The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 42: RSS Hurricane Tie-Downs.
| Pad B Stories - Table of Contents |
RSS Hurricane Tie-downs.
There's two sets of them at each end of the RSS's travel, one set on this side, and the other set three-hundred some odd feet away from you, out of frame left, across the Flame Trench at the bottom of Column Line 7, where the RSS presently sits in its demate position. In this photograph, you're seeing the four forward members of the set for the RSS in mate position, the one that lines up with the face of the RSS on Column Line B, the side facing the Space Shuttle when the RSS is rotated around to span the Flame Trench and service the Space Shuttle.
The rear members, the ones that line up with the back of the RSS on Column Line A, are out of frame left, 65'-11¾" on-center from the ones you see here.
And it may not look like much in this photograph (which is way less than optimal for seeing the actual tie-down plates themselves, but which is excellent for showing the overall sense and location of things), but in the tied-down position, the RSS could be jacked up, locking wedges got crowbarred through matching holes in the Tie-down Plates and the Truck Drive Side Plates, and the two sets of Tie-downs, on their own, held up the entire weight of the 4 million pound RSS out here on its far end, and also held it in place against hurricane wind loads, if need be.
And during a hurricane, a thing like the RSS, with its large sail area, would develop a tremendous lateral force of almost a half million pounds pushing against it trying hard to push it down the rails it traveled along, and in order to keep it from going anywhere, it needed to be locked in place, and locked well.
Here's the whole thing, nicely-colored for identification of the main elements, but without further explanation, which we'll be getting into as we go along. For now, it's enough to say that it was pretty substantial system, and it worked well.
For a basic summary of things out on the bottom of Column Line 7, this should be enough to give you an idea as to what they were up against when they originally designed it.
This photograph was taken moments after the panorama photograph on the previous page, after I had stepped back and away a little bit in order to frame things a little better, and shows us the reason I was up on the Pad this day in the first place, which is of course the Hurricane Tie-downs and there sits my little yellow VW Beetle, parked at the scene of the crime.
And there's a little bit more going on with the Tie-downs than the drawing I just linked to shows, so here comes the rest of it, including the exact item that brought me up to the Pad Deck this day.
The basic Truck Drive system was designed, along with everything else, back in the 70's, and was a marvel of mechanical engineering, but, as is usual with fast-track projects, there were a few loose ends that wound up being covered by subsequent Change Orders, and for the Tie-downs, one of the Change Orders added a set of Adjustable Locks which got welded on to the ends of the Tie-down Plates, and which restrained the RSS from moving laterally along the length of the rails that supported it (hurricane conditions, remember?), and did so in a way that allowed the RSS to come to rest at the end of its travel without need for undue precision in its final location, via the use of very heavy threaded rods which butted snug up against the edges of the Truck Drive Side Plates on both ends of the Truck.
This is an area of heavy iron, and the steel plates which enclosed the Truck Drives on either side, and which bore the full weight of the RSS at times, were four inches thick.
Heavy stuff.
All well and good, but for reasons that I never learned, one of the Adjustable Lock Plates did not make it to the job site with the rest of them. Who can know why?
It's enough to know that it arrived late, all by itself, nothing else included.
The guy who delivered it was not a regular truck driver, but instead just some guy in a car or pickup truck (I do not remember), and instead of taking it up on the Pad Deck, and putting it in the shake-out yard with all the other iron that got delivered to the pad, he brought it to Sheffield Steel's field trailer, got his paperwork signed, drove off, and at that point I became involved with things.
I was always looking for ways to get out of the trailer and up on the Pad, and since I knew my way around up there just fine by this time, I told Dick Walls that I'd be happy to take it up to the Pad Deck, where the ironworkers were now getting ready to install it, and Dick gave me a bemused smile and said, "Ok," while giving my rattly little VW Beetle a look that did not inspire confidence.
As a life-long Steel Guy, Dick Walls had a pretty damn good idea as to the weight of the thing just by seeing it, and he gave my car a sidelong "look" as a direct result of that.
