The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B

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

Page 53: Hanging the Iron, PBK & Contingency Platform Mods.

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This is how the iron is hung.

By Union Ironworkers.

You're standing on the RSS Side 4 PBK Platform at elevation 133'-9", looking southwest, straight across the face of the RSS, toward Side 2.

By purest coincidence, the main longitudinal axis of the RSS at Pad B, in the demate position in which it was constructed, lines up near-perfectly with the VAB, which you can see in this photograph, off in the far distance through the steel which supports the lower portion, the portion with the catwalk on it, of the PBK & Contingency Platform overall framework.

In this image, things are very much in a state of flux.

Very much neither here nor there.

Almost the entire right-side margin of the photograph, all but just a little bit down at the bottom, is taken up by the Orbiter Side Seal Panel, which is in its extended position.

Immediately to the left of the Side Seal Panel, the vertical extent of the Canister Guide Rail is clearly visible.

And on it, visible with equal clarity, down near its bottom end, you can see the blackened smears of recent torch and welding work. Its near flange, the one which we learned on the previous page got clipped at its very bottom to permit an easier, horizontal, entry of the Canister Guide Shoe into the recess of the Guide Rail, is casting a shadow on the web of the Guide Rail, and just behind where that shadow comes to a point, something has been welded pretty much right in the middle of the web, and that's not gonna work, when it comes time to run the Guide Shoe up the Guide Rail, and it serves as still more indication of things being reworked, and also stands as good evidence that Union Ironworkers don't really give a shit about your final configuration, and if they need something of yours to enable them to get whatever they're doing, done, well then, they're going to take it, and use it, and if the process of using it involves a little torchwork or welding or both, then that's exactly what they're going to do.

I have no recollection of what was going on down here to cause that little bit of iron to get tacked on to things right in the middle of the Guide Rail web, but whatever it was, they needed it, and so they very reasonably took it.

Torch it off later, after you're done with it. Put a grinder to the scar to smooth it down, level and even. Hit it with some touch-up paint. Aside from the slight alteration in color from the touch-up paint, nobody would know anything had even happened here in the first place. And this is how they go about it. This is how they get it done.

And if you're wondering about grinders, that's exactly what that is, laying unattended on the float resting against the bottom end of the flange of the big W36 that carries the Guide Rail, and the Side Seal Panel, and a lot more too, and which also keeps everything in the vicinity of the opening of the Payload Changeout Room nice and stiff, nice and rigid.

Hanging down below where it's clamped on to the bottom end of the Guide Rail web, that looks like a welding electrode with a white plastic grip, but there's no heavy black wire coming off of it, so I have to back up and just say that I don't really know what it is, but it might be. And it might not be, too.

Up on the PBK Platform itself, three ironworkers are focused on the task at hand, and my recollections are poor at best, but that might be Ray Elkins on the left, with John Foster to his right, and to the right of John, blocking the sun with his hand to shade his eyes, is someone I cannot not identify to even the slightest degree.

Get a close look at where they're standing.

Click the photograph, zoom it in, and have a look at the bottom cuff area of John's blue jeans past its right margin.

That green is grass, and the vertical white line is a bit of the cross-country piping that comes in from the Hypergol Fuel Building out near the Pad perimeter, and it's all nearly a quarter-mile away from you, off in the distance.

That whole area over there on the platform is wide-open.

The front part of the left foot of our unidentified ironworker is hanging out, over nothing at all.

Eighty feet up above hard flat concrete.

And nobody is looking where they're standing.

All eyes are on that incoming steel beam and the sling and rope that carries it, in-motion, hanging at a very dynamic angle, and its coming their way.

And if it's a W8x24 (and it may very well be), and it's as long as the platform is wide, then it weighs nearly as much as any of the men watching it, and it will go right through you, if you let it. It will sweep you off the iron as if you weren't even there.

And we're all right on the edge here.

We're all right on the edge, with the crane operator.

And I don't get much chance to talk about crane operators in this thing, and I'm going to stop right here...

...and do a little talking about Crane Operators.

Only the very best are chosen for this kind of work.

And how good might very best be?

I will tell you a little story about how good that can get.

This happened back when I was still working for Sheffield Steel.

The crane operator was working for Wilhoit and his name was "Nobel" and that much I can recall, but the spelling of his name may well be off.

Great goddamned big red Manitowoc, two hundred feet of boom, give or take.

And I was up there on the pad deck one day, underneath the RSS over on the Column Line 7 side of things, and Nobel was in his cab, parked out in front of the RSS with the boom facing north and east, and nothing was going on for him at the moment while the ironworkers were blazing away at god-knows-what somewhere in the sky up above us, and he had some free time on his hands.

And it took me a minute before what was going on over there in the corner of my eye properly registered, at which point I dumbfoundedly stopped everything I was doing and gave it my full and complete attention.

Nobel had the boom at a pretty high angle, and the headache ball hanging from the end of the jib on the whip line was just about eye-level with him as he sat in the cab, and he was doing repetitions. He was performing a little arrangement with his crane like a high-end Concert Violinist, practicing on her instrument with exquisite technique, repeating scales or perhaps some little riff, over and over, seamlessly, without flaw.

And he'd have everything in equilibrium, with the headache ball suspended, still and motionless, right there in front of him, suspended beneath a ruler-straight vertical wire rope coming down from the head sheave on the jib, two-hundred some-odd feet above him.

And then, and remember now, the guy was just playing around, just amusing himself, just passing the time, he'd smartly boom left, rotating the crane cab and boom (which we cannot forget is somewhere around 200 feet in length) to his left, and of course the tip of the jib would initially get out in front of the headache ball with the ball's resting inertia (those headache balls are heavy) causing it to resist the initial motion and not want to go anywhere right away, and physics would belatedly instruct the ball, "Hey! Get over there! You're not directly beneath the sheave that's supporting you anymore," and the ball would start swinging across to the side, right to left, as a pendulum swings.

Nobel's still working the crane, still swinging the boom right to left, with the headache ball still playing catch-up with the tip of the boom, far above it.

At which point he'd suddenly reverse the direction he was booming the crane, rotating the crane cab and boom in the opposite direction, and would now be booming right, swinging the whole works in the opposite direction, left to right.

But only briefly.

And then stop that rotation, recenter the boom a little left again, and come to a complete halt, no rotation in either direction, crane cab perfectly still, once again. And the whole thing only took just a very few seconds. From start to finish, it was quick.

And the whole time he was working the boom, the ball, and the line it was suspended from, both continued to reposition themselves, still traveling in the original direction they started with. Still traveling right to left.

Until the headache ball finally caught up with things and got to exactly where Nobel had originally wanted it to go in the first place, with his crane boom pointing more or less north by now, stopping dead without any further pendulum motion.

Just... stop.

On a dime.

Whip line coming off the head sheave on the jib once again dead vertical, ruler-straight. No motion of any kind. Any where.

The ball would swing to the side from right to left, get to where Nobel wanted it, and then cease all movement. No pendulum action of any kind.

Line dead-straight, ball dead still.

In one smooth motion.

Go try this for yourself, maybe. With a yo-yo hanging down on a long string or something.

Swing that fucker to the side, and then, as the yo-yo starts moving to the side, correct, and then stop your swing, in a way that causes the yo-yo to come to a smooth stop in its new location without any further swinging from side-to-side. Without any further pendulum motion.

And I'm guessing you won't be able to do it.

With a fucking piece of string and a goddamned child's toy on the end of it.

