The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 30: RSS Orbiter Crew Cabin Area - Forward RCS Area.
| Pad B Stories - Table of Contents |
We're just beneath the RCS Room, over on the column line 7 side of the RSS, looking across, out, and up, toward the hinge column side of things.
We got here by walking across the roof of the RSS between the back of the RCS Room and the front of the Hoist Equipment Room, just past the emergency eyewash station over on the Line 7 side of things, past the catwalk ramp that would take you to the Right SRB Access Platform, and turned a little left past that, away from the first down riser up at the very top of Stair Tower 4, and headed across the catwalk that protruded out over the frighteningly empty space in front of the main body of the RSS, and from there down the extraordinarily exposed stair that takes you to the Antenna Access Platform.
And at the bottom of that stair (which I always liked to be on so very much, and about which, please note, the depiction in the linked drawing of the area at the bottom of this stair, is significantly incomplete) there was a short catwalk, and at the end of that catwalk there was a door you opened up, and on the other side of that door, which is where you were standing when you took the picture at the top of this page, things changed, and you found yourself in an area that went from bad, to worse, to just awful, as you proceeded out and across the Antenna Access Platform, and then it started getting better again as you doggedly kept on going, but it never got anything that anybody could ever call "good."
Our photograph shows us the last little bit of the "awful" area extending out of frame to the left, and beyond that the places where it gets "better" but never gets "good."
So ok, so let's talk about awful. Let's talk about yet another place on the tower where absolutely full attention was required at all times, and this time it's not because of what might happen if some unnoticed system somewhere was to unexpectedly fail in some way, but instead, it's about not going over the side and taking the express route from the steel checkerplate of the Antenna Access Platform at elevation 198'-7½" to the flat concrete at elevation 53'-0" down at the Pad Deck, here and now, every time you went across the damn thing.
And keep in mind, please, that while I would never be qualified as "good" at walking high steel like the ironworkers did, by this time I could at least get by. I could at least get from here to there across open steel beams on a reliable-enough basis. Hell, it was part of my job. It was part of what I did. So it's not like I had just shown up from Lower Flatlandia where the concept of taking a fall was unheard-of, and never entered into anyone's minds or daily life.
The Antenna Access Platform was different, and it was different because it was supported from a "curtain wall" and also because of the Monorail Transfer Doors (which were also a part of that curtain wall), and which doors I'm going to go on and on and ON about, most likely on the next page, and which has no direct bearing on the checkerplate at 198'-7½, except that it did, and the curtain wall and the doors, in conjunction with where the Orbiter was located in relationship to them, dictated the particulars of the platform part of the Antenna Access Platform, which was not so much a platform, but instead was actually just a ledge, and you could never imagine that So. Much. Stuff. could be going on with one little platform, and...
...oh boy, here we go.
So let's get to the business of "curtain wall" and the Monorail Transfer Doors and the Orbiter and the platform, and see what's going on with all that, ok?
Wish me luck on this one, please, I'm going to need it.
And we discover that the notation "curtain wall" is sprinkled around the drawings in a surprising number of places (here it is here, on a drawing you're already familiar with), more or less any time we encounter things in that netherworld which existed between the bottom of the RCS Room floor steel, and the tops of PCR Main Doors, but what the hell does "curtain wall" even mean?
And we'll let Wikipedia handle this one, but we need to be aware that Wikipedia never actually built themselves a Launch Pad for a Space Shuttle (although they certainly do talk about it a lot, and let us stop right here to commend them one and all for the depth and the accuracy of what they have to say about it), and of course out at the Pad, definitions had a funny way of morphing from one thing into another, and in this case, despite the fact that Wikipedia wants us to believe that a curtain wall is non-structural, when it comes to the Antenna Access Platform that's not entirely the case, because the platform itself was a bit of a structure, and it was load-bearing for loads above and beyond its own dead weight, and...
...see what I mean?
Deep weeds.
We're already out into the deep weeds here, and we haven't really even started.
Sigh.
But I'm guessing that maybe one of the reasons they were so fond of calling this whole thing a "curtain wall" is that curtain wall is a red flag, warning anybody and everybody who looks at a drawing with this nomenclature on it to watch out, because this thing can never be expected to carry a sensible load, or to have any sensible structural integrity, and when you're constructing bridges or buildings or Rotating Service Structures, it's all about structural integrity.
