and depth.

Length is longways, from the Nose Cap all the way back to the Main Engines with the Body Flap beneath them.

Width is sideways, from wingtip to wingtip.

And Depth is low to high, bottom of the tires to the tippy-top of the tailfin.

Length is the 'X' axis, Width is the 'Y' axis, and Depth is the 'Z' axis.

So far, so good.

But wait, it gets better.

Sensible people might imagine that a system such as this one would have cardinal points that made sense.

Sensible people were very clearly nowhere around when this thing was put together.

First off, the system measures things in American inches and not something sensible like nice metric centimeters or maybe meters.

Ok, this is an American spaceship, so ok American guys, go ahead and use your damnable inches if you want to.

Which is all well and good, except they threw a monkey-wrench into the gears and made it difficult for Americans too, because Americans are used to dealing with their inches in fractions and when you look at the contract drawings that we built the towers with, you can clearly see that's exactly what was used. In. All. Places. Quarters, eighths, sixteenths, and so on.

But not here.

Nope.

With this thing, you get your inches in decimals, by the tenths, or even hundredths.

And in so doing, they have created a system that fails to work globally. This thing is trouble for everybody.

And there's more.

Let's take the 'X' axis and measure our way down the length of the Orbiter's fuselage.

Ok, fair enough.

Well, perhaps.

As long as you don't mind the very tippiest end of the Orbiter's Nose Cap, the most forward point on the whole thing, having been given an 'X' location dimension of 235(!) inches, and then counting upwards from there as you move along the length of the Orbiter from nose to tail.

235? Inches? For the place that any sane person would very reasonably give a value of zero to?

Why? Why?

And I've never gotten an answer to that one, or any of the other ones.

At least all the locations can be expressed as positive numbers, so at least we've got that much going for us with this one, anyway.

Maybe they gave it a 235 inch offset to keep the numbers positive and who are we to question a number like 235, anyway? It's what they're using. We'll roll with it. It's all good.

And since we like positive numbers, let's skip to the 'Z' axis. Let's do depth.

And for depth, for 'Z', they stuck with an offset, perhaps to continue to keep all the numbers positive for ease of working with them, but this time they picked a different number for the offset.

I do not know why.

This time, they picked 400 inches.

And not only did they pick a different number, they set it up a little different too, and instead of working to the very edge of something, they decided to work to a more or less imaginary line which runs down the centerline of the Orbiter's Payload Bay.

Uh... ok. Sure. Whatever you say.

And then they got to width... the 'Y' axis, the distance across the wingspan, and they decided to summarily toss out all considerations of offsets and positive numbers, and just go with the centerline of the Orbiter, call that place "zero" and then work in positive numbers headed toward the Orbiter's right wing, and negative numbers headed toward the Orbiter's left wing.

This.

Drives.

Me.

Crazy.

But I'm stuck with it, and there's not a damn thing in all the world that I can do about it.

And you, dear reader, are stuck with it too.

Behold the glory of the Orbiter Coordinate System.

So now you should be able to go back and look at the coordinate system for the whole stack and make sense of it.

Or not.

And what does all of this have to do with what we were talking about in the first place, anyway?

What does all of this have to do with the Forward Reaction Control System and the RCS Room in which we found ourselves standing, in the photograph up at the top of the page?

And what this has to do with that, and a lot of other stuff too, is that we can now take full advantage of all those funny little notations on the contract drawings that tell us exactly where we are with respect to the Orbiter, and exactly what we might expect to be dealing with, on the inside or on the outside of the Orbiter, wherever we find one of these little notations on the drawings.

Like this one.

Which means that now, at long last, we can talk about the stuff we're seeing in the photograph at the top of the page... in detail.

We'll start out broad-brush, and then hone in on a couple of things close-in, and that way you'll understand what's going on in here.

And in so doing, address the fact that the RCS Room was very much a dual-use facility.

You worked in the RCS Room doing Forward Reaction Control System work, and you also worked in the RCS Room doing Canister work.

And a few other little odds and ends too, but let us not go overboard with things right now, ok?

In the main, RCS Room was FRCS or Canister.

And there was never a problem with either one of them getting in the other one's way, because if you were working the Canister in the RCS Room, then you could not be working the Orbiter, because although they both occupied the same places on the RSS, the Canister was handled off of the Pad Deck, with the whole RSS rotated back into the demate position, and the Orbiter was handled off of the MLP, spanning the Flame Trench, with the whole RSS rotated into the mate position, and the two mutually-exclusive systems and positions thereby always stayed completely out of each other's way.