Now go get yourself a nice full-size construction crane. Put a couple of hundred feet of boom on it.

Now do it with that.

Yeah.

And that's kind of what you're seeing in the photograph up at the top of this page.

The line holding up the beam is way off-vertical. Way out there. Looking like it's going to want to snatch the beam back toward the left, and then start some very dangerous pendulum motion with the beam swinging away, and then back again, and there's people standing right there...

...and that thing will sweep you right off the platform if you get in front of it the wrong way...

...but that's not what's happening at all.

Out of sight, far above the top edge of the photograph, the crane's boom isn't sitting still.

And our crane operator (who alas I cannot remember anything at all about, above and beyond the fact that he was world-class) is on that shit.

And in similar manner as the way the skip box met the perimeter of the floor steel at 135'-7" when we read about it back on Page 13, the steel beam you see in the photograph is not behaving in any way like you might expect based on the appearance of this single fragment of frozen time, and is going to move rapidly toward the waiting ironworkers, and just before it gets to them, it will suddenly slow way down, and come in for a feather-light approach, hardly moving at all, where somebody can lay hands on it and pull it farther in, while the operator gently lets it down just a little bit farther, where it will come to rest on whatever the ironworkers want it to come to rest on, where they can then take the rope off of it, and release the operator to take the headache ball with its hook and sling attached below, back around, and down, over in the shakeout yard somewhere, and start the whole process over again, with a new piece, or pieces, of iron.

And the iron is inbound...

And it's moving...

And as you're reading these words, you have to stop.

And you have to stop and think about this kind of stuff.

Or otherwise your brain will just dismiss it.

Your brain wants no parts of any of this, and its only recourse to keep it from starting to feel things, is to just...

...block them out.

Make it go away.

But when you're up on high steel...

It never goes away.

And down here, sitting in your comfortable chair inside a nice air-conditioned room somewhere...

Surrounded by safe and familiar and comfortable objects and people...

With no life-threat darkening your horizon in any direction...

And your brain just kind of shorts out, skips over, completely fails to register...

And your safe and familiar world keeps right on going...

Safe and familiar and comfortable.

...but up on the iron...

It's different.

And the cold fingers of death are never far away.

And you occasionally feel a light brush as the Wings of Death pass by you.

Invisibly...

Silently...

Near-imperceptibly...

But you feel them in your presence close-by, anyway.

And maybe you stop momentarily, and just kind of look around.

Just kind of recenter yourself.

And make sure it's all accounted for.

And as we clambered out and across the wide-open pipe bracing beneath the Left SRB Access Platform one day, I was told by Steve Skinner...

With the softest drawl imaginable.

A drawl as soft as a pillow.

With no edge to it whatsoever...

..."Don't step in the hole."

And it burned me like a branding iron.

And I wasn't planning on stepping in the hole...

...but we were in a place...

...and sometimes the place is easy...

With strong steel-pipe handrails at your side and sturdy steel-bar grating beneath your feet...

...but sometimes it's not...

...sometimes it's not easy...

And you can never allow yourself to step in the hole...

And you look back up at that photograph up there on the top of this page...

And you force your brain to think about it...

And you look at those guys...

And you will never in your life feel any of it.

Unless its your boots...

...with your feet inside of them...

...that need to be kept out of the hole.

And you never talk to anybody about it.

You never give it a chance to come into being...

...by talking about it.

But it's always there. It's always there with you.

It's always there beneath you.

And today, we're out on the PBK & Contingency Platforms.

We're rebuilding the PBK & Contingency Platforms.

And to understand the rebuild, we need to understand the initial installation, and to understand the initial installation, we need to go all the way back to the original drawings for the original Pad, which of course is Pad A, and which also of course I was not around to witness or learn about, which leaves me a little blind in places.

So ok.

So a set of platforms down low, level with the aft fuselage of the Orbiter, hanging off the face of the RSS like an afterthought, and my gut feeling is exactly that.

This whole thing was implemented after the fact.

After the original design for the RSS was implemented in the very beginning of things, back in the 1970's.

Somebody wanted a PBK. A Payload Bay Kit, which can also be researched as an "OMS Kit" and I recommend you do so, because there's some really outré stuff to be found out in the deep weeds, multiple pages down into a google search.

Actually, several somebody's wanted a PBK.

And we'll get to that in just a minute, but first let's include a link to where we originally crossed paths with PBK, back on Page 6 of this set of photo essays, when we really started to sink our teeth into this thing for real, and then another one on Page 32, where we delved into it a little bit more, which itself contains yet another link that backs us up to Page 24, where there's more links, including a couple of drawings that serve pretty well to let us see the overall wholeness of this area, in which, as we're now learning, there's a lot of stuff going on.

Ah yes, it all comes back to me now. Lower Hypergol World. I remember it well.

But it's not all hypergol down here...

Some of it is SSME's. Space Shuttle Main Engines.

Which we'd very much rather not be dealing with, out on the Pad, but sometimes we must.

And those SSME's are very nice, and they pack one hell of a wallop, but of course for some people, it's never enough.

They always want more.

People like NRO.

Or even distant tentacles of NASA itself.

And there are many more, some people, too, but we're not going down that particular rabbit hole right now.

Maybe later.

And when you're flying a Space Shuttle, what they always want more of, is "ΔV." "Delta V." "Change in Velocity." And it's never a change that involves less velocity. Oh no, perish forbid we might wind up with less velocity. No no no. What we want is more velocity.

And in their endless quest for more, at some point back in Space Shuttle Ur-time, after the main design of the thing had been frozen, and it was past altering, somebody, or several somebodies, with enough clout to make it stick, demanded more velocity, and by this point in Frozen Design Time, there was no way in hell they were going to get their ΔV by pushing the original design any harder, and so they were forced into looking for their ΔV outside the original design, and "Hey looky there, look at that big ol' Payload Bay that Space Shuttle thing's got in it, just sitting there empty, with all the room in the world inside of it, and golly it sure would be swell if we could maybe, not too disruptively, kinda put some more fuel tanks inside of that thing, and hook some nice plumbing up to the OMS Motors to pump all that extra fuel into 'em with to run 'em a whole lot longer with, and golly gee, I wonder how much more of that yummy ΔV we like so much we could get by doing it that way?"

Turns out, they could get a fairly hefty portion of more ΔV that way, and I've seen, here and there, numbers up to 1,500 feet per second, and that's gonna give you more velocity to the tune of 1,000 miles per hour, and that's moving right along and for the ΔV junkies who wanted it, it was more than they could resist, and they leaned in to it, and they almost pulled it off.

Almost.

But not quite.

And although a door actually did get cut into the side of the Orbiter on both sides, no PBK was ever built and placed inside the Payload Bay.

The doors never got used for their original as-designed purpose. Even once.

And nobody ever got their 1 kilofoot per second more ΔV, either.

But they did get the doors in both sides of the Orbiter, and the doors required access, and that access was provided, prior to the whole thing being scrapped as untenable, and it was called the PBK & Contingency Platforms, and what's this Contingency you keep referring to, anyway?

And we've already talked about it, and you can go up on this page a little bit and hit those links I put in there and refer to that, ok? Not gonna write it again. No. Not gonna.

And the rework that we're seeing in the photograph at the top of this page was all about the Contingency Platform, but since it was hanging off of the main PBK Access Platform framing like an afterthought tacked on to an afterthought, we must understand the PBK Platform first, in order to understand the Contingency Platform that was hanging off the end of it.