So yeah, the Antenna Access Platform, really is a platform, but hey watch out there Lou, 'cause it's not much of a platform, and you need to mind just how much load you go putting on it, so please be careful with that kind of thing, ok? And of course the platform part of the Antenna Access Platform is cantilevered out there, and that just adds to the fun, by imparting a moment of inertia into things, and what Big Fun this all is, eh?
Ok.
And what's this whole mess for anyway?
Why do we even have a curtain wall with an Antenna Access Platform hanging off the bottom margin of it in the first place?
And that is because the whole point and sense of the Payload Changeout Room is to provide a place where you can work the payloads into and out of the Space Shuttle's Payload Bay, and the Payload Bay is 60 feet long, and anything that's longer than that, for working payloads, over on the RSS side of things, is a waste of time from a strictly-payload point of view, and since this whole place is a clean room, and needs to be kept absurdly clean so as not to damage one of the payloads (which are fussy about such considerations to a degree that borders on the psychotic), any place where we can seal this thing up is a place where we will seal this thing up, and since there's a lot of outrageously-heavy lifting gear inside the PCR, inside the clean-room zone, stashed out of the way up above things where it will not block access to things, way up there above the top edge of the Payload Bay, the Payload Changeout Room is going to have to be noticeably longer/taller than the Payload Bay itself, and anything up above needs to be sealed up tight as a drum to maintain cleanliness too, and so ok, we'll just make the forward-facing part of things up there, up above the Main Doors of the PCR, into a curtain wall, since there can be no structure below that area, because of the giant empty space we created to open the doors to work the payload, and so the curtain wall gets to dangle up above it all, and as such has very little structural integrity for any load-bearing considerations.
Phew!
Then, the RSS swings around, and here comes the Orbiter, right at you, and the part of the Orbiter just past the forward end of the Payload Bay, which would be the back end of the Crew Cabin area, is just as wide as everything behind it, farther down the length of the fuselage, and we're going to be coming quite close to the RSS to do our payload work, and what winds up happening is that the Orbiter Mold Line comes crowding in on the poor old Antenna Access Platform like a rhinoceros or something, and you will move out of it's way when it does, and in so doing, the Antenna Access Platform winds up becoming very narrow. And the dirty bastards are sneaky about it, and they do not give you an actual set of dimensions, and instead make you work at it from both directions, starting from the mold line on the Orbiter side, and the rest of the structural framing from the RSS side, and they never quite manage to come right out and tell you straight-up just how narrow that damn ledge in the middle there is getting...
...and it's getting very very narrow indeed.
With a curtain wall and big tube-steels butt-up against it over on the RSS side of things away from the Orbiter, and...
What winds up happening, when the RSS is rolled back into the demate position, and there's no Orbiter over there, and there's no nothing over there, not only do you not have very much width to your platform, you also get a wall, which is right there, right there next to you, as you work your way across the platform, and then, just to spice it up a little, you get those LRU Lifting Lines Protective Tube Steels protruding out from that wall, crowding you even closer to the edge, and even away from the tubes, the goddamned sockets for the removable handrail posts intruded into the already far-too-small space you had to deal with, and over on the other side, where the structural drawings showed you as having this much space, which wasn't much to begin with, but then the damnable architectural drawings wound up giving you that much space, as they took away 2 full inches of that "wasn't very much to begin with" bit of space you had been given on the structural drawing, with their sheets of insulated-metal paneling, and the resultant of all that is to cause you to pretty much run out of room out there, out in the middle of the platform, which, remember, is really just a ledge, and...
Yeah.
And you've got removable handrail sockets (complete with posts, chains, attach hardware, and a goddamned near-invisible detent pin down there just above the checkerplate which is sticking even farther out into your already way-too-narrow-space) all protruding inwards from the toeplate, wanting to glancingly catch or deflect the side of your boot as you edge yourself along, away from that wall and then you toss in the LRU Lifting Lines Protective Tubes, which, remember, are these great damn big 14"x18" structural-steel tubes, and those things are encroaching in on you, too, right exactly in the two already-narrowest places to begin with, without them even being considered, two places that were plenty bad enough without them, and then as if that's not enough already, you get to deal with the most poorly-located removable handrail socket on the whole Launch Pad, and...
And the damn thing is unpleasantly narrow, and the smooth unyielding vertical surfaces on the side of things away from the open edge of the platform checkerplate with its lethal drop right there, right next to you, are constantly pushing you, even when you're not actually touching them, and once the initial novelty of being in a place like this wore off, I never liked going out on this platform, although I did so more times than I'll ever be able to count.
