The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B

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

Page 60: OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers, a Nightmare in the Making.

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And here at last, we have come to the end of the line with the story of the fabrication and installation of the OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers, which I have previously been glancing off of in one way or another, in numerous places, for numerous reasons, but always with a tone of anger, and we're going to close the story of these things here and now, and you will learn the source of my anger with them.

I will do my best with what follows, but be advised that I have, so far, been unable to lay hands on any of the drawings for the Covers themselves, or for any of the criminally-underdesigned steel that held them up, and will therefore be unable to give you explicit views of this stuff at the level of detail that I would like to, above and beyond the extraordinarily-lucky pair of photographs (inadequate though they may be) which I took with my own camera.

So. We do the best with what we have and we don't let things stand in our way while we do so, and I've already told you how tricky it gets, using the drawing packages we have at our disposal, to show you the actual layout, the actual steel, in the area of the Orbiter Mold Line in those ares where the OMS Pods meet the RSS.

I need to start out by getting you oriented, giving you the location of the Pod Covers on the RSS, and I'll use a couple of before and after shots to do so.

Here, in Image 047, which you have already seen as the lead photograph for Page 46, you can see the RSS as it looked near the end of my time at Sheffield Steel, sometime mid-1982 or thereabouts, and here in the this version, I've labeled it to show you where the Pod Covers will be hung on the tower.

And here, in a photograph I took early in the morning of August 10, 1984, you can see where I've labeled the Pod Covers on the RSS at Pad A, and I've also labeled the OMS Pods themselves, on Discovery. As an aside, this was prior to Discovery's first mission, but it was its second rollout, because its initial Launch attempt on June 26 resulted in the first ever On-Pad Abort at T-Minus 6 seconds, followed by a pretty scary hydrogen fire (And I got to walk around on the MLP Deck directly underneath it shortly afterwards, and some of what I saw by way of burnt and blackened paint down low on the SRB's, frighteningly close to the openings of the exhaust nozzles, frighteningly close to an entry point where that fire might have come in direct contact with the SRB PROPELLANT, scared the living hell out of me, and I wonder to this day, "How close did they come? How close to losing the whole thing, crew, vehicle, pad and all, did they really come?") which necessitated a rollback to replace an engine, followed by the second rollout which you're seeing here in this photograph.

And now that I've got you located, perhaps this would be a good time to address the why of things. As in WHY did they add this stuff to the tower?

And for that, we'll digress for a bit, and I'll tell you the tale of why. Tell you the tale of creeping Orbiter Weather Protection, of OWP (about which, we're going to be seeing much much more). which the Pod Covers are the first significant element to appear on the RSS at Pad B.

And never forget, while we're at it here, we're working Stage Zero here, which, despite commonly-held belief to the contrary, is harder than the rocket which departs from it. Harder than Stages One... Two... however many. And as with all the other stages, and the payload too, it's a murderously-unforgiving motherfucker, and it will mete out punishments for getting it wrong, and some of those punishments can be...

...harsh.

Initially, exactly as I've already said, back on Page 54, and then again on Page 55 (this really bears repeating, so you're getting it one more time, here, verbatim): "They thought they could just roll the damn thing out there to the pad, completely exposed to the constantly corrosive and occasionally violent Florida beachside weather, and let it sit for days, weeks, and sometimes months." And they bet the whole program on it, but as time went on they they were forced into the realization that it might not have been such a great idea.

And again, before we go any farther, these are not stupid people.

And you are not as smart as they are, and you are most very definitely not smartER than they are, so how 'bout you wipe that aggressively-clueless smirk off your face right now, and tune your mind full-focus to the issues at hand, so as you can give proper attention to how this stuff really works, so as that perhaps, maybe one day, maybe you, will...

...stop...

...and reconsider...

...and maybe step back...

...from the edge of an exquisitely well-hidden precipice which you were marching directly and unwaveringly towards...

...in the middle of a pitch-black night.

We're dealing with a textbook example of the exigencies of budgeting and scheduling. The exigencies of resources stretched so thin, pulled so hard, as to invite a sudden rupture which can bring the whole thing crashing to the earth. The exigencies of time compressed so tightly, into such small and over-strained containers packed one-against-another, that it is rendered into a high-explosive, fully capable of flattening the entire landscape should it be mishandled and suddenly go off. Political Power writ large. Pressing down from unseen heights. Bending every blade of grass on the ground, without exception. Great Forces far beyond the control of those who do the actual work, which capture and hold the individual humans embedded within them in a vice-like grip, and then twist them into shapes, and wring them into positions, against their will, carrying their irreversibly-misshapen bodies and souls along as water flows in a great river, uncaring, unchangeable, unstoppable, having taken on full and complete lives of their own which respond to no man's commands.

On Page 55, the focus of our attention with the full ramifications of this badly underthought initial premise was the External Tank, and now, here on Page 60, the focus of our attention is directed to the Orbiter, hanging off the side of that External Tank, outdoors, at the mercy of...

...whatever might come by. Any of it. All of it. Come what may.

Tiles and Blankets and Reinforced carbon-carbon. Thermal Protection System. TPS. Stuff that keeps the Orbiter from burning up on re-entry. Pretty hard-core pass-or-fail system, and in fact it did fail one time, and that's not good, and my heart still goes out to all those people, all these many long years later. It's tough. It's tough as fuck, goddamnit, and when things go badly wrong.....

Anyway, all that TPS stuff looked pretty damn slick on paper, but, as ever, the real world has a way of coming around all sneaky-like from the side, or behind, and then throwing things right into your face.

It turned out that the tiles and the blankets both had a propensity for taking on water when it rained, and then holding on to that water, and wicking that water elsewhere, in ways that they had not initially considered, or even so much as suspected in the first place, which water then stayed put and remained as part of the vehicle on Launch Day.

Water is nasty stuff as a complicating factor in engineering, and holds no end of deeply-unpleasant surprises for those who fail to take its full set of characteristics, immediate, mid-term, and long-term, some of which are deviously subtle and non-obvious to even the most diligent of observers, into account when designing things.

Water, despite its ever so light and splishy appearances, is fucking heavy.

Don't believe me?

Go fill up a common plastic five-gallon bucket with water and then pick it up and carry it around somewhere. Maybe try to run up a couple of flights of stairs with it. Water is fucking heavy. And that's just a mere five gallons. Multiply that five gallons by ten, a hundred, a thousand, or even more, and suddenly you're dealing with some seriously consequential stuff, possessing the open-ended dynamics to really fuck you up.