And the Contingency had nothing whatsoever to do with the Payload Bay Kit, above and beyond the fact that both things ended up at a set of doors on either side of the Orbiter's aft fuselage area, and both sets of doors on the Orbiter were pretty damn close to each other back there on the rear end of the fuselage on both sides of the Orbiter in a place where, in order to get to them, you had to walk out and away from the main body of the RSS across it's face on platforming at elevation 133'-9" (at Pad B), passing just above the rounded top of the TSM's as you do so, which are in the way (remember, we only use this stuff when the Orbiter is mated to the RSS which means the MLP is also there, and the TSM's are sticking up from the deck of the MLP and getting in the way, so the PBK Platforms must to be up above them to clear them when the RSS mates and demates), and for that reason, the Contingency Platforms had to be a sort of extension hanging down from the end of both PBK Platforms down at an elevation below the top of the goddamned TSM which is in the way, and making life difficult for everybody, and the way they originally did it...

Turned out to be...

...unfortunate.

Let us look once again at this odd little Contingency flip-up. One that, despite its very small size, is quite complex.

And we've met it before, several places in fact, including back on Page 37, complete with a marked-up drawing to let you see things in pretty good detail, including the (non-obvious on the drawings) fact that in order to get to Contingency Platform at all, you MUST have the actual PBK flip-up folded all the way back through an arc of 180°, which lays it face down on the fixed PBK Platform grating, which means there's a discontinuity in the level of the PBK Platform equal to the thickness of this flip-up, just before you get to the end of the platform, which constitutes a very real, and very dangerous, trip hazard, and talking from personal experience, as well as the consensus of other people's shared experiences, I can tell you for a fact, that this thing will get you. And if that is not enough, there's another discontinuity, in the opposite direction, one foot from the precipice at the end of the PBK Platform, beyond which is an open space, with a very small platform, 4'-5" beneath its dead-end edge. So the goddamned thing wants to get you and the goddamned thing wants to get you twice, and this is without the slightest doubt, the worst fucking platform on the whole tower because of this.

And you're in a truly lousy place to be getting tripped, and the greater the hurry you might be in, attempting to get to (or from) that motherfucking Contingency Platform down there out on the far end of things, the greater the odds are that you WILL trip on the miserable goddamned thing.

So ok. So what's your hurry, anyway? Why the big rush? You know better than that. You know better than to go running across any platform or expanse of grating, anywhere on the towers.

So it's your own damn fault if you trip.

And this is precisely the design philosophy that went into the construction of this stuff.

And it might be right.

And it might be wrong, too.

And designers and engineers are notoriously impossible to talk with, once they convinced themselves that they've thought things all the way through, and none of the people above them in the food chain that they've had check their work, or review their work, have raised any concerns about their design.

And this happens all the time.

It is a constant of the profession.

And it's good to have confidence in your work.

And it's good to laugh in the face of unqualified non-professionals who question your work...


...except when it's not.


And why are you going on, and on, and ON, about this anyway, MacLaren?

What's the big fucking deal here?

It's just a stupid flip-up platform that is going to hardly ever get used anyway, giving access to a hatchway in the Orbiter's Aft Fuselage area that provides access to the Engine Compartment, which is a place that should never be seeing very much traffic at all, once they're done with the Orbiter over at the OPF.

Well...

...maybe.

And maybe not.

The fact that this little flip-up is here in the first place might be enough to give us pause, and to cause us to perhaps... question things... even if only a little bit.

On the off-chance that...

...maybe...

And presuming nobody is in a hurry, which they have no business being in, anyway, right? They're going to step carefully across that pair of canceling discontinuities, and then, with their boots on the edge of the platform, they're going to turn around backwards, and head 4'-5" down that ladder, a ladder I might wish to point out, which is NOT caged, and which has NO side-guard above and beyond the height of the removable handrail posts and safety chains that were emplaced down below on the Contingency Platform by the High Crew people who were the ones who initially folded the PBK flip back, and then folded the Contingency flip down, and they were tied off as they did so, so what's the big deal here? What the fuck is the problem here? And besides, the people who will be out here on this thing are familiar with all of it, both High Crew and Ops people. They've been here before. They know the place, and are well aware of the peculiarities and hazards that can be found here. So ok. So you're turned around backwards, and you're taking your first steps down that ladder, or perhaps your last steps going back up that ladder, and when you're in that place...

Well...

We wish we had a little more protection to our sides, but this is a place where there's no room for that. Hell, there's no room for anything down here. We're hemmed in by a ladder that barely fits into this place in front of us, and the Orbiter crowding in on us from behind, and we've got removable handrails and safety chains above us and below us, and...

...shouldn't that be enough?

Of course it should.

And that's why they designed it this way.

It was enough.

More than enough, even.

Until one day...

...in a way that nobody had the presence of mind to consider in advance...

...things went terribly wrong.

And although a lot has been said about this accident, in certain regards, nothing at all has been said about this accident, and for the purposes of digging down deeper into the truth of the matter, these words taken from the NASA web page I just linked to are telling...

"Rescuers airlifted Bjornstad to a hospital, but he died en route. Cole never regained consciousness and died in the hospital on April 1. Mullon survived, but died in 1995 from long-term complications from the accident."

And of that entire group of telling words, the word that tells the most is Rescuers.

Rescuers.

And as, at the top of this page, when we were forcing our brains to actually stop, and actually consider, we must stop, and do that, yet again.

...

And in your ambulance, lights flashing, sirens wailing, you are flying down the Crawlerway toward Pad A where Colombia is sitting on top of the MLP and the RSS is mated to it

There's been a call...

And there is no time...

As you stop at the Pad Gate for Security (yes indeed, out here, everybody stops and shows their credentials to Security).

As you race up the Pad Slope to the elevator doors at the base of the FSS...

And out at the 135' level and across the twists and turns of the Crossover Catwalk...

And from there, around to the PBK & Contingency Platforms...

Where you must be careful in your haste, as you approach the end of the fixed catwalk framing...

Being careful not to trip and fall on that damnable double-discontinuity...

And you're wearing your hazardous atmosphere gear as a cumbersome and bulky backpack...

And you're turning around, trying not to bang it, or entangle it, in the close confines of the steel as you prepare to go down that ladder...

And there's guys down there...

Two of them just inside the 50-1 Door, and another farther in, farther into the cramped recesses of the Engine Compartment...

And now you, and your crew, must get them out...

NOW!

But you're on this miserable goddamned postage stamp of a platform...

At the bottom of a fucking unguarded ladder...

And there's no room to turn around for yourself, nevermind another rescuer down there with you...

And you're working furiously, wearing insufferably bulky hazardous atmosphere gear...

Through a far-too-small hatchway to the Orbiter's interior...

On an astoundingly cramped and dangerous platform with only a few removable handrail posts strung with frighteningly-loose safety chains between you and the arm or leg-breaking complexity of the LH2 TSM umbilicals, just a few feet beneath you if you're "lucky", or the bottom of the Flame Trench, through the Orbiter Exhaust Hole in the MLP, 120 feet farther down, if you're not...

With the dangerously-squared-off edges of the bottom of the Canister Guide Rail along with the implacable steel roundness of the Side Seal Panel Drive unit crowding down on you from above, four and three-quarters feet above the hatefully-small platform you are desperately trying to maneuver around on...

And you have barely enough room to turn around...

And your crew is trying to work with you...

But there's nowhere for any of them to stand beside you...

And you're hauling on the first victim you encounter, unmoving, not sure whether he's alive or dead...