Open steel beams and girders are vastly preferable to a place like this.
On an open beam, even one that has a top flange that's only 4 inches wide, even when you're way the hell up there, you have a sense of being centered, a sense of security, and if, god forbid, you take some kind of fall, you at least have something to throw an arm across and get properly hold of up underneath your armpit while you grip a flange-edge with tendon-stretching force using your fingers, that you can then use to pull yourself back up on top of things, and that steel wall which crowds you from the side in a place like this will block you from doing a thing like that, and if you touch it, or, god-forbid, you go a little off-step somehow and push it, with a shoulder, or a hand, or a hip, it pushes back, and it tries to push you over the edge, and there's nothing at all over on that side to push back against in return and get yourself squared back up...
...until you're pushing against the concrete of the Pad Deck, far below.
And that laughable set of "safety" chains only served to worsen matters, owing to the fact that beyond an ever-present danger of entanglement on the cursed things, followed near-instantly by an awkward flip and fall to your death, they served no purpose at all that I could ever discern. They were only hip-level high. Plenty of room and momentum, even at a snail's pace, to go right on over them. And the aluminum handrail posts wobbled in their sockets, and the chains moved obligingly out of the way when you pushed against them, and..... nope.
And in the end, the overall real-world effect of all of this adds up in an unpleasant way, and you're walking along out here, trying to get to the stupid flip-up platform over on the Hinge Column side of things which has had multiple problems from day one, and the answer to the last RFI you wrote on it was a horseshit no answer at all, and the ironworkers have gone from thinking that the Ongoing Engineering Idiocy associated with this flip-up is funny, and merely laughing at it, to being actively pissed-off about it and are demanding good working real-world answers NOW, and now you're up here once again, with a clipboard and blank sheets of paper stuffed into the rear waistband of your blue jeans so you can keep it with you, hands-free, pencil clenched between your teeth to keep from losing it, and you're going to have to make a field sketch, again, to demonstrate to the self-important blockheads in NASA Engineering that no, it can not be done the way they continue insisting it needs to be done because of some hidden agenda that they refuse to share with you (most likely to keep somebody from looking bad, but you'll never find out), and you're already being pushed, even before you get to the first tube-steel, and as you're brushing against the "safety" chains trying to give your left shoulder room to clear that damn tube-steel, the tape measure, which is always clipped onto your belt, hip-level on your right side, manages to catch on the hook that holds the chain to the eye-bolt on the handrail post, and at the exact same second, one of the tatters dangling down from the hem of your six-year-old working blue jeans manages to find the t-grip handle on that detent pin down there, and you reflexively startle around with a rightward rotation to keep the tape measure from becoming even more involved with the hook and the post it's attached to, and your right foot takes a funny little jerk as the pin pulls at the tatter, and your left shoulder suddenly makes hard-contact with the goddamned tube-steel, and all of that together, causes you to kind of bounce a little bit, toward the open edge of the platform, and while all that is going on, the handrail post moves in its socket, and then suddenly goes rock-solid as it travels to the far extent that the metal socket has to give, and you then find yourself overbalancing, with your center of mass wanting to go over the top "safety" chain on the farther side of the handrail post, and all of this happens in far less than a full second, and you somehow manage to catch yourself, pencil still clenched in teeth, which you have somehow managed to not bite cleanly in half as this was going on, so at least you didn't lose it and have to go all the way back down to the trailer and get another one, winding up with your right boot hard-against the inside surface of the steel toeplate unable to go so much as one additional millimeter farther out ahead of you in your direction of motion, to push down sharply and stop you from further overbalancing, which millimeter, this time, you miraculously don't need, but god DAMN, does it really have to be like this up here?
And you regather your wits, and you look around and see that there's nobody else anywhere nearby in the area and you were completely on your own for the whole thing, and if you'd wound up partially over the side, tangled up in those damnable "safety" chains jerking around on handrail posts that refuse to stay solidly put, with chains wanting on their own to spin like a jump-rope, offering almost nothing at all by way of firm purchase or proper grip to lever yourself back up onto the solid surface of the platform with, and you're either going to do this on your own, or you're not going to do it at all, and nobody was around for any of it, and you stop and breathe for a few more seconds, and then, you go right back at that miserable damn too-narrow space between the tube-steel and certain death, and this time you go a little more carefully, and all's well that ends well, but god DAMN, does it really have to be like this up here?