So that was pretty cool how all that worked out.

And in our photograph at the top of the page, we start simple by showing you some Canister stuff, and the stuff we show you is one of the two Canister Stowage Cables that hung down from up in the heavy trusswork in the far upper reaches of the RCS Room.

The Canister was big, and the Canister was heavy, and when it had been pulled up into its working position by the 90-ton Canister Hoist, facing into the Payload Changeout Room, the hoist was disconnected and taken out of the operation after a pair cables had been hooked on the spreader-bar that held the Canister, and the entire weight of the Canister was from then on borne entirely by this pair of 2¾" diameter fixed-length wire-ropes which hung from their own very-sturdy supports made from ASTM A-588 steel plate, full-penetration welded to a nice heavy, stiffened-up W24x84 wide-flange beam up there.

Once they'd hooked it on, that Canister wasn't gonna be going anywhere.

Which is a good thing I suppose, 'cause some of the stuff they brought out to the pad inside the Canister, destined for insertion into the Space Shuttle's Payload Bay, and from thence to the airless black of space, traveling at five miles per second, cost above one billion dollars a pop, so... yeah.

Don't drop the nice Payload Canister, ok?

Ok.

We will be dealing with the Canister Stowage Cables in much greater detail on the next page, using the next photograph which will appear at the top of that page. This also applies to the platforms we're just about to get into, as well. So if I leave you wondering about something on this page after you've finished reading this whole page, give me a chance to cover the material in greater detail on the next page before you send me an email asking about something I did not mention, ok? I'm happy as a clam to receive and reply to emails, but try to make sure the thing you're wondering about isn't dealt with someplace elsewhere later on in this thing, before you hit the <S>end key on that email, ok?

We'll work from the top down.

And we'll start with the set of removable handrails up on the Mezzanine Deck.

This was the only set of handrails like this on the whole tower. Nowhere else would you encounter anything like them, and they were clearly designed to allow someone to lean against them (which is something I never liked, and always strongly recommended against doing, but what do I know?) to gain whatever sort of hands-on access to every last bit of the RCC (Reinforced Carbon-Carbon) Nose Cap on the Orbiter that might ever be required while the vehicle was out on the pad.

Here they are, viewed from above, in isometric view, on contract drawing M-20.

And here they are again in plan view, on contract drawing M-21. And there's something a little sneaky about this view and what's on the drawing, but there's no way you're going to be able to pick it out (It's sneaky, right?) and we're going to have to wait till we get to the next photograph, on the next page, before we get to delve into that little bit of interestingness. So stick around, ok?

These handrails were made out of aluminum pipes (to make them lighter, but they still weren't all so very light, and presumably, easier to manipulate, since they were removable and somebody was going to have to remove them, and then put them back, on a regular basis) instead of the usual steel pipes that all of the fixed handrails on both towers (and a lot of the removable handrails too, and now that I think about it, it seems like the aluminum removable ones were always on perimeters that directly faced the Orbiter, and the steel removable ones were everywhere else, but I might be off a little with that one) were made from, and instead of the usual 1½" Ø schedule 40 standard callout for posts and runners as with the steel handrails, this particular set of aluminum removable handrails had 2" Ø schedule 80 posts (I suppose if you're going to be having somebody leaning out and down upon them with their full weight...) and 2" Ø schedule 40 runners (aluminum is weaker than steel of course, so they had to compensate some for that difference), and this larger diameter gave them a very different, and somehow more awkward feel in your hand as you gripped one (which you might find yourself doing on a regular basis while standing right on the edge of things in less-than-fully-comfortable locations, as you removed or replaced them in conjunction with perhaps some sort of work involving them, or in the more normal circumstances of simply raising and lowering the flip-up platforms they were attached to, and required removing from, in order to permit the platform to be flipped up out of the way of something) and no, I never liked any of that, either.