And he's inert, and he's HEAVY...

And you're dragging him out on to the platform with you...

Trying not to bang your head or put a fearsome gouge in the top of your shoulder blade...

Trying not to go over the side...

Even though there's no room for him...

Or you...

And your crewmates are working beside you and above you, up on the main portion of the PBK Platform...

AND HOW IN THE NAME OF FUCK ARE WE SUPPOSED TO GET THIS GUY UP THIS GODDAMN UNGUARDED LADDER WITHOUT LOSING HIM OVER THE SIDE AS WE LIFT HIM?...

And up above you people are stumbling on that goddamned pair of discontinuities...

And the time...

Oh God, the TIME...

This is taking far too much TIME...

And there's TWO MORE of them in there...

And...

Go back and look at that drawing again.

Imagine being there.

Imagine it's you that's doing it...

Imagine lifting someone up and out of there.

Without losing him over the side as you do so...

Imagine!!

And it was not a good day that day.

And in the end, three people did not make it.

And how much of the fact that they did not make it can we lay at the feet of time lost because of that evil motherfucking little platform set those bastards built?

And in the end...

The whole thing got reworked...

And we've just been through a pretty close looking-over of its original configuration, so let us now proceed to its reworked configuration.

And here's an isometric view of it with the reconfigured PBK Platform retracted and extended, with the Contingency Platform and stair, beneath it, and with that stair now a part of the Contingency Platform, never again would anyone have to battle that damnable little unguarded ladder, desperately trying to extract an unconscious victim from inside the 50-1 Door and get them the hell off the tower to where rescue might be waiting to get them to a proper medical facility as fast as humanly possible to do so.

Not that it'll ever do a goddamned thing for anybody who's already gone, but the hope was that a thing like that would never happen again.

And the exigencies of the thing caused this rework to be exceedingly complex, and this is the configuration (Up to a point. Nothing ever stands completely still out here.) you were seeing in the zoomed-in NASA photograph on the previous page, when we were getting the full story about things with the pair of winches that draw the bottom of the Canister into flush contact with the face of the RSS, after it's been lifted all the way up.

And now that we've seen the isometric view for a generalized depiction of what was being done to this area when the photograph at the top of the page was taken, let's now begin to work our way farther down into the fine details of things.

79K24048, which only very recently fell out of the sky, directly into my lap, tells the tale, but let's review 79K14110 to see what it looked like originally, and drawing M-34, which we've encountered previously in marked-up form, gives us a pretty good pair of elevation views to do so.

79K24048's version of this drawing is S-160, and please notice how, in the time between the issuance of the two different contracts which were depicted in the two different 79K drawing packages, somebody decided to take this stuff out of the mechanical package (the 'M' drawings), and drop it into the structural package (the 'S' drawings), and nary a word was said about it anywhere, and it just sort of "happened" and this stands as a sterling example of how large and significant things just sort of move around, and it's up to you, Mister Contractor, to take note of this kind of stuff, and you bid the goddamned job, so now you build the goddamned job, and it's not for us to hold you by the hand, and tell you where we hid the damn thing this time, and in case you didn't know, it's the old Shell Game, and if you fail to find any of this stuff... well... tough luck.

And this is how the game is played, and you'd best be nimble and you'd best be ready for this kind of thing coming at you unexpectedly, unannounced in advance, and... yeah.

Big Contracting Fun, out on the Shuttle Pad.

Feh.

And on top of that, our good friend 79K24048 S-160 is clearly a washoff (about which more, much more, later, but not right now), and it's not enough that they just washed it off, they doctored it up, too, and that adds another whole dimension to the ways things can go horribly horribly wrong when it's your money that's on the line with this stuff.

I've been doctoring things up left and right, but at least I've been trying to warn you when I'm doing it, to keep you from gaining false impressions of things, and to further help you keep track of things as we continue to travel through what has by now become a bewilderingly-phantasmagoric landscape, that occasionally kills people, where nothing is what it appears to be, and everything seems to want to morph into everything else, sometimes by fits and starts, and sometimes en masse, and now here we are encountering the same damn thing at the hands of the people who are designing it, and who remain steadfastly close-mouthed about it the whole time.

They grabbed the pair of elevation views off of M-34, doctored 'em up, and pasted 'em in to S-160, but that wasn't enough for them, and in the process of doing that they also simply obliterated the plan view of the Hinged Stair shown in the upper left portion of M-34, and replaced it with a plan view of the area adjacent to and behind the PBK Platform, where they decided to create a little extra storage space for themselves stuffed up in there between the Hypergol Spill Duct and the PCR Wall Panels, extending from the back of the PBK Platform, and just kind of going up and over the 16"Ø RSS Main Framing pipe diagonal in there, which caused them to have to make a particularly-weird sort-of-a-stair with a couple of wedge-shaped risers, laid down with an unsettlingly-hazardous change of angle between them, sort of like what you might get in a spiral staircase, but not really, next to a very steep piece of serrated grating that loses a foot and a half of elevation over a horizontal distance of only 2'-2", and where the wider ends of the wedge-shaped risers met that steep piece of serrated grating... there was nothing at all, and yes, thank you for asking, that thing was quite the little trip hazard, and I suppose having that piece of serrated grating there was a good thing, because it would keep you from going through, but you still very definitely did NOT want to ever be hitting that thing, because it was cocked up at a nasty angle, and plain-vanilla steel-bar grating will slice the holy living shit out of you all by itself if you fall and manage to hit it at an angle, and of course if you add some nice serrations to it... well... just imagine. Just imagine the shape that you, your hands, or maybe even your face, would be in, as you picked yourself up off of that little beauty.

Oh yes, such a wonderful little place this was...

And here it is here, on S-168, just as innocuous-looking as you could ever ask for.

And of course they liked it so much, the did it twice, with one on each side of the PCR, and...

And by now the bitter end of the PBK Access Platform had become extensible, and that sends us off into yet another patch of very deep weeds, so... ok... may as well put on the heavy trousers and snake-boots and head on out there to see what that thing was like.

And this thing wound up bearing more than just a passing resemblance to the extensible SRB Access Platforms that we met for the very first time way back on Page 6, so it's not like we've never dealt with such a thing before, but still...

And of course everything seems to be "Two steps forward, one step back," so now we'll step back, just a trifle, and take another general-arrangement view of things, with an eye toward trying to understand the extensible parts of them.

And when you do that, you get something that looks like this, which is depicted on S-162.

And now you start to get an idea as to just how hairy it can get, when all you ever wanted to do was to simply give your technicians sensible access to some of the systems which required hands-on attention every now and then.

Wait'll we get down to where we're inside this thing... it gets better.

But for now, you can see that in order for this platform to extend out for access, and then retract back out of the way to allow for different access, for a different platform just below it, and to also be able to simply get it the hell out of the way when the RSS was swinging around like the battleship that it was, mating and demating with the impossibly delicate systems on the Orbiter, a whole lotta precision-orchestrated shit had to go on, involving a whole lotta weird gear, and... I did say hairy, didn't I?

So ok, so let's crawl down inside of this thing and see what really makes it go.

And yeah, there's really a lot of stuff going on in here, as shown on S-164, eh?

I was thinking about marking it up with the addition of colored labels and arrows, like I usually do with the rest of these things, but it was just too confusing and cluttered in there, and it was never going to work, and there's already copious notes (a lot of which I've yellow-highlighted) on the drawing, and the highlighted areas of the differing components are fairly straightforward to understand on their own terms, so instead, I'll just kind of give you a run-down on what it is you're seeing here, and you can refer to S-164 as you read along, ok?