And of course, because of all the other problems we had up here (We'll save that part of it for the next page, I'm not going to get into it right now, ok?), The Fates decreed that I visit the place on a pretty regular basis, over a protracted period of weeks and months, and even years later I was still being taken there occasionally... by The Fates, and sometimes I wonder... I wonder what was actually going on with all of that... and I'll never know... but I'm still here, and my son still has a father. And I remember. I remember it all. Every last bit of it.
Ok, enough of that.
Let's get back to figuring out what all this stuff is, what it does, and how it does it.
By now, we've gained a fair bit of familiarity with things up here in the RCS Room and Antenna Access Platform area, so for the moment, let's sort of do a review, ok?
So here's the photograph from the top of this page again, but this time it has the main players labeled. The stuff you've already met. And now you get to see it all from down here, and it always helps to get different points of view on things, right?
As with the previous page, we'll work from the top down, for the most part, ok?
We'll start with the two boom pendants, which is what the Canister Stowage Lines actually are. Each of them terminate in a hot-dip galvanized open spelter socket. I mentioned the Canister Stowage Cables briefly on the previous page, and now that we're getting a better look at them, we can go into a bit more detail with it. The drawing only shows one end of what it's calling the Canister Stowage Link (and yeah, the work's not hard enough as-is, were going to liven it up a little every so often by calling things by different names, just to make sure you're really paying attention, here), but these large spelter sockets were on both ends of the cable, and were swaged on, and even the simple-enough business of swaging drew substantial attention from NASA, who really did NOT want to see one of these things fail, and of course nothing of the sort ever happened, so I guess we did good, huh?
I forget the actual load rating of these things, but it was substantial with its included safety factors, and of course they were proof-tested after fabrication at Indusco in Jacksonville, (and how 'bout that, I just Googled them, and it looks like they're still around, so I guess I'll take this opportunity to say "Hi" to John Ferlisi, the Indusco guy, who I worked with on this as well as other things and maybe at some point I'll get to tell the little story about me, and John, and the stainless-steel detent pins, and Sag Rod the ironworker's union steward, but not now, ok?) and of course I had to handle all the material certs, and test results paperwork, and god knows what all else, but it was plenty, and NASA was quite excitable about these damned boom pendants, but who can blame them, because if they'd ever dropped that Payload Canister things would have gotten quite ugly, quite rapidly, and...... no.
As I mentioned earlier, they'd lift the canister with the 90-ton hoist when the RSS was rotated around to the demate position to get it into place, controlling it for orientation and horizontal location and alignment with a set of capstans and snatch blocks on the Pad Deck and vertical guide rails on the RSS, and that whole system was surprisingly complex, and involved quite a bit of rigging, and hands-on work. Once they got it up to its final working elevation, they would hook those ever-so-sturdy boom pedants on up at the top, tie the Canister to the face of the PCR, double-check everything to make sure it was all rock-solidly in place, and then unhook the Canister from the hoist, and it could hang there on the boom pendants for as long as they needed it to, while they went about their clean-room business of opening up the PCR doors, opening up the Canister doors, rolling the PGHM forward, attaching the payload(s) to the PGHM, which would then be rolled back toward the rear of the PCR, out of the way, at which point the Canister doors would be closed, the PCR doors would be closed, the hoist would be hooked back on to the Canister, which would then be lifted up just enough to take the tension off of the boom pendants, which would then be disconnected along with everything else, and then the Canister would be lowered gently back down to the ground, where its zillion-wheeled transporter was waiting to take it back to the O&C Building, or wherever else they might be wanting to drive it to.
Once all the work with the Canister was done, and it was time to roll the RSS around to mate with the Orbiter, these pendants would be lifted up and pulled off to the side, behind the folding platforms and out of the way, and tied back securely, to keep them from interfering with the Orbiter itself.
But if the Orbiter wasn't there, then they might occasionally find themselves in the condition you see in the photograph at the top of the page, with pendants hanging freely, with the flip-ups in the "down" position, for any number of obscure operational reasons.
All in all, it was a fairly contrapted set of operations, but it all worked well enough, and that's what matters, right? It was a slow process, though.
Ok, let us move from the boom pendants to the compressible bumpers on the flip-up platforms they're hanging down right next to.
Except that on the Mezzanine Deck, above the RCS Room Floor, up at elevation 220'-4", the boom pendant isn't "next" to the flip-up at all, it's inside of it. And it's also inside of the removable handrail, too.