As I recall, I never wound up mentioning that little item to anybody, but it was distinctly noticeable to me at least, and the larger diameter of the pipe, in conjunction with the much more noticeable smoothness of the aluminum as compared to steel, always caused me to wonder if there might have been some better way of doing things, but it never came up, it was never discussed, and I always thought to myself "Here we are, standing on the edge of a precipice with certain death just on the other side of it, perhaps with a multi-billion dollar piece of equipment very much in harm's way, which we might all-too-easily damage if we drop this damned handrail while we're trying to wrestle it into or out of the socket it lives in (more about which, later on, ok?), and we're dinking around hands-on with an awkward goddamned thing that leans away from us here, causing us to have to reach to get to it properly, in the worst possible direction, and place our center of mass perilously close to a place where we might become overbalanced, and the thing we're dinking around with is no longer able to prevent us from going over the edge, and..."

But maybe that's just me.

I dunno.

Moving downward in our photograph, the next thing we encounter is the flip-up platform framing of the Mezzanine Deck itself, and I should presume that as part of all the foregoing handrail explications with linked drawings, you should already have a pretty good feel for these flip-ups. They were pretty big and heavy, there were winches, and lifting lugs, and all the usual ham and eggs that goes with it, and I'm not gonna get any farther into it than that, ok? You already know this stuff. You already know how to read drawings. So ok.

You also already know all about Compressible Bumpers covered with painter's tarp which we first encountered back on Page 24, down in Lower Hypergol World at elevation 112'-0", so we're not going to get into that part of things, either. You can see it over there on the far side of things on the Mezzanine Deck. So ok.

Stepping down once again, we now find ourselves getting into things that are a little more interesting.

Across the way, you can see a sort of intermediate-level, braced, fold-down platform with a set of removable stairs leading to it, with sockets for removable handrail posts along the side facing you in the picture.

That platform, and a lot of other stuff in this area, isn't the same shade of dark gray that most of the rest of the steel on the towers was, because it was hot-dip galvanized, and the surface you see reflecting light isn't steel, or paint, but is instead, zinc, which is what galvanized stuff is coated in.

Apparently hypergol and any rust that might form on less-than-perfectly-coated steel do not get along very well.

Aluminum, on the other hand, was much more mild-mannered in the presence of hypergol, so they liked that too, and for things that people might be picking up and moving around, aluminum was always a favorite, since it was a lot lighter than steel. Not particularly light by any means, for a lot of this stuff, but lighter.

We were advised by NASA that if the hypergol was to come into contact with rusted steel (and it was the rust that was the culprit, not the steel itself), that piece of rusted steel would catch on fire! And of course the rustier it was, the fierier it was.

So yeah, I guess having your steel catch on fire would not be such a fun thing to have to deal with, especially in the presence of a gas or liquid which was so reactive that it would try to eat the flesh off of your bones and further be trying to kill you by destroying your lungs, before the fire it caused could kill you, and.... well, yeah, that kind of stuff. And such jolly stuff it is! So they very reasonably coated the living hell out of any steel that had to be in the immediate area of where hypergol might get a little loose from its handlers and maybe go some place they'd rather it not have gone.

And yes, that very thing actually happened with a bird on the pad one time, and they managed to spill a significant amount of the stuff down the right side of the Orbiter from the Forward RCS area before they managed to bring things under control. The good news is that nobody got killed, nor, so far as I know, injured, either. And the steel didn't catch on fire, too.

How nice.

We'll get to all that in a minute, ok?

For now, I present you with the fold-down platform and removable aluminum stairs that sort of made a small "level" of their own, between the RCS Room floor steel level, and the Mezzanine Deck level.

Lotta levels in this place.

And they can be hard to keep up with.

So I'll do the best I can...

...but you get to do the best you can do, too.

Because of the Mezzanine Deck just a few feet above it, there was nowhere for the fold-down platform to fold UP to, so it had to fold down, and so that's what it did.

I'd show you all that on the drawings, but for some reason, this drawing package I have does not show this particular hot-dip galvanized folding platform anywhere.

No idea why.

It's just not there.

So we're stuck with an old man's memories, and we all know how unreliable that kind of thing can be, but we're just gonna have to tough it out and make the best of it with what we've got.

And although we don't have any drawings of the iron in this particular little area, we do have drawings of the Orbiter, and they're nice ones, and they have nice 'X', 'Y', and 'Z' axis numbers on them, and from there we can go directly to what this platform was doing up here.

So that's kinda cool, right?

