The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 34: Of Flame Deflectors and Handrails.
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You are standing near the edge of the grating at elevation 112'-0", looking across and down where the cutout for the Orbiter's right OMS Pod ends, and the nominal edge of the floor steel at that level begins.
In the lower left corner of the image, you're getting a fairly good look at just how see-through the steel-bar grating which covered most platforming locations was, when you were looking at it exactly along the length of the bars. This was quite disconcerting when you first encountered it, and on a few occasions I was with individuals for their first visits up in the towers, and when you stepped out of the FSS Elevator, the grating bars ran lengthwise right in front of you, right where you would put your very first footstep down, and everybody for whom this was their first encounter with such a thing, kind of stopped, looked closely at what they were stepping out and across on, considered things for a bit, made a comment or two. Or three. And then, quite cautiously at first, testing the strength (which anvils dropped from skyscrapers would not be sufficient to punch through) of the frightfully-open bars with every footfall, proceeded onward to wherever it was that we were going.
My own first experience with it was identical, and it took a little while before the sensations of fear started to die down and I could persuade myself to not keep looking down at things in the distance far below me through the grating and alarming myself all over again every time I did so.
This photograph was clearly taken mere minutes before, or after, the photograph at the top of Page 23.
I am trying, as much as I can, to keep things in a chronological order, but I also want you to receive, as soon as possible, as you read through these pages in sequence, the broadest-possible look at things, so that you might develop the widest sense and understanding of this miraculous place, in order to then inform your subsequent delvings into greater detail with subsequent photographs, and it's a hopeless task, and it's doomed to failure, because I'm going to get it wrong, too often, but I'm going to be doing it anyway, so at least now you might understand, if and when, photographs don't quite follow the most precise temporal sequence that they could.
The Flame Deflector.
We have already visited the Flame Deflector in these stories.
You're looking directly at it, right there in the center of the frame, filling up all the space between the five-story vertical walls that make up the Flame Trench.
Running east/west along the crest of the Flame Deflector you can see the row of SSW Spray Headers which were located there. Inside the deflector, there was some serious plumbing. And it was fed from a 6 foot diameter header that came in through the wall of the flame trench, down at the bottom of things.
Just prior to engine ignition, SSW water was pumped furiously through these, and other, spray headers, and in so doing, diluted, not much, but just enough, the ferocious effects of heat, blast, and shock wave, that the Space Shuttle produced when it took off.
As the SSME turbines ramped up toward full power for six-odd seconds prior to the SRB's kicking in, which is when the Shuttle starts moving, the exhaust from the SSME's sprayed down hellishly, directly upon the the sloping ramp of the Flame Deflector. And along the full length of its top edge, running from one side of the flame trench to the other, there was this row of closely-spaced spray headers. And the job of these spray headers was to protect the Flame Deflector as well as the rest of the adjacent pad, and, most importantly, the Space Shuttle itself.
Those SSME's were a thing to be reckoned with.
And over on the other side, the SRB's were much worse.
When the Shuttle flew, this thing took it right on the chin, and its job was to deflect the impossibly-powerful exhaust to the side, redirecting it safely away from the Space Shuttle, in order to allow it to get up and away from the pad without destroying itself in the attempt.
Rockets are insanely energetic things, and the larger the rocket, the more insane the energy level, and by the time you've reached the scale of something as large as the Space Shuttle, the human mind loses all hope of properly understanding things directly.
So instead, you start looking around at some of the stuff that's involved indirectly, and you attempt to gain understanding that way.
And you look at the flame deflector, and you look at how big it is and how heavy and close-spaced the iron which is made from is, and you look at what it's coated in (and if you're lucky, you will have had an opportunity to look at other, similarly-coated objects that have endured their share of launches and have seen with your own eyes exactly what those launches did to them), and although you are aware that you will still never understand exactly what's going on directly, you begin to get the faintest glimmerings that something perfectly horrific is occurring. Something that you want no parts of. Something to be stayed very far away from when it happens.
As an aside, I'm pretty sure that the fact of having grown up more or less in the shadow of these launch pads is the root cause of my complete lack of interest in fast and powerful cars, fast and powerful boats, and most (but not all) fast and powerful airplanes. Somebody or other is trying to persuade me that the race-car they're talking about is really something, and inside, I'm thinking F-1's and SSME's, and I just cannot bring myself to feel very much at all by way of impressment with something that generates a total output of perhaps a thousand horsepower when compared to things that have fuel pumps (just the fuel pump, not the whole motor) that generate 70,000 horsepower. I recall being this way as a small child (this kind of extreme high-energy stuff has fascinated me from day one, and I remain just as fascinated with it now as I ever did), and the feeling has never left me, all my life.
In the immediate near-foreground, you're getting a good look at the removable handrails along the Orbiter Mold Line, and can see pretty well just exactly what kinds of components they were made of. A36 bent-plate steel socket welded to the toeplate, with a hole through-drilled for a stainless-steel detent pin which hangs on a stainless-steel chain lanyard, aluminum post, stainless-steel threaded eye nuts, and galvanized hooks and safety chain.
These removable handrails here at elevation 112'-0" are illustrative of the chasing-around through the drawings that you'd have to do sometimes, to find out what it was that they wanted somewhere, and often enough, it could turn out to be a surprisingly elaborate and difficult process, and that goes double, considering that what we're trying to do in this instance is a very small and very simple thing.
We're structural people. Ok, fine. Here's the structural drawing for this area. S-31.
What a mess!