This unforeseen uptake of water by the Thermal Protection System (in the very beginning, they were preparing the Orbiter with literal spray-on water repellent before rollout, and they thought this would be good enough, but it most assuredly was not) meant that the Space Shuttle was significantly heavier come launch day, than it was when they first rolled it out to the Pad, which therefore would very clearly demand the necessary additional energy to lift and accelerate the now-heavier Orbiter and insert it into its intended orbit up there somewhere a few hundred miles above your head, hurled to an eye-watering velocity of five fucking miles per second, and which necessary additional energy, above and beyond whatever it was you had originally been given to work with once the tanks had been topped-off and the thing was fully-fueled, was nowhere to be found, and there's not any gas stations up there, so you work with what you've got, or you don't work at all.

Nevermind what that selfsame deviously-subtle water might have been doing to things, slowly, creepingly, invisibly, down there underneath the surface, unseen, unseeable, wicking, migrating, following surfaces and edges around to strange and distant places as water will, into things further away than you might at first, or even ever, imagine, including working its way along and into faying surfaces, possibly introducing corrosion into areas where corrosion would be fatal, or who knows what else.

So. The mere weight of the stuff alone was enough to cause very real problems going uphill, and it's attacking the integrity of your structure in addition to that, but even that's not the end of it, and of course when you're climbing upwards at high speed into the rapidly-darkening sky a mile or ten, continuing to rise higher and higher faster and faster, and the first stars are starting to show despite the fact that it's the middle of the day, it becomes extremely cold and all that water will very reasonably freeze, in a hurry, and the expansion forces of ice formation which routinely split boulders down here on the ground, introduced yet another whole set of potentially fatal issues, and that's not even the end of things when it comes to ice, and yeah..... fucking water.

And so, piecemeal, by slow degrees, as the ever-worsening scope of the very real problem with the fact that it rains like hell in Florida on a regular basis continued to manifest itself in more and more and more unforeseen, unpleasant, and frighteningly-unexpected ways, they built themselves quite the OWP edifice on the RSS and then on the FSS too, hoping to control a thing which they could never fully understand and never fully come to terms with.

It had well and truly become a life or death situation, and there was no way they could back out of it, and I can only imagine just how deeply stressful and scary it was for some of the participants in some of the engineering meetings which were convened along the way to get ahead of this thing before it started killing people.

Rainwater was causing serious problems, preferentially getting into the OMS Pods after running down the side of the Orbiter and encountering the bulge of the Pod sticking outward, down at the bottom, and it was addressed by creating a pair of large clamshell-looking affairs, a sort of "weatherproof" pair of covers which matched the peculiar curved shape of the OMS Pods, but the complications inherent in this approach to keeping water out of the goddamned OMS Pods Thermal Protection System and the ever-so-vulnerable aluminum airframe beneath it, eventually overwhelmed them and the entire system had to be scrapped, but even the scrapping of the system went horribly wrong, and the Pod Covers came down off the tower well before they were ready to implement the next phase of OWP, following...

...not yet. Not right now.

And it wasn't "weatherproof" at all.

Water could still run down the side of the Orbiter and preferentially enter the OMS Pods exterior heat-shield tiles, because you're not going to go caulking the top edge of the Pod Cover in the area where it meets the Pod. No. Not gonna happen. Don't even think about so much as touching the sonofabitch. The mated Orbiter constantly flexes and moves a little, and the RSS which it is mated to also flexes and moves a little too, but they don't ever quite move the same distance and direction at the same time, and now you want to go putting hard metal a bead of caulk's distance away from the eggshell-delicate exterior surface of the orbiter?!? And we're not even going to get started with what the application and removal of that bead of caulk might lead to, short and long term, thermally, chemically, physically, every time the RSS mates and demates. No!! Hands off!

And they knew this in advance. They knew that there was no way to hermetically seal the OMS Pods against the water, using a gargantuan four-million pound mobile steel structure which was never designed from the beginning, to accommodate such measures as they found themselves scrambling around looking for, to make a thing like that happen.

It was tantamount to placing the icing on a wedding cake, using the rudder of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier to do so.

It's never gonna work, and I don't care what anybody says.

The Real World can be cajoled and persuaded in no end of clever ways to achieve some desired end, but the Real World also has limited patience for bullshit, and beyond certain points, you shall not go.

So they satisfied themselves with excluding such water as the Covers would prevent from getting into things that could not tolerate it, and capped that off with the injection of a lot of hot dry air ducted into holes in the Pod Covers, blown all around inside the narrow gap between their interior surfaces and the exterior surfaces of the OMS Pods, and in that way (in theory, at least), water which did manage to enter the Forbidden Zone would promptly be caused to evaporate in the heat and get blown away as an endless supply of more hot dry air was continuously ducted into, and then expelled from, the area beneath the Pod Covers.

But it can't get too hot, for too long, and you can't blow the air in there too hard, because the whole fucking thing was egg-shell-fragile in ridiculously-weird physical and time-dependent ways, and, to quote the Wicked Witch of the West, "These things must be done delicately, or you hurt the spell."

So you line the inside surfaces of your Pod Covers with closed-cell foam-in-place-insulation to keep warm things warm, but not too warm, and you pepper that stuff with temperature and pressure transducers with their business ends poking up just above the surface of the foam ("Mind those eggshells, Lou. Don't go letting that transducer thing stick up past the surface of the foam too far."), and which are wired up, all the way back to the Launch Control Center back at the VAB, and that way, somebody gets to look at a screen somewhere with constantly-updated readouts of what the hell's going on in there, underneath that fucked-up Pod Cover where god himself cannot see...

..and that's really how they did it.

...and suddenly, a well-concealed and completely-unexpected doorway to the past opens up directly in front of us, and reveals archaeological artifacts on the other side that speak of a time long-past, all traces of which we previously believed to have been irrevocably lost, but...

...not quite.

Diligent and back-breaking spadework by pith-helmeted stalwarts beneath a blazing desert sun has rendered up the barest traces of that lost world. Rendered up a few broken shards of pottery...

And here, on an electrical drawing (Of all things, and this is not the sole example of things managing to somehow pass through a very fine sieve, on electrical drawings, and I can only presume that the practitioners of that discipline might have been just a trifling bit less acute of eye, when it came to picking up things on the drawings possessing... structure.), we see that the forces of extirpation...

Missed a little something, despite the very best efforts, of their very best people...

To cast all traces of it into an oblivion which there would never be any return from.

The wiring for all those transducers was inadvertently left in Drawing Package 79K24048, and stands as yet another example of the haste and sloppiness with which this entire PRC/BRPH Engineering Package was slapped together, except that this time, things fell our way. It can't be bad news all the time, can it?

My sleuthing surmise for this one is that it got caught up in the backdraft of drawing 79K24048 sheet E-218 which very definitely needed to be kept in the Package long term, and which is showing us a pressure transducer and signal-conditioner rack down in the ECS Room, nowhere near the OMS Pods or the OMS Pod Covers, which receives input from a variety of places/systems, including the OMS Pods, which, I've got a feeling, is a completely different set of transducers from the ones on the OMS Pod COVERS, but... I really don't know. Whole different place, whole different system, but it had to be kept, and it looks like it kind of dragged the next two drawings in the Package along with it by accident as someone who was harried for time glanced at them and then moved on without taking action on it.