And I'm a 6'-1" tall guy, and maybe I wasn't standing perfectly, exactly, at rigid-attention straight-up when I took the picture, and the camera's lens is just a smidgen below the viewfinder on the top left corner of the back of the camera I was looking through, and add all that up, and maybe the point of view for our photograph was 5'-6" above the RCS Room floor, which is elevation 212'-2", which gives us an eye-level elevation of 217'-8" or 9" maybe, and with that bit of information, we look across at the fold-down platform, and we see that we're very nearly dead-level even with its top surface, a little bit above it, and we'll guesstimate that platform's elevation at 217"-0" or 217'-6" or someplace in between.

So.

Ok.

Now, where might elevation 217'-2" be? 217'-2" is exactly five feet and no inches above the RCS Room floor. 217'-2" is exactly 60 inches above the RCS Room floor. And this stuff is hard enough to keep track of already, and we're gonna make it easy on ourselves right now, ok? No extraneous oddball-value feet and inches to complicate things. We can add it all back in later, if we want to, but for now, we'll stick with even figures for elevation and see where that translates out into our good friend the 'X' axis on our Orbiter Coordinate System.

We're gonna figure this one out, ok? We're gonna get to the bottom of this one, ok?

Ok.

So.

Here's the Orbiter.

With a hilariously-bogus set of 'X' and 'Z' axis numbers on it that are supposedly accurate to the thousandth(!) of an inch. Somewhere, somebody did not have the faintest glimmer of an actual understanding of significant digits, and instead, they just plugged their graphing grid into that whack-ass Orbiter Coordinate System, and the machine spit it back out at them to three decimal points of "accuracy" and not only did the poor fool who originally did the work not realize that this is absurd and cannot possibly be true for a drawing like this one, everybody up the food chain from there, all of whom at some point had to look (Glance? Wave at it from a distance?) at this rendering, also failed to realize what had happened, and everybody approved it, and here we are, looking at a drawing that cannot, not under any earthly circumstances, be depicting anything to the clearly-stated one one-thousandth of an inch accuracy that it's claiming to.

Gah.

And while we're here, take a gander at that 'X' axis number for the tippy end of the Orbiter's Nose Cap.

Yep, 236. Six. Not 235. Not FIVE like everything else that we've seen so far with the Orbiter Coordinate System has. Two. Three. SIX.

Feh.

So this drawing's got issues, and we're just going to have to live with them, but we certainly do not have to accept them blindly.

And in case you're wondering why I'm so outraged at all these shenanigans, it's because this is how people get killed.

This is one of the ways airplanes full of people fall out of the sky, killing everyone aboard them.

This kind of stuff is how Space Shuttles kill people.

Unreconciled mismatches, slight self-disagreements, false accuracy, and unexplained loose ends that they never quite managed to get tied back up, nice and neat.

Inches. Lousy no-good goddamned inches. And people not recognizing those fell places where single inches make the difference between life and death, blithely presuming an inch to be an inch, and letting it pass, or never even noticing the damn thing in the first place.

You need to know when you don't know. You must.

I know that I don't know the exact elevation of that miserable fold-down platform, and I've been as loud and as clear as I possibly can about it. We're guessing, here.

You need to know when you're guessing at it, and then, after that, you need to let everybody else know, too.

Except that the dirty sociopathic bastards will turn it against you, stab you in the back with accusations of incompetence, claw their way one rung higher on their personal ladder, leaving bootprints on your neck as they do so, and in so doing, cause you to be much less inclined to let people know, the next time.

Ah well, so it must be. Enough already.

So we already know there's a pair of hypergol service panels up in the front of the Orbiter on either side, and we already know that the RCS Room floor is X_o=398 (and while we're here let's make note of the fact that the Mezzanine Deck is sitting up there at a scarcely-believable even number of X_o=300 but we don't care about that right now so we can ignore it), which means elevation 212'-2" (the RCS Room floor) plus our nice even sixty inches for our guestimated height of the galvanized (galvanizing already being a significant clue way up here in Upper Hypergol World) fold-down platform gives us an X_o=338 (or somewhere within 3 or maybe 4 inches in either direction) for the location of the top surface of that platform, which puts it close enough to elevation 217'-0" to go ahead and use that number for our present purposes.

So.

We work it all out, and we conclude that when the Orbiter is standing up on the Pad, and the RSS is mated to it, and we're in the RCS Room with our little galvanized fold-down platform, we can be pretty sure that the lower edge of the upper panel on the right side of the Orbiter, the Oxidizer Purge and Drain Panel, is sitting pretty close to X_o=325, which puts it six feet and one inch above the RCS Room floor, which would place it at elevation 218'-2" and now we go back and look where we guestimated the top surface of the fold-down to be, and lo-and-behold, it's sitting there somewhere pretty damn close to elevation 217'-0" and that makes it just about perfect for laying some of the heavier purge and drain lines and equipment on top of as we're working the hypergol up there.