Here it is here, highlighted for you, so you can get a better look at it.
And of course the compressible bumper is split, and the platform is notched, to accommodate the interference condition wherein the pendant and the platform both want to be in the same place at the same time and somebody's going to have to do something about it, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I've got a feeling that they did not really like the solution they came up with, but they were stuck with it, and all in all, it's one of the more kludged-up places on the whole tower in this regards.
Doing pretty much anything at all up in this area, with this flip-up platform, was just pesty, no matter how you looked at it.
Platform, lifting-winch, locking-lugs, awkwardly-angled and sized removable handrail with detent pins, great big open spelter socket on the end of a very heavy, very stiff, wire rope which is hanging out over open space well over a hundred feet above the pad deck...
...yeah, I can just imagine how much fun all that was, every time they found themselves having to reconfigure anything at all up here.
Oh well.
Around the curved perimeters of the RCS Room floor steel, and the Mezzanine Deck, we're getting a pretty good look at those compressible bumpers which kept hard steel from coming in contact with fragile TPS Tiles in the area around the nose of the Space Shuttle, forward of the cockpit windows.
These bumpers were nothing fancy (although that "Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene" material call-out on the drawing might make you think so, but it's common as dirt, and these things weren't even fire-resistant, which seems quite surprising, considering where they were located, and they also managed to misspell it as "Acyrolonitrile"!), and they were fabricated by a local upholstery shop across the river from KSC over in Titusville, and I was the guy who drove over there and picked 'em up and then brought 'em back out to the pad, nearly filling up all of the room inside my ratty little yellow VW Beetle and making for less than fully-safe driving by blocking most of my vision in most directions except forward, through the windshield at whatever was in front of me as I was driving. Something about the juxtaposition of ironworkers and upholstery just doesn't seem to fit, but there it is, and that's how it was done. Those bumpers were made by sewing neoprene-coated nylon cover material over a soft foam interior that was no different from the cushions on your couch, with a bit of extra fabric extending out an inch or two along the back side of things that could be laid flat against the perimeter plate of the platforms they were on, so as an aluminum strip could then be placed on top of that strip of fabric and screwed down onto the metal of the perimeter plate, thus holding the bumper very firmly in place.
And there's one more bumper too, and this one's a weirdie.
It's the only one that does not correspond to anything on the flight hardware, and instead, is for the Orbiter Access Arm, which, if it had been on the tower when this photograph was taken (it wasn't), and if it had been swung around, with the RSS mated with the shuttle, giving access to the Crew Hatch, it would be filling up the space right next to this oddball vertical bumper, which of course was there to keep the OAA from getting damaged if it somehow was to physically come in contact with the RSS, and here's the photograph again, with my best estimate of the location for the face of the OAA inserted into the image, to give you an idea of where it would be.
And I suppose right now, I'm going to step forward in time several years and use a photograph I took after the Orbiter Access Arm had been installed on B Pad (this picture might be the very best photograph I took, the whole time I was out there, and it shows an extraordinary amount of very well-presented detail, and we're going to be seeing it again, here and there, as I use it to help you locate things and just generally get an overall sense of the whole layout of things, but beware, because by the time I got this shot, the RSS had already been extensively modified and does not fully match what you're seeing in the picture at the top of this page), and on top of all that, this photograph was taken on A Pad, the morning they first rolled their brand new Orbiter Discovery out to a launch pad, and in this photograph, you can see that the OAA is midway between its mated position with the Orbiter, and it's latched-back position against the side of the FSS and Struts, and clearly, for the RSS to be able to swing around and mate with the Orbiter, the OAA had to also be mated with the Orbiter, or otherwise the RSS would run right into it, and that would not be a good thing.
This whole area, with a gargantuan RSS moving around wildly, and a not-small OAA also moving around wildly, in conjunction with each other, and in conjunction with an FSS plus Hinge Column and Struts that did not move, along with the every which-a-way visual confusions and deceptions introduced by all of that structural steel which is spiderwebbing around all over the place in the background, makes for a difficult thing to understand. I'm doing the best I can, but I also understand that for some of you, this is not going to be making enough sense, and for that, all I have to offer is my apologies. This is what we had. This is what we worked with. This is the real thing in the real world, for better or for worse.
So ok. So now we know all about how the compressible bumpers on our launch pad work. And a bunch of other stuff, too.