So let's stop right here and have ourselves a little fun (and maybe dip our toes just the teency-weenciest little bit into real engineering) and calculate what it weighed, ok?
Math is nothing more nor less than a form of highly-organized magic. Never forget this, ok? And being a magician is fun, and it gives you mysterious and potent power over things, and I don't care what any of the dumb-asses who can't handle it might say to the contrary.
Fuckem.
Ok. Here's the drawing, straight from the people who cooked it all up in the beginning, and please note that this drawing uses metric dimensions for everything, which means we're going to be dealing with millimeters instead of inches.
Total envelope for this thing was 64mm thick by 292mm wide by 407mm tall.
Small.
You could easily fit it inside the bag you carry your full-size laptop computer with the 17" screen around in.
The bag wouldn't like it when you went to pick it up by the strap, but it would fit.
Ok, what's its volume?
Feel free to check my numbers, which is one of the reasons I'm putting 'em out here in plain sight for anybody to see, and verify for themselves (trust, but always verify), and if I've got it wrong, well then, pretty please invoke the email address down at the bottom of this page, and get me squared up with the straight scoop, ok? I do not like being wrong, and am always as happy as can be, whenever I discover that I've strayed from The Path, and some kind soul stops and takes the time and effort to redirect me back onto The Path.
Locking Plates dimensions in mm, plate is 64mm thick.
Whole Plate 292x407x64=7606016 cu mm.
Less slot for screw 64x72x63=290304 cu mm. 7606016-290304=7315712 --> 7315712 cu mm.
Less square cutout for lock bar 64x83x168=892416 cu mm. 7315712-892416=6423296 --> 6423296 cu mm.
Less both corner clips 64x140x76=680960 cu mm. 6423296-680960=5742336 --> 5742336 cu mm.
Total volume steel = 5742336 cu mm.
So.
What's it weigh?
Density of steel is approximately 7.85 g/cm3 and 1 cubic millimeter is 1/1000 of a cubic centimeter, weight of one cubic millimeter is 7.85/1000 = 0.00785 g --> 7.85 milligrams.
7.85 mg x 5742336 cu mm = 45077337.6 mg.
45077337.6 mg = 99.37851820567 pounds.
Call it 100 pounds, even, and you won't be wrong enough to notice, even if you were looking for it.
A hundred pounds in your laptop carry bag.
Ok, sure thing. Whatever you say.
So.
Go find something that weighs 100 pounds. Something small. Maybe head down to the gym. I'm guessing they might have something laying around in there that you could use, but then again, maybe not. This thing was pretty thick.
Maybe pick up two of the thinner 50-pound ones, stacked on on top of the other. Small. Heavy. Make sure it fits in the laptop bag, ok?
And you discover it's not impossible to deal with, not by any means, but then again, neither could it ever be considered as being trivial.
Drop that fucker on your toe, and you'll discover quite rapidly just how non-trivial it really is.
And Dick Walls, who was a lifelong Steel Guy, already knew all of that just by glancing at our piece of iron, and so, even as he was giving me permission to schlep this thing up to the pad deck, he was also becoming curious as to just how this was going to work out in the real world.
So... "Oof, this thing's heavy," and I've got hold of it, and the car's already open with the driver's side seatback pushed forward to allow access to the back seat (and at least I had the minimal sense to stay away from the passenger side, because the battery is over there on that side just beneath the back seat-cushions and even an idiot like myself knew enough to avoid all chances of the metal springs in the seat being pushed far enough down to touch the exposed battery terminals down there), and all the crap and surfing-towels and generalized rubbish that lived on the back seat had been tossed up onto the little shelf behind the seat up underneath the back window (clearly visible in the photograph up at the top of this page), and with a few awkward grunts along the way, I go to set it down on the back seat, and I immediately realize that the back seat of a 1972 VW Beetle is NOT designed for such work (yes, it will carry your morbidly-obese Aunt Polly's enormous fat ass, but Aunt Polly's enormous fat ass is quite wide and distributes her ridiculous twinky-fueled weight across a much larger area), and even then, she needs to be careful when sitting down, and this piece of iron tried to go right through the damn seat, so I wound up having to put it on the floorboard back there, and anybody who's ever owned an old VW bug on the beach in Brevard County can tell you that the floor pans tend to rust out, and now I'm wondering if the damn thing is gonna go right through the floor, too, and I finally, very gingerly, very strenuously, got the damn thing in there, and Dick Walls is not doing such a good job of repressing his laughter, and I don't give a shit anyway, 'cause I get to go back up on the Pad Deck again, and where's my camera, and fuck all of you goddamned people anyway!