And just below the galvanized fold-down platform there's a small "shelf" which, unlike the galvanized fold-down above it, does show up on the drawings, and goes by the name of "O-17 Removable Access Platform" and its top surface is at elevation 213'-1⅝" and that would be equivalent to an Orbiter Coordinate System X_o value of 386.375 (gotta love those decimal inches, and please notice how we've gone from a drawing that gives us elevation dimensions to a tolerance of plus or minus something a little under one-eighth of an inch maybe, which is the stated dimension, so let's S.W.A.G. it a little and say our tolerance is to one-tenth of an inch, and then all of a sudden, when we convert over into that damnable Orbiter Coordinate System, we discover that fractional eighths of an inch are suddenly expressed as decimal thousandths! of an inch, and no, no additional information was actually gained anywhere, and instead it's simply a one-hundredfold increase in false accuracy, a one-hundredfold increase in bullshit, and yeah, this kind of stuff really does occasionally kill people), and we go back to our drawing and we see that the lower edge of the lower panel on the right side of the Orbiter, the Oxidizer Service Panel, is sitting pretty close to X_o=379, and yeah, that's well within the error bars too, and we can be pretty sure we've positively identified both of our little work platforms over there on the Oxidizer side of the Orbiter, and it's fun being a detective, and it's even more fun when you start getting answers.

And now it's time for a little story involving this pair of platforms.

The Day They Spilled 15 or 20 Gallons(!) of N₂O₄ Down The Side Of Columbia.

The story begins on the lower part of this page, under the header of "STS-2 OV-102 N₂O₄ SPILL (9/22/1981, KSC PAD 39A 207-FOOT LEVEL)" and please mind the five-foot elevation differential between Pad A which is five feet lower, and Pad B, ok?

And on the very next page, they give us a nice picture of the scene of the crime, but they're more than just a little coy about it, and they're not calling it by any name that we might be familiar with, and instead they call it the "AP28-12 Door" but things are beginning to gain a most very familiar look about them.

Reading further, we get a nice rendering of the mess they made, and yeah, I would imagine that fifteen or twenty gallons of hypergol might wind up going all over the place if given half a chance to.

And then they give us a nice picture of... not the scene of the crime itself, which is up at their AP28-12 Door, but instead they show us an "AP28-00 Door" which they are at least kind enough to identify in the text of the document as the "AP28-00 door (second FRCS oxidizer servicing door just beneath the AP28-12 door when the vehicle is in the vertical orientation)." and if that's not our good friend the Oxidizer Panel, complete with a bit of our little O-17 Access Platform "shelf" just above the RCS Room floor down at the bottom of the frame, complete with the upstanding angle-leg facing the Orbiter, I'll eat my hat.

The good news is that nobody got killed or injured. They were dressed in SCAPE that day. Nobody's flesh was dissolved and washed away in a red foam all the way down to their bones. Nobody died from having the insides of their lungs attacked by a chemical that is fearsome beyond all belief or understanding, enduring the last moments of their horribly-ended life in a coughing fit of a violence that cannot be imagined, spraying blood and physical pieces and strings of the flesh which lined their lungs, all around them on everything and everyone until they at last grew still and quiet. No poisonous fire erupted and spread rapidly from one end of the facility to the other. No seriously Bad Thing happened that day.

But it could have.

It very easily could have, and the fact that it did not can be chalked up to a combination of Defense-in-Depth, and sheer random by-the-grace-of-god Good Luck.

I drone on and on and ON about stuff and it wears away at you, grows tedious, causes your attention to first drift and then completely decouple from things.

But always, everlastingly, beneath it all, the infrasonic thrum of death can be sensed.

Space is hard.

Space is very very hard.

And you can never allow the tedium, nor the funny stories, nor anything else, to ever cause you to lose your focus, to lose your attention to things, to lose your life.

Let's get the hell out of here, ok?

Let's move on and head down to the Antenna Access Platform, just beneath where we are right now, in the RCS Room.

Another place for tight focus and full attention to things.

MacLaren's Images and Stories Pad B Stories - Table of Contents

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