That all said, those next two drawings, very definitely DO show us the Pod COVERS, and this is our shard of broken pottery, prised from its entombment beneath the desert sands.

It may not be a lot, but we'll ever so gratefully take what they're giving us for this one.

It's all we can do.

Regardless of the location of any of the abovereferenced pressure transducers feeding input into an anonymous rack buried deep within the bowels of the Pad, 79K24048 sheet 219, OMS Pod Heater Transducer Installation has taken us up to elevation 125' on the RSS, give or take, because the drawing is... deficient in that regards (and others), and it's giving us the routing for a bunch of electrical stuff, some of which winds up out in front of the RSS, and mirabile dictu, it neatly slices the Pod Covers more or less in half horizontally, and gives us a surprisingly-detailed look at their exact structural configuration at this elevation (whatever it really is), complete with a clear layout depiction of their sets of longerons, their main longitudinal primary structural framing members running full-height vertically through them, along with one of the levels of horizontal beams tying them together at some unknown precise elevation. It's small, but it's enough, and we are extraordinarily lucky to have stumbled upon it after they thought they'd erased all traces of it.

And then, on the very next sheet, 79K24048 sheet E-219A, we get to see them again, this time in elevation view, and although it has a very "schematic-ey" look to it, the sense of things still comes through loud and clear, down to and including the small removable "ARCS Stingers" which hung off the outboard corners of the Pod Covers down on their bottom edges, as well as (just barely) an adequate rendering of where all six hardpoints, the only places on the whole Pod Cover designed to take any kind of external load, no matter how small, were located on each Cover.

These hardpoints will loom large in the events to come, in more than one way, and they did not have any sensible forgiveness of any kind designed into them, and were strictly and exclusively only capable doing their precise given jobs, and not one bit more, dealing with their respective working forces, with the Covers presumed to already be properly located right where they were supposed to be and nowhere else, hanging in suspension off of the face of the RSS, and that lack of forgiveness...

We were the ones who furnished the goddamned things (via a subcontract), and of course MacLaren had to play Receiving and Inspection Guy when they showed up on the back of a wide-load flat-bed semi-trailer at the Pad, after having been fabricated at no small cost, cross-state in Lakeland or somewhere like that at Specialty Maintenance and Construction Incorporated (SMCI).

At which time they were bare metal constructs, painted gloss white like something you'd see in the operating room of a hospital, but otherwise without finishings. Pure aluminum. No foam. No transducers. No wiring. No ducting. Etc. Then we had a different subcontractor come in, whose sole job was to spray the foam-in-place-insulation across the entirety of the orbiter-facing sides of the Pod Covers, scuff or sand or scrape or whatever the hell they did with it to knock down the high spots and get it the specified thickness across its full expanse, and then top coat it with some kind of evil black half-rubber half-paint crap, thick like molasses, very slow to dry, and nasty as a motherfucker, after the electricians had installed the transducers and wired them up under the watchful eye of the NASA QC guy who was probably upset that we didn't hire a team of fucking brain surgeons to do the work, and who was fussy about shit to the point of...

The Pod Covers consisted in an outrageously-complex, faceted, no-curves-anywhere, bevel-fitted all-welded all-aluminum framework consisting of longitudinal, horizontal, and x-bracing members, skinned over with thin aluminum panels, complete with built-in hardpoint support brackets, turnbuckle mounting plates, and even their own built-in Flip Up Platform, and everything was welded aluminum, all-of-a-piece, with the sole exception of the hinge pins for the built-in flip-ups.

The uppermost surfaces of the Pod Covers were covered in aluminum checkerplate, the kind of stuff made for walking on, and served as a "replacement" for that part of the PCR Main Floor which got ripped out and replaced by these things. But nobody trusted them. Nobody walked on them, unless necessity demanded it in some way, and even then it was done with a sort of gingerly walking-on-eggshells trepidation, even by the hardest of hard-core Union Ironworkers, and the quicker you could get the hell off of them and away from them, the better. Everybody was afraid of them. Everybody knew. Except NASA, maybe, who, in their cocksure engineer's-hubris-driven bovine state of self-delusional confidence, seemed to be perfectly comfortable and at-ease with them.

Here's a close crop from a photograph which we will be seeing all of at some point further on in this narrative (and the tale it tells is one of stratospheric ironworker savvy, cunningness, and "can do" approach to making things happen, but not now), and it shows us the tops of the Pod Covers down at the level of the PCR Floor, after they'd been installed, and I've marked it up to help you understand what you're seeing, but otherwise we're getting well ahead of ourselves here, and... no. Not now.

So now, with our newfound knowledge of the detailed structure of the Pod Covers, which we extracted from a couple of electrical(!) drawings, we can return to a cropped version of Image 056, which we first met at the top of Page 51, that I've hit pretty hard in post-process to bring up the details of the ridiculously-intricate all-welded aluminum metalwork with which these things were constructed, and to also use the two ironworkers rigging the Pod Cover to be lifted, for a bit of visual scale to let you know this stuff isn't small, and we'll have a much better chance of understanding what we're seeing here and now, and what we'll be seeing...

...soon enough.

Here's that Black & White image again, labeled, and by now you should be starting to get a bit of a feel for the look and shape of these things, along with the locations of the main players in their construction, and from here, we can start sinking our teeth deeply into the photograph at the top of the page, and learn what's going on with it, what it means, and why any of it might be important.

In the photograph at the top of this page, you are standing on top of the steel-bar grating at the lowest Main Level of the RSS, down at the 112'-0" elevation (the APS Servicing Platform level shown here on 79K14110 sheet S-31), looking up and across the center of the RSS which is at Column Line 4, in the direction of Column Line 7, with a better-than-you-might-expect view of what had to be done to the floor framing of the RSS at elevations 125'-0" (the APU Servicing Platform level shown here in 79K14110 sheet S-32), and 135'-7" (which I don't have a sufficiently-useful drawing of for this work) which I'm therefore not going to even bother with trying to show you, having to explain all the deeply-confusing differences between what's on the (no damn good) drawing, and what's shown in the photograph.

Here's another visualization of things down in the lower reaches of the RSS using 79K24048 sheet A-18, where all three levels of the RSS involved in the photograph at the top of the page (the one you're standing on and the two above it) are shown on a single sheet and I've included your location and point of view, and please note that although Drawing Package 79K24048 came after 79K14110 (which was the one that came after, and butchered all to hell, the Original State of Things, depicted on 79K04400, and then 79K14110 rebutchered the Floor Steel in the area of the OMS Pods Heated Purge Covers), they have somehow, impossibly, not only failed to incorporate the first round of butcherment, but also the second round of butcherment which followed it, and instead have skipped all the way back to the Dawn of Time, before anything had been done to alter any of the Floor Steel down here.