Alright then, let's return to our Hypergol Service Panel Fold-down Access Platform which we've already discussed as to why it folds down, and not up, owing to lack of room above it where it's sitting, just beneath the main platforming of the RCS Room Mezzanine Deck. We're getting a really good look at it here, and the look we're getting, from below, informs us in a way that I'm guessing that nobody has stopped to consider, how and why flip-UP platforms are as prevalent as they are.
I mean when you stop and think about it, almost everything flips UP, and hardly anything flips DOWN.
Why?
Why would a thing like that be?
There's gotta be a reason, right?
Nothing out here happens without a reason, right?
So.
What's the deal?
And the answer is given in this photograph, and I've highlighted and labeled the platform, and the reason, and you can see it in the photograph.
Bracing.
You most very likely never even noticed that none of the flip-UP platforms have diagonal (or any other kind) bracing underneath them, to hold them up.
They just stick out into empty space, cantilevered for all they're worth, and they work just fine that way.
The hinge (and the hinge line) is up, even with the top surface of the platform, or even just a little bit above that, sometimes.
And what winds up happening is that as the platform rotates downward from its initial raised position, it reaches a place where hard interference with the framing steel it's attached to keeps it from going any farther, and the designers make good and sure of that because they introduce stiffener plates and stop blocks in there, and those things, in conjunction with very sturdy hinge lugs and (usually) the use of ASTM A325 high-strength structural bolts as hinge pins, all adds up to something that when it reaches the end of its envelope of travel and stops, it really STOPS, and it does so without need for anything at all underneath it to hold it up, and all of a sudden, we've gained ourselves a nice open space beneath the cantilevered platform when it's flipped down, and I should hope that by now, everybody is gaining a proper sense of just how crammed together everything is up on the towers, which puts open space at quite the premium, and every opportunity they have to gain some open space, is an opportunity they're going to TAKE, and so, when it comes to platforms that need to be gotten out of the way for any reason, at any place, they're going to be flip-UP platforms, unless there's a very good reason for making them otherwise.
But a fold-DOWN platform enjoys none of those benefits, and demands bracing underneath it to support it, and the bracing needs to be strong, and the bracing needs to be removable, or hinged, or provided with some kind of ability to be gotten out of the way when the platform is not in use, and what you wind up with is what you're seeing right here in the photograph.
So now you know all about that, too.
Very well then, let us return to the Antenna Access Platform itself, and give things at that level a closer look.
There is much to see here.
There is much to consider here.
We'll start with the curved gray flat vertical steel plate that comes out of the bottom left corner of this panorama image, and extends upward a little bit above the bottom edge of the frame, as it curves along almost, but not quite, all the way over to the far right edge of its part of this composite image.
Look a bit closer, down toward the lower margin of this run of steel plate, and you can see two dark holes, with a vertical seam a little to the left of the right-hand hole.
The holes were for air supply to the Orbiter Inflatable Seals in this area (which had not yet been furnished and installed when this photograph was taken), and there's two of them because the vertical seam between them denotes that the right hand hole is cut into the steel plate that fronts a separate, flip-up, platform. The rest of the main part of the platform/ledge to the left of this flip-up is fixed in place and remains immovable even as the part on the right gets winched up, out of the way, before the RSS closes in on the Orbiter when it's swinging around into the mate position.
And our flip-up had to be lifted up and out of the way to permit the Orbiter Side Seal Panel along with its Inflatable Seal, each one of which is a separate item with its own air supply to inflate it, on each separate moving or non-moving piece of steel, (which we've already discussed in a pretty good level of detail down at elevation 135'-7", and which discussion applies in the exact same manner up here at elevation 198'-7½") to be rotated around and retracted inward to permit the RSS to be mated with the Shuttle without smashing into it, taking out the left payload bay door and part of the left side of the fuselage as it does so.
I have already altered one of the contract drawings in two different ways (79K04400, Pad A, mind the elevations, you already know this, but a gentle reminder can never hurt, right?), to show you how the Orbiter, and floor steel, and flip-up platform, and Side Seal Panel all work together to make their part of the game happen.
The alterations show us how it looks and acts down at elevation 135'-7", but the action is identical up here at 198'-7½", and the two altered drawing versions can be opened up in new browser tabs, one for each altered version of the drawing, and then you can blink back and forth from one tab to the other to see how things work in a way that gives you (we hope) a "gut feeling" for this outwardly-simple but surprisingly-complicated in the real world, area. Up here on the Antenna Access Platform, there are no OMS Pods, so the outline of the Orbiter Mold Line cutout is much simpler, but the sense of the thing is identical. Exactly the same concept.