In hard dark blue, you can see the "original" Fixed PBK Platform Framing, end-on, (none of which is actually "original," and every last bit of it is new construction, installed after the original stuff we'd gone to all the time and trouble to furnish and install was demolished per drawing S-159) which is what you'd walk across to get to the flip-ups out at the end of things, so as you could go work on the Orbiter, or maybe attach a sling to the bottom of the Canister, to suck it all the way back into the face of the tower so they could go to work doing Payload Stuff.

In green, you can see the body, the carriage assembly, of the new extensible platform.

In orange, you can see the grooved wheels attached to the extensible platform, which moved along with it, and which were supported below, and movement-constrained above, by the dark-blue stainless-steel angles which made up the support and guide rails, below and above them respectively.

In yellow (excepting the yellow-highlighted notes that are sprinkled around all over the place, of course), the entirety of the actuation mechanism that caused the extensible platform to extend out, and then get retracted back into, the dark-blue fixed platform framing which supported it, can be seen, starting from top left where you get a delightfully old-timey steel handwheel that you would turn, which would then, via a long and pretty indirect path through various gear reducers, shafts, flex couplings, and stuff, wind up spinning a small spur gear that engaged with a long gear-rack that was attached down the center of the extensible platform along its underside. Turn the handle, turn the spur gear, trundle the platform in and out, tra la la.

And in light blue, you get the beef-up support steel W8x58 along with what it uses to tie to and stiffen the fixed framing of the PBK Platform, plus the pillow blocks that hold the horizontal actuation shaft in place, as well as one of the 10"Ø RSS Main Framing Pipes.

Also in light blue, up at the top of the drawing in Section B, you get the support plate that holds the lower gear reducer which is part of the actuation mechanism, and you oughtta be looking at how that reducer is bolted on to the plate, 'cause it's not level, and did somebody make a mistake on the drawing and lay it out cockeyed?

And the answer to that is, "No, that's precisely how they made the thing, with deliberate intent."

Why?

And you look for the source of that section cut 'B' and you find it down low, over on the left, looking at the reducer from point-blank range cutting through that nice heavy W8x58 which is holding up the whole works over here, and looking at 'B' again, we see that they put the reducer on the side of that W8 away from the end of the platforming.

Ok fine, all well and good.

Then we return to S-162, and we see that they wanted the handwheel just as close to the end of the fixed platforming as they could get it (and yes, every additional inch does matter, and it matters a lot), to give the tech who was rolling the platform outwards or inwards, the very best view possible, closest to things out there at the far end of the range of platform-travel (Mind that Space Shuttle there, Lou, we don't want to go breaking that thing, do we?) from his location on the far end of the fixed platforming, and ok, the reducer was tied to the W8 in a place that kept it within the envelope of the full length of the gear rack beneath the platform which the spur gear engaged with to actually move the thing, but the handwheel's free to pretty much go wherever we might want it to go, so ok we'll just kick the location of the handwheel out as far toward the business-end of the platform as we can, and then run the shaft from the wheel down to the reducer at an angle, and okey dokey, that's exactly what they did.

So that's how all of that works, ok?

And we really wish we were done with this stuff, but we're not, and what's coming is... insane... but they had no choice, and it's a woolly booger to properly understand, and you would never in your life believe that things had to be this way, but you wanted to understand this stuff, or otherwise you wouldn't be here in the first place, and now we're gonna take a good close look at the bizarro flip-ups and folding stair(!) out at the very end of things where the actual work gets done, and if you think this stuff is bad, wait'll we get to the Guide Columns, and once we get to that monstrosity, you will look back fondly on the ease and straightforwardness of all this stuff down here at the end of the PBK & Contingency Platforms, and...

...don't say I didn't warn you, ok?

Now. About those bizarro flip-ups out at the very end of things...

Oh boy, here we go again, two steps forward, one step back.

And in The Land of Two Steps Forward, One Step Back, we are going to find ourselves more or less starting over from scratch again, and the main reason for having to start over from scratch again, just to try and figure out the stupid flip-ups at the ends of this stuff, is because these PRC/BRPH drawings are fucking GARBAGE, and we've been completely spoiled by the RS&H drawings we were using back in the beginning of things, and... this is some chopped-up shit, and it's low-quality chopped-up shit, but it meets the spec, just barely, and so NASA approved it, and now we find ourselves having to live with it, but god DAMN it, I never liked these drawings when I was actually using them, and I STILL don't like them, today. And of course the ironworkers, the people who actually had to build this stuff, HATED them, too. And not just here, either. The whole drawing package, 79K24048, in toto, is low-quality chopped-up garbage. Every. Last. Bit. Of. It. So don't go expecting things to get better, once we've extracted ourselves from the present morass, ok? There is no promised land. It never gets better. Gird your loins accordingly, ok?

And whatever else you do, don't go blaming me for the fragmented mess you're about to endure, and don't blame me for the bone-breakingly choppy ride, either.

As we find ourselves going through this crap, try to keep in mind that I'm having to hold on as tight as you are (tighter, actually, 'cause I'm the fucked-up tour guide for this thing), while we all get bounced and jolted along, just trying to get to wherever we're going.

Feh.

There are TWO levels of flip-ups out here, ok?

One at the far end of the extensible platform that we just drilled down into, foolishly thinking that we were gaining full understanding of it as we did so.

And another level, not very far at all down below that stuff, which is our old nemesis, the Contingency Platform.

And they're separate and distinct things, except that they're not, and each of them come into play with the other, and each of them dictated configuration of the other, as a result.

Let's give Image 033 another look, keeping in mind that every bit of what we're seeing with the PBK & Contingency Platforms got completely destroyed, thrown away, and rebuilt from scratch, and I've marked it up for you to show you the sense of what's coming, and never forget that what you're looking at in Image 033 is the exact platform set which gives access to the 50-1 Door on the Orbiter, in its original as-built configuration in which the events transpired, over on Pad A, wherein three people died. Never forget, that despite my own sardonic take on things, and despite my own overblown editorializing and rants and raves, this is deadly-serious, life-and-death stuff. Never forget that, ok?

And now, with the new stuff, that we're seeing only partially built in the photograph at the top of this page, we'll work from the top down, and do the flip-up crap on the extensible platform, the actual "PBK" part of things, first. Except that it's not all (or even mostly) flip-up stuff, 'cause a big piece of it is removable stuff. So get ready for it, 'cause here it comes.

So here it is in isometric view, on S-166, which we've already seen before, but now we find that we need to look at it again, and... what the hell's going on with this stuff, anyway?

And of course the drawing has nothing whatsoever to say about any of the "why's" that surround everything that it's showing us, like an impenetrably-dark cloud, and simply sticks to the "what" part of things, exclusively.

And we find ourselves having to jump over to drawing S-163 (and along about in here somewhere, you should be coming to the realization that they didn't even bother to change any of the drawing titles), hoping that maybe it will give us a little more useful information about this thing, but nope, not gonna happen, and instead we find ourselves dealing with yet another garbage drawing, that just barely meets the spec, and just barely gives us enough information to maybe... kinda... sorta... build this thing, but no, I never have been able to find the callout for the hinge on that little piece of hinged grating out there, and I have retained no memory of this crap, but my gut feeling is that we wrote an RFI, and got some damned horseshit answer or other, and whatever it was, it wound up being just enough, and so a hinge was furnished and installed, and the little grating panel was from thenceforth flippable, but as to the sense of any of this stuff... nope. No sense for you, Mister Contractor.