It's stuff like this which will make you want to tear your hair out, take a brisk walk across the parking lot to one of the Engineering Trailers, and start killing people, but you're not allowed to do that, so instead you sit and fume, while chasing this shit down, trying futilely to make some kind, any kind, of fucking sense out of it, and... ho hum, just another day on the job, eh? Suffice it to say, yet again, that these PRC/BRPH 79K24048 drawings are breathtakingly dreadful, everywhere you look, everywhere you go. RS&H spoiled me rotten, and I have been scarred for life as a result of knowing full-well what good engineering looks like. And I'm violently allergic to bad engineering as a result.

So. We return once again to our photograph up at the top of this page, with a much-improved set of eyes which, we hope, may now be good enough to provide us with at least a sporting chance of fucking understanding the horribly disorienting and overcomplicated motherfucker.

When the photograph was taken, the floor framing at elevations 125' and 135' has been butchered and rebuilt, and we're just about to hang our first (left) OMS Pod Heated Purge Cover in an area out of the frame of our photograph, up above and over to the left. There's a tremendous amount of stuff going on in this image, and I'll try my best to explain as much of it as I can in plain English.

Let us orient ourselves, first. I understand that this is a murderously-opaque and difficult photograph to make proper sense of, but not only is it informative on its own terms once you finally figure out what the hell it is that you're looking at here, but it's also informative when it comes to providing maybe just a trifle of insight into what we had to do on a daily basis, putting fiendishly-complex and difficult things together in the first place. So ok. So let's give it a whirl, whatta ya say?

We'll work from the top down, more or less, but there's going to be some unavoidable jumping around, so...

...get ready for it.

Visible in the top left portion of the photograph, you can see some of the 135' level Orbiter Mold Line Perimeter Channel Framing and just a bit of the 135'-7" Floor Steel which is welded to it, coming in from behind, and is what holds it up, but none of this is any kind of straightforward...

...because...

In addition to the 135'-7" Floor Steel itself, additional Pod Cover Support Haunch steel had to be fabricated and installed, to carry the Haunches, just beneath the surface of the 135' floor steel, bolted and welded to it from below. These two small haunches are all there was to hold up the whole Pod Cover, which hung in suspension below them with its Mounting Brackets resting on top of the Haunches.

And when you're viewing this stuff from below, as we are in the photograph at the top of this page, it becomes hard like a motherfucker to distinguish between the two sets of steel framing members, and the limitations of this image, in the lack of any other images to see this stuff from different perspectives, only serves to make things worse. I'm really putting you guys to work here, and I know it, but for some of you it will be well worth it. The rest of you will skip over it anyway, so I'm not going to worry any too much about it, ok?

A great deal of everything else in the photograph is 125' level APU Servicing Platform Floor Steel, and it too contains its own bewildering extraneous crap in the form of unistrut (which was ubiquitous, but which was also thin, and corroded rapidly in the beachside salt-air, causing no end of multifarious problems over time in so doing, and which, periodically, NASA would issue edicts forbidding the use of, but which then, after the edict had been forgotten on the next contract, would return, like steel kudzu, and... for the ironworkers, it was beneath contempt, fit only for the cutting torch if it ever dared intrude into an area where real work was getting done), wires and cables, mounting brackets, steel-bar grating, toeplate, and all the rest of what you've become more than just a little bit familiar with over the course of reading these essays, up to this point.

So I'm counting on you to persevere in the interests of actually understanding not only how this facility was put together, but also gaining sensible understanding of the whole process from design through fabrication to installation, for structural steel projects in general. The work is a bastard, from one end to the other, and if you come away with nothing more than that little piece of insight, then I will consider my mission here accomplished. It's hard, but it's also very much doable.

Also plainly visible, but very hard to pick out of the welter of surrounding extraneous detail without help, you can see the Adjustment Turnbuckles.

For the Right Pod Cover (which will be the one farther away from us as we view the place in our photograph where it's going to get hung on the iron), we're seeing 3 of the 4 turnbuckle SETS (they come TWO to a set), one of the two upper (inboard) and both of the two lower (inboard and outboard). For the Left Pod Cover (the one that will be closer to us) we're seeing only one of the 4 Sets of Adjustment turnbuckles (lower inboard).

That's a LOT of turnbuckles, and those of you with a bit of a feel for how mechanical things operate might want to consider these goof-ass Sets. Each turnbuckle is independently-mounted on its far end (away from the Pod Cover, where the set ties to the steel of the RSS in two different places, and which is rigid and can't go anywhere), but both are tied together on a single piece of metal at their other end (where they tie to the Pod Cover, which is a thing that needs to be moved around some, using the turnbuckles to do so), and once they've been attached to the steel on the RSS, you discover that if you turn the adjustment barrel on only one of them, the bracket on the other end where they're tied together like siamese twins, will immediately start twisting, and if you want to keep that bracket oriented just so (which you DO, and which you MUST), with its flat mounting plate face staying plumb, square, and true, properly aligned for a snug and secure face-to-face fit with the Pod Cover Mounting Plate, then you're gonna have to work the adjustment barrels on BOTH turnbuckles, SIMULTANEOUSLY, and you're all crammed up under here, and this stuff is not light, and you find yourself having to use a goddamned pry bar shoved into the turnbuckle adjustment barrel's slot, just to get the damn thing to simply move at all, and...

Just imagine how fucked up a thing like that could get, in a hurry.

And you're the Turnbuckle Guy. The Pod Covers have been hung on the tower. And today, it's time to adjust the location of the Pod Covers so as we can mate the RSS to the Orbiter properly without smashing into it as we do so. And you're outside on the open platforming of the RSS. No air conditioning for you Mister Turnbuckle Guy. And it's the middle of summer, and it's suffocatingly hot and humid, and the Pod Cover is blocking all of the pitiful little breeze that's trying to blow across the blistering-hot sunbaked steel and concrete of the Pad and cool you off, and you're by turns knees-down on the steel-bar grating, or reaching too far up and across from a ladder, and the fucking wasps have built yet another goddamned nest up under the Floor Steel over your head and they're flying around and they don't really want you there, and you don't really want them there, and now the fucking horse flies have shown up, and you're sweating like a pig, but that only makes it worse, and your shirt's sticking to you like a wet sponge, and the motherfucking adjustment barrel will NOT go, no matter how hard you twist with the fucked-up pry bar, because the damnable siamese twins are, yet again, binding, locked in a battle to the death with each one trying to make the mounting bracket go a different direction as you spin (or... try to, anyway) its adjustment barrel, and there's five engineering, management, and QC overseer people standing around looking over your shoulder tapping their toes while you sweat and curse, wanting you to hurry the fuck up, and...