Side Seal Panel extended.
Side Seal Panel retracted.
Open them both. Blink back and forth from one to the other.
This is how it works, ok?
Except that something is the matter, and things don't look right, and that's because they're not right, or at least so far as I've highlighted and labeled up to this point, because, to the RIGHT of the flip-up, there's just a wee little bit more platform metal over there, and that particular item is part of the Side Seal Panel, and it's not part of the flip-up, and it's not part of the main platform framing up here, and instead, it's part of a thing that extends downward, out of the bottom of the frame of the image, for sixty full vertical feet, until it gets down the the RSS Main Floor, way down there at elevation 135'-7"!
And up here, at elevation 198'-7½", they needed just the tiniest little bit of extra decking area, where people could stand, or things be laid down, and they had no choice. They were well and truly boxed in, and they wound up having to get that tiniest little bit of extra decking area by grafting it on to the top of the Side Seal Panel.
So. One Antenna Access Platform. With the deckplates shown in color, which are parts of three completely separate and distinct structural framing subsystems over here in this one little corner of the thing, all three of which had to fit neatly together in a way that would cause them to act like a single thing, even though they weren't, and even though they could, and did, occasionally take off in three completely separate and distinct directions, taking them to three completely separate and distinct locations, when they weren't all neatly tucked in to one-another when it came time for the work to be done.
It's funny. People, if they think of them at all, think of structures as big stupid things that sort of just sit there, holding something else up. But that's not always the case. Once in a while, structures can become...
...different.
Here's that same drawing, M-70, again, with a few other little tidbits highlighted for you, ranging in value from several dollars to several billion dollars, just for fun.
Yeeks.
This whole area is tight.
This whole area has no room.
For anything.
You've got the Antenna Access Platform(s) itself with work to be done up there. You've got the Orbiter Access Arm swinging around at you. You've got the RSS swinging around at the Orbiter. You've got the Orbiter Cargo Bay Doors trying to open and close. You've got the Canister trying to open and close its doors. And you've got the Canister Guide Rail trying to keep the Canister out of trouble while it does so.
All of it, every last bit of it, cheek-by-jowl, with nowhere for anything to wiggle around and escape to.
Everything's connected to everything, and everything gets in the way of everything, and everything has to be on hinges or bearings or wire ropes or hooks, or sitting in sockets, or some damn thing to allow it to be moved out of the way, and it all has to be rigidly orchestrated and sequenced for any of it to work.
Once the RSS is safely locked down with the Orbiter untouched, they will rotate the side seal panel back into its working position and then lower that flip-up platform back down, and then inflate the seals which are there to keep dust and dirt and birds and bugs and bats and who knows what else out of the PCR clean room. And even then, once in a while, the birds, or the bugs, or the bats, or perhaps an occasional human will wind up on the wrong side of the seals, anyway. It's tough. It's really tough to keep everything fully-organized, and there's no such thing as a Perfect System.
Zoom in on this image to see the chain hoist (temporary install by one of the craft labor groups, I do not know which one, and I do not know why they cut a hole in the toeplate to use as a lift point, but that's what we're dealing with here and I have no recollection as to why) that lifts this flip-up. People think that everything that's going on out at the Cape is done by well-scrubbed scientists wearing spotless white lab coats in a brilliantly well-lit indoors environment of shiny stainless steel and polished glass, but in truth most of it bears a much closer resemblance to what's happening day-to-day in train yards, or on the decks of tug boats, or even drilling rigs out in the oil patch.
In addition, despite my very-curious and somewhat-adventurous nature which draws me inexorably toward experiences with the novel, the phenomenal, the rare, and the unusual, I sure as hell never trusted my life to that weird-looking aluminum ladder there, hanging beneath its pair of very questionable-looking little wheeled trolleys that ran along the lower flange of the curved monorail beam. I never got on it, even once. Never so much as set foot on the lowest rung. Nope. Not gonna happen. From the lower flange of that monorail beam, which is all that's keeping this ladder from going over the side, and down, it's a direct and unimpeded straight shot all the way to the hard flat concrete of the pad deck, waiting patiently over a hundred vertical feet below you.
Nope. Not gonna happen. And like I said, I was a somewhat-adventurous type, and went a lot of places that other folks would never dream of going, but this ladder remained off-limits for the full duration of my tenure on the pad, and that's just the way I liked it.