And in our photograph you see the result of all that, and Elmo McBee (center, wearing brown jacket) and Ray Elkins (Standing to the right of Elmo in the image, and I miss them both, very much. They were, very much, Good Men, and, knowing I had no background whatsoever with this stuff, they, along with everybody else working for Wilhoit and Sheffield, took me under their wing and watched over me, closely, and helped me along when I needed help, and did so with everlasting forbearance and compassion.) laughingly had their apprentice ironworker (who's identity, alas, is lost with me) extract the damn thing from behind the driver's seat, and they were setting it up to get welded to the Tie-down Plates when I took the picture, and somehow the car did not experience a catastrophic structural failure of the back seat floorboards while all this is going on, and the RSS got locked down good, and never blew away during a hurricane, and... that's kind of nice, right?
Yes it is.
Of other interest in our photograph, directly behind Ray Elkins, you can see the Sound Suppression Water Riser for the Orbiter Exhaust Hole in the MLP.
There were three of these SSW Risers feeding water into the MLP, and all three of them were over on the east side of the Flame Trench, and the one we're seeing here is the runt of the litter at 36" in diameter, because the other two were substantially larger at 56" in diameter.
They forced a LOT of water up into the MLP on Launch Day, and this is what they used to do it.
At the time our photograph was taken, the SSW Riser you see behind Ray Elkins had not been finished.
It had been installed on a previous contract before I arrived, and before they could proceed, they needed to verify their newly-installed SSW System, and one of the verifications is by pressure-testing things with a hydrostat test, and to do so, for this (and the other) risers, they needed the whole system to be sealed up tight, and if you look close at the top of the riser, despite the intervening handrail that's in the way, you can just barely make out the fact that it's kind of smooth-round up there, and that smooth-round up there is a "Temporary Dished Head" to enable the hydrostat.
But they weren't very far at all from removing that Temporary Dished Head, and replacing it with the actual Interface that connects to the underside of the MLP, which you can see over there next to the Crawler Trackway sitting on a pallet, partially obscured by our bent-over ironworker and the plywood sheet they've set up as a windbreak (the northwest winds of winter were cutting right along, this day) to allow them to properly weld the Adjustable Lock Plate to the Hurricane Tie-down. So we're looking at things in a kind of in-between state with this riser, in our photograph.
As specified in the contractural divisions of labor, this SSW Riser work was owned by the pipefitters, and Wilhoit's ironworkers never touched any of it, and as a result, my own interactions with, and knowledge of, the entire Sound Suppression Water System was quite limited.
Which did not to the slightest degree keep me from being curious about it, and attempting to learn as much as I could about it, but there was much that I never so much as suspected the existence of during all the years I was up on the Pad.
Elsewhere in the photograph, across the Flame Trench, familiar faces are visible.
MLP Mount Mechanism 6 above and to the left of our ironworkers with one of the MLP "Downspouts" immediately to its right directly above Elmo McBee, the great dark mass of the RSS, floating improbably in the upper left quadrant of the image, the Hinge Column and Struts to its right, the bright color of the FSS to the right of that with hard-hatted workers on a couple of levels, our Pad/MLP Utilities Platform down at the bottom just above my car, and to the left of that, a gentleman in a red hardhat staring directly into the eyes of the camera, and probably wondering to himself, "Ok, who the hell is that guy over there with a camera taking pictures, and what's he doing here?"
And the answer to that is not altogether believable for a place like this, so maybe we should just leave well enough alone with it and not worry about it.
Return to 16streets.comACRONYMS LOOK-UP PAGEContact Email Link |