And we can look back at S-166, and scratch our heads over it for as long as we like, but whatever it was that drove this design, is permanently lost in a murky past that shall never be retrieved by humans, and this is some of the daffiest stuff on the tower, and when you stop and consider that it was all dictated by people actually DYING out here, it begins to take on some very darkly-Kafkaesque undertones, and let us just stop for a minute, and consider this damnfool thing.

They went to an awful lot of time and trouble to fix this thing up so as the Contingency Platform down beneath it could be accessed simultaneously with the PBK Platform up above it in full-extended position.

That much is clear.

Hell, there's a great big HOLE in the grating that lets you walk right down to the bottom of the stair, and get out on the Contingency Platform.

Ok, fine.

And they even, in their magnanimity, added a little extra by way of access, in the form of that little grating panel out there at the end of things, which flips back, opening up a patch of overhead room for anybody who might be forced into having to work down below on the Contingency Platform, while the Extensible Platform was extended, and this is quite the grace they've bestowed upon that unfortunate individual, because otherwise that person will find themselves to be standing on a Contingency Platform at elevation 129'-5", underneath an Extensible Platform with the underside of its structural framing at elevation 132'-10¼" which is only 3'-5¼" above them, not even counting the gear rack bolted on to the underside of the damn thing, and that's some pretty close quarters under there, and of course the grating flip panel rests on the forward structural framework of the Extensible Platform, which is perforce not going anywhere, and remains in place, pressing down from above in a very claustrophobic and unsafe way, and even if you back away from the far end, and get up under that hole which provides access down the goddamned stair, you're still going to be dealing with the bottom end of the Canister Guide Rail that the flip-panel of grating had to be notched to keep from hitting (and which, please note, is never correctly shown on any of these drawings for this area, and they failed to include the clipped flange which allows for an easier entrance of the Canister Guide Shoe, which we recently learned all about, and that kinda makes you wonder what else they've failed to include), which is hovering malevolently above you with its bottom end at an ever-so-slightly-more-forgiving elevation of 133'-11½", giving us a whole 4'-6½" of overhead clearance before we accidentally bash our head or shoulder-blade into it, and...

...this whole thing is just...

...stupid!

DANGEROUSLY stupid!

And why in all holy fuck they might have decided that they HAD to provide access to the Contingency Platform with the Extensible Platform just above it extended...

...nobody knows!

They just... did!

And of course it's a non-trivial operation just to simply remove and reinstall that section of removable aluminum grating panels, too. It ain't just a matter of "pick it up and move it out of the way." Oh no. Not even. The damn thing his held on with saddle clips which are screwed down onto metal studs, and leave that stuff out in the weather for a month or three, and all of a sudden, just getting the nuts off the studs, so as you can remove the saddle clips (Don't go dropping that thing, Lou, we don't have anymore spares left after the last time you dropped one.) and then and only then, remove the grating panels!

Looks easy as pie on the drawings, but just you get your ass out there on the iron and see how "easy" it is, when it's you that's doing it.

And about the stupid "flip" panel of grating...

What's holding that thing down out there?

The removable handrail that fits down over it?

Sure looks it to me, but the drawing remains steadfastly silent about it, so who knows?

None of this stuff is properly detailed. Properly accounted for. Properly finished.

Garbage drawings.

So ok, so since we like garbage drawings so much, let's go look at some more of 'em.

Let's go look at how they're showing us the Contingency Platform and the ridiculous stair that it's hanging from.

Sure.

Why not?

And here it is here, on S-161, and... ok... don't look all so very complicated, so... ok.

Until you actually start to try and figure this thing out, as shown on yet another one of these horrid PRC/BRPH drawings, with enough understanding to actually build it.

How's the grating on this thing work?

How do the hinges on this thing work?

Are you really telling me that you're slapping 1½" aluminum (which isn't too well-renowned for its strength) grating panels with their bearing bars running crosswise to the direction that it's cantilevered out there 1'-8¾", more or less butt up against the side of the Orbiter, laying it down on top of the platform frame which contains inset flush-mounted steel-bar grating, using J-bolts that reach around and grab the steel-bar grating from below? Really? Really really?? Really really really???

'Cause that's sure as hell exactly what they're showing us on the drawing here, except of course you have to jump over to S-162 to find out about the J-bolts, right?

And I was going to point out a whole bunch more. Just with this one little flip-up. But things are clearly getting out of hand, and we're gonna cut our losses with this thing here and now, but since we're such gluttons for punishment, well then of course we're going to go take a look at the folding stair.

Folding Stair.

Not a hinged stair, oh no, that's not good enough. That would never do.

This one needs to fold, and good lordygollamighty does it ever fold.

Behold the glories of the Contingency Access Platform Folding Stair as depicted on (turns, and spits disgustedly on the ground), PRC/BRPH drawing S-165.

And I ain't gettin' into this shit, ok? There's not enough paper in the whole world for me to write it all down for you.

Just... no.

Not gonna do it.

YOU figure it out.

We already built the sonofabitch once, and that was plenty more than enough, and I'm not gonna go building it again. Not with these goddamned drawings. No.

This time, you get to build it.

And I'm gonna stand over here off to the side, and watch you do it.

But, since I'm such a nice guy, I will help you out some.

I'll point out the "3 Steps" on S-165 for you, that tell you all you'll ever need to know, about working this thing, once it's finished-built.

Easy peasy, one two three.

And you can now look at the photograph at the top of the page once again, where Union Ironworkers are putting it on the line for this stuff, and by this point you should have enough understanding to recognize most of what you're looking at, from that nice heavy W8x58 holding things up from down underneath on the side closest to us, to the longitudinal members of the fixed PBK Platform framing, partially grated-over, with two of our three ironworkers standing on that grating and one on the (ungrated) longitudinal member itself, to the Extensible Platform which is already in place, lurking in there between the two main longitudinal fixed framing members, completely hidden from view except for its leading edge with its single stair tread aimed in our direction, to the Canister Guide Rail which the Extensible Platform will barely miss, as it slides in our direction just beneath it, to the fact that the stupid Folding Stair, with it's equally-stupid Contingency Access Flip-up Platform hanging off the end of it has yet to be installed, to...

...a whole lot more.

And you get to build the whole thing...

...using...

S-159

S-160

S-161

S-162

S-163

S-164

S-165

S-166

S-167

and S-168

And that's it, no more, do it with what we gave you, or we'll find somebody else who can.


\\\\\\\
ADDENDUM, 2023 08 20:
And once again more engineering drawings come plummeting unexpectedly out of a clear blue sky and land directly in my lap.

And we now get to see how the corresponding set of access platforms for this unpleasant area between the bottom of the OMS Pod bulge and the Wing, at the aft end of the Orbiter's fuselage, were handled in the VAB!

Once again, clearly, there have been revisions to the drawings, and such original configurations as may have existed are now irrevocably gone, but we have plenty enough to work with, just the same.

I'm going to try to keep this as brief as I can...

...but this is a devilishly-complex set of platforms, with an even more devilishly-complex set of reasons and rationales behind their design/build/modify philosophies...

...so wish me luck, ok?

We'll start out with a review look at the aft end of the Orbiter's fuselage in the areas of interest, where our platforms need to be giving us access to, ok?

And before we go any further, you must know that our areas of interest are not the same as they were, out on the Pad, because, we're now inside the VAB, and it's... different.