Stop a minute here and consider this.

Welcome to the fucking Space Age!

Notice also, that the support brackets for the Adjustment Turnbuckles are just as heavy, perhaps even heavier than, the Support Haunches for the Pod Covers. Flip back and forth between different incarnations of the photograph if you need to, to get a proper look at that Turnbuckle Support Bracket steel that's welded to the structure of the RSS. That shit sure the hell ain't going anywhere, but... why? Why so heavy?

Hmm...

And I know all this crap because I did a LOT of work in this area. I had to. I had to because the butchery (mandated, never forget, by NASA Engineering, and you don't touch the sonofabitch until we tell you to touch the sonofabitch, and you touch the sonofabitch exactly like we tell you to touch the sonofabitch, or otherwise you're gonna wind up in Bankruptcy-grade Trouble) of the existing floor steel at 135' and 125' was poorly considered and implemented.

I cannot tell you why.

My guess is that they were in some kind of awful hurry, exceedingly desirous of getting things hacked out of the way and rebuilt before A.) any further steel or equipment was installed in this area as the work kept right on going and would therefor also need to be hacked out at additional time and expense, and B.) because this whole area was Critical Path Country, and they could not stand the thought of backing up the whole fucking Space Shuttle Program so much as a single extra day, as part of their psychotic need to cover their asses and not get fingered as The Ones Who Fucked It All Up.

Zoom way on in with the image at the top of this page (which you've already clicked for the full-size rendering of, yes?).

Drift around in here for a while, zoomed in. We're here on the very day the pod covers were being hung, and there is evidence all over the place, of work done in haste. There are signs. There are signs of heat all over the place. Welding. Torching. There are signs of work done in such a headlong fashion that they waived all the requirements for dressing things up, finishing things off, before proceeding to the next step. This is NOT business as usual with NASA QC. Ordinarily, they're constantly up your ass with neverending nitpicks about scratched paint, weld examinations and testing, final installation locations to the quarter-inch or less, bolt torquing, you name it.

But not here.

Not today.

Beams roughly torched-off. Beams cut, butted, and welded, with no finish-work after the weld was completed. Not so much as hitting some of these welds with a needle scaler. Paint, burned and blistered, no touch-up. And the NASA Paint People in particular were Right Bastards about that kind of thing. They would fuck you, wearing a wolfish grin with a sociopathic glitter in their eyes over far less than what's plainly visible in this image.

But not this time.

Someone, someone higher up, had called off the dogs. Someone had issued a directive. Someone told those worthless sons of bitches to stay right where they were, in their chairs, at their desks, even as we were up on the tower, doing what we were directed to do. Someone wanted these fucking pod covers hung, and they wanted them hung NOW.

Was it to cover something up?

Was it to prevent prying eyes from seeing horrifying things like those lethally-incompetent haunches that were furnished and installed with nothing whatsoever by way of safety stops? To hide that nightmare turnbuckle adjustment system? Or the way the whole thing had been hatcheted in there? I do not know.

Once upon a time, when I was younger, I would give people and organizations the benefit of the doubt.

But I'm older now, and I've seen too much.

I've seen far too much to question my own instincts. My own gut feeling about things like this.

Once the pod covers got hung, this whole area would become phenomenally difficult to access. Phenomenally difficult to even see.

My gut tells me there's a story here that no one will ever tell.

There was no end of little shit.

And it was the little shit that, in the very beginning, drew me in to the steel. That pulled me away from the fucking telephone on my desk. The little shit was the thing that set in motion, the cascade of self-reinforcing processes and events, all added together, which altered me...

From being an answering machine...

To being a construction manager...

And I think that somebody, somewhere, decided that the Haunches which held up the Pod Covers, and the turnbuckles which were used to adjust their location, were "little shit," and treated them accordingly.

You go back and look at the photograph, and give those Haunches another, closer, look, and... they don't look like much, do they?

Couple of stub-length flimsy little W8's, side by side, nearly touching each other, butt welded back to the structure on one end, weirdly-cut and shaped on the other end, with another weirdly cut and shaped plate welded down on top of 'em.

Buncha damn crap.

Buncha damn flimsy-ass little shit.

Yes indeed, they look just like little shit. No different than a million other similarly-sized and irregularly-shaped things. Stairs, and handrails, and toeplates, and lifting lugs, and locking lugs, and brackets, and shelf-angles, and grating panels, and a million and one other things of a similar nature, with all the accommodations in the iron around them which had to be torched, and welded, and measured, and fit, and it all had to fit precisely or it wouldn't go, and... little shit. The ten percent of the tower by weight that takes up half the goddamned labor hours to install.

A few scraps of what I had to deal with, involving "little shit" in this two-level area beneath the Payload Changeout Room, have managed to survive.

And it's instructive.

So we'll use the story surrounding this field sketch of the OMS Pod Flip-up Platforms at 114' (note that 4, please, it's two feet up above the main flooring level at 112' and shit like that can kill you if you're not constantly aware of it).

Just looking at the sketch itself, you can see that something was fucked up with some lugs on this little double flip-up platform that gave the techs access to the little nook down between the base of the Orbiter's tail, and the bulge of the OMS Pod, right next to it.

Stuff like that was all over the place. Flip-ups on flip-ups. Gah. But the sketch was created at and for work, and contains not a shred more time-consuming information than is absolutely necessary for the informed decisions that Dick Walls had to make, so we're going to get to chase this across a couple of drawings, just like I had to, all those many long decades ago, and while on our trek, we'll maybe learn some more about little stuff.

Ok, fine. What lugs?

Well, these platforms are part of the structure of the RSS, so let's go look at the structural drawing that tells us how to make 'em, how 'bout?

And 79K14110 sheet S-46 looks like just the place to dig in to the lugs which were the center of attention on my field sketch, a pair of which seem to be sticking out from a column flange, and another one of which sticks out from the far side of the fold-down platform, and when you lift the platform up out of the way when it's not in use, that single lug on the far side of the platform wants to fit snugly between the pair on the column, just right for a locking pin of some kind to fit through some matched holes in all of 'em, and lock that platform in it's stowed position so as it won't fall, at the worst possible time of course, and cause a problem.

Except they're not there on S-46.

Not on the platform, not on the column, not nowhere.

Nothing. Not a whisper.

The sketch tells us there was a mismatch with the locations of these lugs, and apparently it was close enough that it's looking like somebody took a beater to 'em, and bent 'em over to the side a little, hoping to get the fucking thing to go, but by virtue of the fact that Sheffield Steel wound up sending a guy (me) in there to draw up a field sketch of things that didn't quite work, now there's gonna have to be some torchwork and welded modifications, but you don't dare do that without saying "Mother may I?" to NASA Engineering, and... you know the drill.

Ok, fine, maybe they're on one of the mechanical sheets.

And we waltz on over to 79K14110 sheet M-44, and...