Ok, I'll give you some help with it, and here it is, zoomed-in for just the area we're interested in along the margins of the steel-bar grating in the area of the cutout for the Orbiter's OMS Pods and Tail, and I've gone ahead and given you some more help, and highlighted everything they've got to tell us about handrails on this particular drawing.
And you can see that in the area of the curved C8x11.5 channel that fronts the cutout for the OMS Pods... no handrail.
And not only no handrail, but no mention of handrail, either.
Lovely.
Ok, so where is it?
And you use your previous experience with this stuff to go look somewhere else.
And in the Mechanical package, lo-and-behold... on drawing M-44... and... well... at least it's something. And to its credit, it at least, sort of, in the absence of any actual specified dimensions or callouts, if we cock our heads and squint at it just so, is appearing to tell us how many removable handrail posts there are along this short run of curved C8x11.5 channel, and although it's not coming right out and telling us, it's sort of letting us know that the outboard posts, the posts farthest away from the centerline of the RSS, are not exactly on the corner of the curved C8x11.5 channel, but instead are inboard just a little bit, even with, on a line that's parallel to the face of the RSS, the other ends of the safety chains they support, which are attached (somehow) to the inboard flanges of the W8x31 columns on Line B.7 at Lines 3.4 and 4.6, and yeah, this is a particularly lousy way to specify this kind of thing, but maybe a walk over to the NASA Engineering trailer and a few exchanged words with the nice people over there will be sufficient for us to presume that's in fact what they really wanted, and without submitting paper on it, we can move forward with that much of things, anyway, but clearly, we're still not done yet.
We've got a start on it, but it's still not telling us what we need to actually make these things, but at least on this one, they're kind enough to point us to the Architectural package, on sheet A-30, Detail 'M' and 'M1'.
So let's head on over to A-30 and see what's going on, over there.
Well... I suppose. But notice how they've craftily decided to, for no reason whatsoever, and only in this one area, start calling the kickplate... not a toeplate... oh no... now it's a curb.
Curb?
Yeah, now it's a curb, and you'd best be aware of it, lest you find yourself in a bad way with things later on somehow.
And we're still not done.
We still don't know how to make the safety chains, and nobody's said a peep about detent pins.
And once again, we find ourselves scratching our heads over where we might find such a thing, and we might also be just a little bit irritated with the fact that M-44 specifically mentioned "safety chains" when it sent us to details 'M' and 'M1' on drawing A-30, but A-30 makes only the vaguest and least-useful mention of "stainless steel chain railings" without any further elucidation of matters or any further direction as to where you might need to go to find these things, and shall we mention that the "chain" down here at elevation 112'-0" is visibly galvanized (duller-looking, not as shiny as stainless steel, and yes, a trained eye has no trouble whatsoever ascertaining that fact based on nothing more than a quick visual glance at it) and not stainless steel? No. Let us not make mention that the "chain" down here at elevation 112'-0" is not stainless steel.
Lovely. Just lovely.
And once again, we find ourselves falling back on nothing more concrete than previous experience with this stuff, and once again we find ourselves bouncing away from the drawing package we're now looking at, and (only because we've seen it before, and only because we remember seeing it there), we complete the circle and return to the Structural package, and lo-and-behold once again, we find that which we seek, almost, way out toward the very end of the package, on sheet S-97 (complete with an order countermanding our previous vague instruction from A-30 to furnish stainless steel chains, and which callout do you trust, and which callout does the Contracting Officer trust?). And, as a special bonus, it even tells us how to connect our safety chains to those columns on Line B.7 at Lines 3.4 and 4.6. Hooray!
Except that there is nothing whatsoever on S-97 about the damned lanyards that hold the detent pins to the handrail post, or anything about the detent pins themselves, either.
And off to the races we go, once again, to find (if we can) the particulars of the lanyard which holds the detent pin (as well as the detent pin itself), via yet another one of those infuriating "dot" callouts on the detail which offer no clue whatsoever as to where this detail might be getting called from, (note please that the other details on drawing S-98 do have callouts from where they're being taken from, and which therefore do not offer any help for us down here at elevation 112'-0" which is excluded from the given referrals) and the only drawing we have with that information is wrong insofar as the way it specifies how to attach the lanyard to the handrail post down here at elevation 112'-0", and none of the shown configurations for the posts fitting down into the sockets match what we're seeing at elevation 112'-0", and notice please how the drawing which does show the configuration for the posts fitting down into the sockets correctly, fails utterly to even admit that any lanyards or detent pins even exist in the first place, and...
Gah. And when you look back at the photograph at the top of this page, closely, you can see that the lanyards are attached with some kind of collar thing that goes around the handrail post, and no, I have no recollection of how or why it was done that way down here, and... who knows?
What I do know is that everybody, and I mean everybody from the very top, all the way down to the very bottom, and all points in between, hated these damnable things, because they did not add to the structure, and they did not add to the sensible progress of the overall job and the business of getting paid for that overall progress, and even though that was most assuredly the case, they did wind up taking outrageous and astounding amounts of time and effort to furnish and install, and they were magnets for idiot inspectors who had no idea how the tower worked, or what it was even for, but they sure as hell knew how to take out a tape measure and measure the distance from the grating to where maybe the lanyard was attached to a post, and if it was off by a quarter inch, they would write up paper on it, and you'd find yourself once again dancing with these things, spending even more time and effort on their manifest stupidity, and...
...yeah, nobody liked 'em, except maybe for the very-most junior, and very-least competent, members of the inspection and quality control apparatus, and...
Feh.
And that's how that gets done.
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