So ok, so here's Orbiter Access Panels - Penetrations - Markings Left Side 2-2a, rotated to put the Orbiter in the vertical orientation you find yourself working on it in the VAB after it's been hung on the Tank, and out at the Pad, with labels for all the stuff you're already familiar with from reading up to this point, along with a couple of people we haven't really looked at too closely, and it's all been done-up the way it is, with an eye toward getting you organized on how and why the platforms, in the VAB, that corresponded to the PBK & Contingency Platforms out on the Pad, were constructed and arranged the way they were.

So that's your baseline for the Orbiter with this VAB stuff, and now we'll need to get some baseline with the VAB itself.

Which was very unlike the Pad, and instead of having Launch Vehicle Access Platforms tied back to the structure, they had their platforming inside of what they called "Extensible Work Platforms," and that name is pretty misleading, because these things were GIANT, anywhere from 22 to 51 feet in height, by just about 40 feet square, completely enclosed except for where they interfaced with the Saturn V for which they were originally furnished and installed to service, and they were mobile, sliding back and forth twenty-five feet, give or take, on heavy rail assemblies, and...

They were monsters, and you can kind of get an idea of how big they really were in this photograph of them being constructed, out in front of the LCC (and there's people visible on top of them in a couple of places to give you a sense of scale with it), taken in February, 1965, and it's only the fact that the VAB is... ridiculous... that causes you to not properly appreciate their full size, and all of the standard-type "Vehicle Access Platforms" of a form that we're familiar with from our time spent out on the Pad lived inside of them...

And just to give you a little better feel for what these things looked like, here's Extensible Work Platforms C (near) and E (far), laying on the ground outside of the VAB after they had been removed, in preparations for further modifications to the VAB for the Artemis Program.

And you can see all of them here, viewed looking down from high above, inside the VAB, in this NASA time-lapse video, titled "Vehicle Assembly Building Platform Removal - NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla." getting removed for the coming Artemis mods.

...and it was all just a little bit... different.

Originally, there were five sets of these things in each VAB High Bay, named, creatively enough, A through E, going from the top of the Saturn V down, and here on the original Urbahn-Roberts-Seelye-Moran drawing PH-182 (the 'P' standing for "Platform" and the 'H' standing for "High bay"), you can see the whole thing, top to bottom, complete with the cutout locations (unlabeled, visible in Elevation B) for the LUT Swing Arms which were mated to the vehicle while it was being serviced inside the VAB.

And here on drawing PH-184, you get a nice view (the drawing says "isometric view" but that's bullshit, because the rendering clearly shows perspective, which makes it a perspective view, and a proper isometric does not show perspective, giving all three dimensional axes equal length, which is where that "iso" comes from, but that's a nitpick for another day) of Platform 'D' and Platform D is right where we're gonna be going here with this stuff, pretty quick.

And that's all well and good, but we're not talking about Project Apollo, we're talking about the Space Shuttle, so... whuffo?

And whuffo because the Shuttle Program came along after the Apollo Program, and found itself dealing with a lot of existing Apollo infrastructure, not least amongst which, the VAB, and...

Those monster Extensible Work Platforms are never gonna work for the Shuttle "as-is," but they're too nice to throw away, so... how 'bout we reuse 'em?

And to do that, they very naturally found themselves having to modify them of course, but they also found themselves having to relocate them, and since they only used High Bay's 1 and 3 (front-left and front-right as you look at the VAB from the east) to stack the Shuttle, they wound up with a pile of extras, which they reluctantly had to shitcan, and all of that wound up looking like...

79K05424 sheet S-2 which gives us the Removal Procedure for the existing Apollo-era Extensible Work Platforms in the VAB.

And then you turn to 79K05424 sheet S-3 for the Installation Procedure, and maybe kind of take note of the platform installation sequence, 'cause it answers questions that people always ask if they don't know about this end of things.

And once all that's done, you get what shows here on 79K05424 sheet S-7, and just so you know, the stuff over on the right side where they stow the External Tanks in High Bay 4, is all new, and is not reused Extensible Work Platforms. And while we're here, take a look at the Platform identification letters sequence, going from the ground up: D, B, E, C!!! Gah. But it's for a reason, and the reason is that they had to reuse these things, which were originally furnished and installed (in proper sequence I might add) to work on a Saturn V, and they all had individual identification letters, and those letters stayed with them, even when they shuffled the deck and threw away a few of the cards as they did so, and with those same individual identification letters still associated with their respective individual platforms, the engineering is thereby simplified, and greatly reduces the chances for the sorts of potentially catastrophic mixups that occur when you start swapping names around back and forth with things, and if you don't like the goddamned sequence, well then tough shit for you, 'cause that's what we're using.

So man up Nancy, and quit whining about it, and really, the miracle is (considering how wildly-different the outline of the Space Shuttle Stack is from the outline of the Saturn V) that these Extensible Work Platforms could even be reused at all. But they pulled it off, and they set it up the way they set it up, and we're now cognizant of all the 'how' and 'why' of it, so we're good to go with it, from now and forever more.

We'll zoom in closer on the Shuttle part of things with 79K05424 sheet S-8, and now we're starting to get a pretty good look at our area of interest with where we're about to encounter Access Platform 65, and we can see that the place down there near the aft end of the Orbiter's fuselage, in that nastily-cramped and ever-so-busy area between the bulge of the OMS Pod and the top of the Wing, is going to be just above Second Floor, Level 78'-0" (VAB, remember? Whole different set of elevations from either Pad) of our reworked Extensible Work Platform D, and that's right were it needs to be, pretty damn close to X_o=1392, (remember THAT stuff?) where we need to get in there to either work the Lifting Sling that gets used to hang the Orbiter on the External Tank, or to open the Aft Fuselage Access Door, and climb inside to work on... whatever might need our attention at any given time.

Dig down a little deeper, and with 79K05424 sheet S-33 we get an Architectural (despite that 'S' on the drawing number) plan view of Platform D, Second Floor, Elevation 78'-0", things are now coming into much clearer focus, and some of the outlines are quite familiar, and the TSM's show up labeled as "Service Mast (By Others)", and on the right side of the drawing, over where it shows Platform D in its extended position, we can see a dashed rectangular outline labeled as "Future Floor Above T.S.M." and that dashed outline is sitting squarely on top of the TSM, and at this Platform D Second Floor elevation inside the VAB at elevation 78'-0", that TSM is going to be a problem, and I've got a sneaking suspicion that when this drawing package was originally put together before any of this stuff got built, back in 1975, on this particular sheet and just a couple of others that correspond to it, in the very beginning, they still did not quite know what the precise dimensions and outlines of the TSM's were going to be, in their final as-built configuration, and for this reason, they left that "Future Floor Above T.S.M." strictly alone and just went ahead with the rest of it, knowing that at some point they were going to have to return to it and put it in there because without it there's no access to the attach point for the lifting hardware they use to hang the Space Shuttle on the External Tank, and there's also no access to the Aft Fuselage Access Door, and that ain't gonna fly, so we'll just skip over it for the time being and get back to it once we know what the hell we're dealing with back here, and these very particular drawings were left in their original configuration, in a drawing package that got extensively revised in the years after and...

And it's right about here that things start to get fishy again.

It don't smell right around here anymore.

When you look at the other drawings in 79K05424... when you look at all the other Platform Levels...

Everything shows up, nice and solid, nice and buildable...