...perhaps.

But then again, perhaps not.

Because what's on M-44 disagrees completely with what reality, in the form of cold hard steel with a tape-measure laid across it in multiple locations, as depicted on the field sketch, had to say about it.

And when you take a close eye to both drawings, and combine them together for a thorough understanding of the dimensions involved here (and of course the lugs being in the wrong place, constitute a dimension fuck-up, right?), you immediately realize just exactly why M-44 was so very very casual about what, exactly, was going to be locking this goddamned platform in the Up position.

And Section A down in the lower left corner of M-44 is trying to tell us, without actually telling us, to put this set of lugs, the pair on the Platform, and the single on a Handrail(!), without giving ANY dimensions, just kind of whistling past the graveyard with it (as we've seen far too many times already, in far too many other places, and yes, that actually is a red flag, whenever you find yourself looking at a drawing and seeing that they just kind of drew it in there without nailing it down by including precise dimensions for it).

And you chase back to S-46 to find where the flip-up on the flip-up (the part with the funny-cut pointy end that folds down and out, into the nook between the Orbiter's Tail and OMS Pod) gets attached, with its own set of hinges, which are on the end of the platform that section A on M-44 is looking directly at, and if you work the numbers to get to the 3'-6" elevation of the top rail of that handrail where the single lug is perforce located on M-44, you discover that you have to come out, across the platform, away from where it hinges just past the short stair you take to get up on top of it, and you have to go 11 inches, and the other hinges, the ones that work the flip-up on the flip-up, the one with the pointy end, are gonna be right there...

And... nope.

Hard interference condition.

And M-44 is very coy about things, and if you look close, at the main plan view part of the drawing, you see that the devious bastards seem to have drawn another, teeny tiny little lug on the opposite end of the platform, but section A makes no mention of anything like "sim" or "typ" "two places" or anything at all to let you know you might be having to make a pair of these stupid-ass things, one on each end of the main part of the double flip-up, and even if you did, you go back to S-46, and goddamnit, there's removable handrail sockets to contend with over there...

And... nope.

Hard interference condition.

And this ten-pound pile of shit isn't going to fit into a five-pound bag, any better than any of the other ten-pound piles of shit we've already encountered up to this point, have fit into that same five-pound bag.

And it turned out to be so bad, that they had to scrap the whole thing, completely redesign the locking lug system (which never got documented on the drawings), kind of co-opting the lifting lug that the hand-winch uses to lift the platform (no, we're not going to ask how you remove the winch cable from that lug, after the platform is raised in order to then put your locking pin through it, without the platform falling while it's unhooked from everything), and they put the mating pair of locking lugs on the column instead of the handrail, using the single lifting lug on the opposite side of the platform, instead of part-way out along the adjacent (and yes, these are the same definitions for "opposite and adjacent" you got in Trigonometry class) side like it's shown on the drawing, and all well and good (well... not really), but for the love of god, somehow they managed to fuck that up too, and yours truly wound up on the iron, yet again, with a tape measure and clipboard, and...

And you're being pecked to death by a flock of geese with this kind of bullshit which is coming at you from all directions, and if you don't think this kind of crap will burn some labor hours, and wind up costing you a ridiculous amount of additional money, and move your schedule an unpleasant distance to the right while it's burning those labor hours, well then, maybe you need to come inside the field trailers with us, prepare your own bid, and then run the fucking job with your own money after your bid came in low, and see if you wind up making money, or going broke. Cash flows like water, and when it's flowing away from you, things can get pretty exciting in a hurry.

...little shit!

Alright, calm down MacLaren, it's going to be ok.

Alright. Back to work.

Let us consider the OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers Mounting Haunches some more, shall we?

Let us consider this little shit in a bit more detail.

Take another look at them, if you will, and please note that for the purposes of supporting a mobile object that's larger than the two-story Lawyer Foyer on some idiot's McMansion, they're pretty fucking small, aren't they?

Goddamned right they are!

And what about stops or limit-switches or some goddamned thing to restrict travel in a way that would prevent the matching surfaces on the Pod Covers themselves from just waltzing right on over the edge and down down down to certain oblivion?

No.

Not there.

No stops. No limit-switches. No NOTHING.



This shit just keeps getting uglier and uglier, the more we look at it, and it's already far more ugly than I have any taste for, or trust in, thank you very much.

And I have not, to this point, mentioned so much as a single word about the hidden dangers of the foam-in-place insulation with which the entirety of the orbiter-facing sides of the Pod Covers were coated in. Hidden dangers which, to this day, have yet to enter the general consciousness about this stuff, which is as common as dirt, and which everybody seems to think they understand, completely.

And nobody's actually hiding it...

...but nobody's actually talking about it, either.

But now I'm going to.

And you're going to think that I've completely lost the thread here, and have wandered off farther into the deep weeds with it than we'll ever be able to return from, and it's very definitely going to be a roundabout path I'll be taking you on, but it will arrive at its destination, and it will arrive at that destination after traveling through some pretty scary country, and it's the things you met in that scary country that will allow you to integrate all this Pod Cover gobbledygook in a way that will let you...

See...

And understand...

So here we go...

Foam-in-place insulation produces closed-cell foam, and closed-cell foam is waterproof.

And I will now give you some background about water, and foam-in-place insulation.

I will tell you the story of the UES Door over at SLC-41.

Space Launch Complex 41.

Where they launched Titan III's (at first) and Titan IV's (after we got done rebuilding their Pad).

Titan III tear-out and refurbish, conversion to Titan IV.

The UES (Universal Environmental Shelter), was what Martin Marietta and the Air Force called the Clean Room at the top of the MST (Mobile Service Tower), where they attached payloads to the tops of their Titan rockets.

NASA had a PCR, and the Air Force had a UES.

Ok, fine.

Titan's a pretty big rocket, and it takes a pretty big pad to handle it.

Ok, fine.

And so the UES took up a significant portion of the top of the MST, and the whole south side of the UES was a great goddamned big 80 foot tall Door, that swung open and closed, exactly like any of the doors in your house.

But bigger. Lots bigger. And a little more complicated, too. With its own multi-level sets of flip-up platforms. And hoists. And catwalks. And framing elevations. And all of the rest of the stuff you get with big rockets. Big rockets are a little different, right?

And payloads are deeply-fussy things, and require tightly-controlled environments, and one of the things they wanted tight control over was the temperature, and to make that easier to do, they very sensibly constructed the UES out of 8 or 10 inch (I don't remember which) steel-channel framing, laid on its sides, making for a nice wide space between the metal panels that covered all of that UES channel-framing on both sides, exterior and interior, and they blew foam-in-place insulation into that space (which is why it's called foam-in-place, 'cause you already have a pre-existing place, and you cut some holes into the skin panels of your place, and you squirt barrels of the nasty chemicals into that place which react with each other on contact, become inert, and in the process of reacting and becoming inert, they produce oodles and oodles of nice light waterproof closed-cell plastic foam), to provide... you guessed it, insulation, so as they could keep the temperatures inside the UES where they wanted them.