This ladder, and the curved monorail beam that supported it, were both surprisingly complicated, and were both spec'd out to levels of detail that you might not ordinarily expect to encounter.
The ladder provided access to the cockpit windows on the Space Shuttle, and the monorail gave it support in suspension (there being nothing directly below it to set it on top of for support) all along the deviously-complex curve which matched the shape of the Orbiter at this elevation, and when the RSS was mated, the cockpit windows of the Orbiter were, right there, and this was something that had to be right, since the penalty for getting it wrong might involve a broken Orbiter, and of course that's never going to be allowed to happen, and so they spec'd it out in some pretty fine detail.
And yeah, that's all well and good, but could somebody please tell me how that hilariously-bad rendering of that technician there on the ladder managed to sail through the entire series of approval processes and wind up in the actual contract drawings?
Are you kidding me?!?
And the guy is not even necessary, anyway.
The drawing does just fine without him, and you can build everything there in his absence, and yet there he is!
And he's bad.
Terribly terribly bad.
And the more you look at him, the worse it gets.
And the funnier it gets.
And we were the ones who fabricated and delivered this ladder, and I'll never forget the first time I turned the sheet above it and my eyes were greeted by this thing!
Over forty years later and I'm still laughing.
And I'm still finding things wrong with it.
Check out the little wrench peeking out of the guy's pocket, sitting in there, loose.
While he's hanging out over a 4 BILLION dollar (1970's money, don't forget) Space Shuttle!
What happens when he drops his wrench on the Space Shuttle?
And he's working on the windows, and what, please tell me, are you going to be doing, with a wrench like that, working on the windows?
And what's up with his feet?
Who's feet are those, anyway?
They can't be his feet.
His feet would never fit in a pair of shoes that small, right?
So what's going on here, anyway?
And of course, forty-plus years later...
...no answer comes.
None of this makes any sense, and yet there it all is, right before your eyes.
I dunno.
This whole place is...
...I dunno.
And on the next page, we're going to be talking about that ladder some more, and things are going to launch off into another whole separate bizarre realm that took me forty full years to get to the bottom of, and finally get the answers to questions that stood unanswered for that whole period of time, and as a hint of what's to come, you might want to be asking yourself "Why does the handhold framing that sort of, but doesn't quite really, follow the upward path of the rungs of that ladder, have to look so... odd, anyway?" and such a simple question it is, and we wish the answer was equally simple, but it's not, and the full ramifications of that "why" wind up branching off into some pretty outré territory, and the military gets into it, and nothing makes any sense at all, until suddenly, all of it makes perfect sense, but without having the secret key to things in the first place... whuf.
And, now that I look at this image yet again, I'm none too sure about the confidence I expressed elsewhere regarding how safe and cozy things would get, once the RSS was rotated around to the mate position and the Orbiter was filling up all that space next to, and beneath, that rolling ladder with the inflated seals completely filling the gap, fully in contact with both the RSS and the Orbiter, all the way around. Those inflatable seals were beyond soft (I was involved in proof-testing them with a manometer following installation, and although I do not remember the exact air pressure that was sent into the seals to keep them inflated, it wasn't all too very much. Just a few inches of water in the manometer, as I recall. Less than one PSI. Quite a bit less, actually. Also, the Herculite fabric they were made from was quite thin and light, and when you touched or poked them while they were inflated, you immediately noticed that they were very soft and it looks to me as if there might be just enough room in there between the toe plate and the Orbiter to..... Feh. Enough already. Nothing to be gained by dwelling on such things.
The Antenna Access Platform was a place with its own very special mana, and it was a very powerful mana, but it was very much not a particularly pleasant mana, and you had to constantly be watching out for it at all times.
Let's wrap this one up by looking close, over on the far left side of things up top in the original photograph, and you can see, slightly out of focus, just to the left of a heavy brown rope in the nearest foreground (in the top two of the three overlapping photographs that make up this panorama) where the the people working in this area have hung a fairly substantial wire-rope with a shackle at its bottom which is carrying another wire-rope beneath that, going farther down, but in the bottom photograph, this bit of rigging is gone, and I have no recollection at all as to what was going on when I was taking these shots.
Zillions and zillions of eency-teency little details, any one of which might be fully-capable of stopping the whole damn program until a resolution was found and implemented.
It's truly amazing as to just how much stuff is going on in some of these pictures, once you start really looking at 'em closely.
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