Except for right here, right where access to the Aft Fuselage Door is located...

Right where three people were KILLED on Pad A with this miserable fucking set of lethally ill-designed platforms...

And god damn it, I've already seen too much of this kind of thing in too many other places, and it seems like every time somebody decides to cover their tracks...

By causing things in drawing packages to mysteriously disappear and/or get opaquely replaced with zero comment about any of it...

They tend to do too good of a job, and it's the sterile spotless emptiness of what gets left behind that is itself a clue...

And every time I see one of these fucking things...

My radar goes off. Loud and clear, red alert, something ain't right here, and I may not know exactly what, but I can sure as hell see that it's something.

Here's all we have by way of structural steel for this area, on 79K05424 sheet S-37, and it's all so very detailed and complete...

Except for one place...

Where we're given nothing at all above and beyond an exquisitely-opaque and non-informative little note telling us about some "Future Floor Above T.S.M." or other...

And...

And as a matter of engineering record, what happens next is that we have a significant gap in things...

That extends unbrokenly from 79K05424 to 79K08103...

With nothing at all in between those two points, frozen in time.

And 79K08103 sheet A-15 is where we encounter a setup that looks exceedingly similar to what we encountered out on the Pad, earlier on this page in 79K24048 sheet S-166 which dates from a time (April 1983) AFTER two people got killed at Pad A one day by nitrogen asphyxiation, and a third died some years later from effects received on the tower in the same incident, with the original design of the PBK & Contingency Platforms being complicit in this matter, and playing the role of enabling-accomplice to the homicide. The configurational exception from 79K24048, as relates to the platforms in the VAB, shows on 79K08103 sheet A-16 and consists in the fact that the upper "PBK" platform portion does not extend and retract, and the lower "Contingency" stair portion does not fold, and instead the whole thing swings up on a hinge which is located up at the top of that stair, but everything else is strikingly similar, and if the horrid little original Contingency Platform, the one with the double-fold flip-up at the bottom of an unpleasant ladder, ever existed in similar form inside the VAB...

No trace of any such thing remains.

But the whole thing on 79K08103 looks very much...

Altered...

And although the version of what has by now been given a name, Access Platform 65 (which corresponds one-to-one with the PBK & Contingency Platforms out on the Pad), is included in a Drawing Package with suitably-old-enough dates on it (1976), that too is no guarantee, and I invite you to go back through and review some of the other material in this narrative to see how things with dates on them do not always correspond with the dates given, having been extensively revised, removed, replaced, or god knows what else, without the title blocks ever suffering the first blemish as a result. This stuff constitutes a handrail that you do NOT ever lean against, lest you suddenly find yourself taking the express route 200 feet straight down to the Pad Deck.

And to understand how they almost, but not quite, successfully covered their tracks with this, we'll need to look at Index Drawing V-2 of drawing package 79K08103, and learn that, unlike so much else we've grown used to in this business, the individual sheet numbers are NOT what you get when you go to look at the Revision Block, and instead, you get the sheet numbers (Huh? What the fuck are you talking about here, MacLaren. You don't get the sheet numbers and instead you get the sheet numbers? What the fuck kind of nonsense is that?), and what we're used to dealing with as sheet numbers on everything heretofore, is handled under a separate column labeled "Func. Code" which is the place where our old friends the 'A' numbers, and 'S' numbers, and etc., which tell us what major division of work any particular sheet can be found as a part of, are located.

And there's a Rev Block on this V-2, and Rev E shows up, but it's pretty much illegible, and the rest of the drawing is plastered with 1976's all over the place, which is before the lethal events involving the corresponding platforms that transpired on Pad A went down on March 19, 1981, and...

We find ourselves having to back up one page, to 79K08103 sheet V-1 (that's what I'm calling it, so fuck you)...

And Son Of A Bitch, but right there, right there in the fucking Title Sheet of the whole Drawing Package...

There it is...

Right there in the Revision Block...

Perfectly legible, despite being just about as misleading as bloody-handed hell...

E INC E0 11-28 REVISED SHEETS 1,2,7,9,15,16A,16B,16C,16D,19,20,24A,24B,24C,24D,33,35A & 35B. ADDED SHEETS: 16E,24E & 24F. 5/30/84.

Loud and clear, hiding in plain sight, in a place where nobody is ever going to see it, and we clearly see the inclusion of "Sheets" 16C and 16D (which are actually sheets A-15 and A-16) in a revision which is dated after the fatal events of March 19, 1981, and this is on a Drawing Package which was originally created in 1976, and...

It's all just a little too convenient. Just a little too easy.

Sly... eh?

Very... very... sly.

So ok, so what I've been calling (and will continue to keep calling) sheet number "A-15" in 79K08103 is actually SHEET NUMBER "16C" and "A-16" is actually "16D" and who the hell besides an obsessive-compulsive crazy guy like me is ever going to come along and dig far enough down into this stuff to nail it to the fucking wall? And they simply were not expecting me, and they thought it would be ok.

But it's not ok, 'cause we now have everything we need to know, and what it tells us is...

Kinda dark, actually.

And then, after 79K08103 had come and gone, 80K58128 came along in 1997 and ripped every bit of it out, and replaced it with something else, completely different...

Wherein they finally just decided to dispense with the whole it's-never-gonna-work-right split-level double-platform deal, with either a ladder or a stair in a nastily-dangerous location, and just let the whole damn catwalk hinge up or down from a point directly above the center of the TSM, to let the techs work straight-level-across at either the Orbiter Mating Sling or down a gently-sloping ramp at the Aft Fuselage Access Door, but never both of them at the same time (And who the fuck ever needed a thing like that in the first place, anyway?), and we're not gonna dig too far down into the nuts and bolts of this reworked-yet-again platform, and instead I'll just give you a general overview of it here on 80K58128 sheet S-4.

Which shows us how it works, up and down, but isn't the best rendering in the world to let you see how the fixed portion of this platform had two arms that cantilevered out toward the Orbiter, between which the hinged part of things moved up and down, secured firmly by a pair of curved tube-steels sticking up from it that slid inside of a retaining bracket on the cantilevered extensions of the fixed part of the platform.

So here it is again, on the better drawing that the electricians were given, 80K58128 sheet E-3, to let you more-easily see those cantilevered arms sticking out there straight and level even as the hinged portion of the platform droops down past the top of the TSM. Feh.

And you look at these computer-generated drawings, and they're all so seamlessly smooth, and polished, and space-age-techno-wonderful, and they beckon you with a welcoming smile, and you'd never guess that out there in the real world, out where people have to fight this shit, to get it to work, it's all a bunch of crap-ass kludgery, and every time the techs had to use this thing, you can rest assured that the cloud of curse-words surrounding the work became quite dense and dark.

Fuck this thing. It was never right, and it never stood a chance, and the people who had to entrust their lives to it didn't stand too much better of a chance, either.

And clearly...

There are things are afoot around this place...

But I haven't learned exactly what...

And my radar continues to alert...

But the wall in front of me is doorless and made of implacable brick...

And I find myself standing at its foot, looking at its impassible face, disclosing no hint of why and how it was placed here, nor what might lie beyond it...

And that's that, then and there.

And whether or not any of my wild tinfoil-hat conspiracy-guy speculations above contain the least grain of truth (there are plenty of good reasons, with far more mundane explanations, for why they might not)...

...I never liked this whole place.

And I don't like being here now.

This is a Bad Place.

And there is Bad Juju in the air, all around it.

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

I'm done with this shit.
///////

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

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