Ok, fine.

And payloads were handled and rockets were launched (including both Voyager's and both Vikings, which were all launched from Pad 41 on Titan IIIE/Centaurs), and everything was fine until the money ran out, at which point poor old Pad 41 was abandoned, simply walked away from, to slowly rust away in the astoundingly corrosive Florida beachside salt-air.

Until, after NASA had successfully persuaded everybody that their Space Shuttle would be the only thing that anybody would ever need to get into space with, and the actual production-lines and programs for everybody else's rockets were in the process of being shut down, and the military took another look at that, and they fucking freaked out when they realized that every last one of their eggs was now going to be in a single basket and they started scrambling around where the money comes from in Congress, and finally got through to enough of the right people, to get a second basket for their eggs, if, god forbid, the first basket got dropped, or was broken, or was found to be unusable in some way, and as a result, the Complimentary Expendable Launch Vehicle was born, and that CELV's name was "Titan IV."

Phew.

And yes, I really will return to the fucked up foam-in-place insulation on the OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers, I promise.

And yours truly was in on that from the very beginning, from the very first part where we did the very first bid walk-down with the other bidders out at the pad and up on the frighteningly-corroded steel of the MST, and, among other things, took a ride in the impossibly-ancient and creaky personnel elevator with the ridiculous open-air construction complete with one of those old-timey elevator doors you occasionally see in old black and white film noir movies from the 1940's and 1950's, which jounced and rattled alarmingly up the West Tower of the MST and took us to Level 10 or some goddamned place way the hell up there and while the Martin Marietta guy was droning on about something or other, a couple of us structural types ambled over on the catwalk deckplate to one of the primary columns that held the whole goddamned gigantic monstrosity up, and there was a column splice right there at chest-level, with about 48 great big structural bolts holding the splice plate to the column flanges, and they were all so damned rusted that all of the nuts had completely exfoliated out into what looked a lot like a rose blossom made out of rust flakes, with a lot of petals, and I was absentmindedly yapping to Carlton D. Taylor, and even more absentmindedly picking at the layers of exfoliation on one of the nuts until there was not only no more exfoliated nut left to pick, but the bolt onto which the nut had one day long ago been torqued down, was left looking like a sort of pointy-ended nub, peering out from the level rusted area of the splice plate itself, and we both more or less simultaneously realized that I had, with my fingernail, successfully removed part of that which was holding the whole damn thing together, and we then gave each other a horrified look as we realized that we were a hundred feet up in the air on a giant steel tower that was held together by... nothing. Nothing at all! Holy shit!

And that's not even the story I'm trying to tell you and goddammit once again this thing has ricocheted off into unexpected territory and I'm losing control of my narrative, again, and holy shit but did some god DAMN stuff ever happen to me while I was out there on those towers, and you haven't heard the half if it. Hell, you haven't heard the tenth of it.

Gah.

The UES Door. I'm trying to tell a story about the UES Door.

Please let me tell the goddamned story about the UES Door.

Please?

Ok. So. Anyway, Martin and the Air Force tried desperately to re-use the existing Titan III structure on Pad 41, believing time and money would be saved by doing it that way, to create a brand-new Titan IV structure, but the farther we went into it, the more that premise was found to be terribly, horrifyingly, nightmarishly, wrong, but by then it was way way too late, and we had to grit our teeth and just keep on going, and everybody hated it by that time, but there was nothing any of them could do about it, and at some point or other, they realized there was no way out and well... ok.

Whattayagonnado?

And somewhere in there, the whole, the whole eighty foot tall, UES Door had to come down off of the tower to be refurbished.

In one piece.

And we had a crane there, and we parked it up nice and close to the MST on the south side, and the ironworkers set about preparing to remove the Door.

The Door had a full-height hinge pipe, held in place along its full vertical extent with pillow-block bearings, and held up at its bottom end with a thrust bearing that rested on top of a very sturdy mounting haunch which was tied back to primary framing in the MST's East Tower.

And Rink Chiles was Ivey's general foreman for this job too, and I've already described Rink in terms that should leave no doubt in your mind that he knew exactly what he was doing and as part of his savvy when it comes to this sort of thing, he very wisely chose to go a little farther than might ordinarily be expected, and he placed a heavy restraining chain, tied back to the primary structural framing of the MST, down around the bottom end of that hinge pipe, just above the lower thrust bearing where the whole works sat, solely-supported by the Mounting Haunch, for just in case.

And it was a good damn thing he did, too.

Lives were saved.

Perhaps even mine, I dunno.

Here's a picture taken from the top of the MST, after it was first rolled to its mate position where it fits up with the Umbilical Tower and the Launch Vehicle sitting on its Transporter (no LV, no Transporter, this day), looking back toward its Park Position, 600 feet to the north.

And then here's the same picture again, with a few features identified for reference. It's not perfectly accurate. I just sort of drew things in there, as best I could, and I'm no Rembrandt when it comes to stuff like that. Here's a better rendering of the footprint, with the MST mated to the UT, Transporter, and Launch Vehicle, to scale, done by somebody that knew what they were doing, and maybe keep in mind that the width of the MST is just about 100 feet. Large object. And once again, that MST Footprint in the photograph is 600 feet away from you, and the tower itself is just about 250 feet tall. Pretty sizable goddamned thing to be rolling around cross-country like that.

And up on the tower, it was, I believe, a crew of 6 ironworkers, and on the ground was a single crane operator, and me, and everybody else was shooed away from the jobsite this day, because demolition work is exceedingly dangerous, and this particular piece of demo work, which involved removing an eighty-foot-tall steel door which was hung with its bottom edge a hundred feet up in the air, possessing an unknown level of structural corrosion, was considered even more dangerous than usual, and with the exception of the direct participants in the Door removal, the whole jobsite was shut down, and there was nobody around but us.

Ivey needed a "field representative" and that task fell to me, 'cause I was otherwise pretty useless in the organization, so I was designated to remain on the jobsite, as liaison, in case anybody from Martin Marietta or maybe the Air Force needed somebody to beat on, in case something happened in a way that did not please them.

Martin and the Air Force themselves, as I recall, were either not at the pad at all, or well outside of the pad perimeter, over in the Ready Building, which you can see in the distance in this photograph, and from which location nothing whatsoever concerning the UES Door could be seen, as it was on the far side of the MST's East Tower, when viewed from the Ready Room.

Had any of them been around, they would very much not have been pleased, but they weren't around, and Rink pulled this one back in with such cunning expertise that by the time any of them had been made aware that anything out of the ordinary had occurred, the entire situation had been brought completely back under control and there was nothing left to get excited about.

But what happened next... well... shit got real. Shit got real, in a hurry.

And it all happened because one man, one man who only made one mistake in all the time I ever knew him, made that one mistake, which resulted in what happened this day.

Dusenberry was tasked with "weighing" the door, so we could select the proper crane to do this lift with, and do it safely.

And Benny duly ran the calculations based off of a material list which was generated using the original 1960's drawings (done by Parsons, Kanonovich, and Somefuckingbody, or some kinda damn like-named outfit) which detailed the construction of the door, and came up with a weight for the door, and it was looked at by their people, and our people, and everybody's people, and everybody was happy with it, and it was wrong.

Dusey made a mistake. And all of the rest of us were party to the mistake, too.

And the mistake typifies sooo well how things can getcha!

The mistake was more or less a "lie of silence." One of those types of lies that are most favored by those pious sorts who look at you with a haughty sneer and say, "I never tell lies," and they expect you to believe and go along with that bullshit, because they consider "lies" as only spoken things.

Things unspoken, therefore, cannot be lies, right?

Therefore, I'm not lying to you, right?

Yeah, right. Sure thing, bub.

And the lie of silence in this tangled tale revolves around the goddamned motherfucking foam-in-place insulation.

Remember the OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers? And the foam-in-place insulation that was sprayed all across their orbiter-facing surfaces? Remember that? This started out as a story about the goddamned OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers, and finally, at long last, the threads are going to be reunited, and tied back together, just like I promised.

But not yet.

And the lie of silence that was told by the hateful "waterproof" foam-in-place insulation that filled all the empty spaces between the skin panels and channel-framing of the UES Door was a lie that failed to come right out and tell anybody, "I'm not really waterproof at all."

And that lie of silence damn nearly brought down a 240 foot tall steel tower, killing six ironworkers, one crane operator, and one company management operative, as it did so.

Whoa.

Memory is all I've got for the numbers you're about to get, so kinda keep that in mind. I'm an old man. It's been almost thirty-five years since this happened. The sun got in my eye. The dog ate my homework. And my memory might be a little off with some of the details. But the sense of the thing? Yeah, the sense of the thing I would bet my own life on. Hell, I already bet my life on it once, the day it happened, right? Nothing to lose by taking that bet again.

The door was calculated to weigh twenty or thirty thousand pounds as I recall. Twenty-six or twenty-seven thousand pounds keeps jumping into my mind here, but I cannot bring myself to trust it. But it's in there somewhere, ok? Somewhere in that ballpark. And that weight was calculated by weighing all of the items in the bill of material that made up the door, including the foam-in-place insulation, but since that stuff weighs essentially nothing, its weight was included as essentially nothing, and the steel and hardware, above and beyond the weight of a few barrels of nasty foam-in-place chemicals, was what constituted the sensible weight of the door.

Wrong.

And nobody knew.

Nobody suspected.

That goddamned door had been sitting outside in the Florida weather since it was first built, back the early 1960's.

And as anybody who's ever lived in Florida can tell you, it rains like hell in Florida sometimes. Actually, it rains like hell in Florida all the time.

And the door was made from channel-framing, and the channel-framing was skinned over with metal panels, and the metal panels were fastened to the channel-framing with common threaded fasteners, and perhaps some equally-common caulking in there. And that was that.

And that was not enough.

Because water, devious, patient, water, kept falling upon and against the door as the years rolled on and on and on, and after enough years had rolled by, the caulking started to lose its effectiveness (presuming it was perfect in the first place, which is a very lousy presumption to make), and the door would expand and contract in the heat and the cold, and around the threaded fasteners, and between the framing and the skin, and in between separate skin panels, narrow gaps, fissures, and a multitude of openings too small to see or notice would begin to insidiously appear, and the devious, patient, water, was there when it happened, and it entered the door.

Which is no big deal, 'cause the door is filled up with waterproof closed-cell, foam-in-place insulation.

Except that it's not.

It gets old.

The plastic gets brittle.

And as the wind blows, and the structure bends and flexes (they all do, you just don't realize it when you're 20 floors up, cause it's ever-so-slow and you can't feel it, but it's happening anyway), and the heat and the cool make for differential expansion and contraction, and the non-inconsequential acoustic vibrations from nearby thunderclaps when it was raining like hell (Florida is not the Lightning Capital of the whole world, but it's very definitely the Lightning Capital of the United States), and percussive sonic assault of nearby rocket launches (big rockets, and they're only 600 feet away), and the years keep adding up, and things start cracking the closed cells in the closed-cell foam, rendering them open and the salt air gets into the act, and.....

And after enough time goes by, the no-longer-closed-cell foam starts absorbing water.

And water wants to wick upwards and inwards, deeper and deeper into the foam, owing to capillary action, and what this means is that once the water gets in there, it never comes back out again.

Ever.

And water is heavy, and the spaces between the 8 or 10 inch channel framing that surrounds a door that's 80 feet high, and over 20 feet wide, adds up to a very large volume indeed, and when you start filling that volume up with water, adding to it again and again, every time it rains, you're going to get into some real trouble somewhere along the line, and that's exactly what happened to us.

And here we are with the Mobile Service Tower, and the door has been swung open a little ways to provide clearance on its left side, away from the hinge pipe, and the crane is hooked on to the door, and he's got it in tension, lifting on it just a little bit, just enough to take a little bit of the weight off of things, and the ironworkers are each at their workstations on the split pillow-blocks that attach the door firmly to the MST and the thrust bearing down at the bottom which is still bearing most of the weight of the door, and they're very carefully torching off the bolts that hold the door to the bearings, and I'm watching all this standing just outside the front door to our flimsy little field trailer up on the Pad Deck that's made out of ridiculously-thin aluminum skin tacked down over a ridiculously-light "structural" framework, watching, looking across and very much up at this gigantic steel tower (note ironworker standing on left side of Bridge Crane Box Beam for scale) which is looming above me as things unfold (the crane you see in this image is not the crane in question, which was a yellow 90-ton P&H crane with a black boom, on rubber and not on tracks), and then the last bolt on the last pillow-block which retained enough integrity to keep the door from actually going anywhere gets decapitated...

KaWHAM!!!

And many things happened simultaneously at that point.

The door, the goddamned eighty foot tall steel door, immediately popped away from the pillow-blocks and lurched off to the side in the direction of the Framing which ran between the MST's East and West Towers, tying those two towers together rigidly, keeping them from falling over, but otherwise not really doing too very much at all as can be seen by looking at the above image and noting just how... open-air the construction of the MST is in this area, and maybe also noting that this East/West Framing area does not even extend down all the way to the ground, and it's wide-open down there, or otherwise the MST can't travel right over and past the AGE Building on the way to its mate position with the UT and the Vehicle.

As the door lurched to the left up at its top end, its bottom end, the end which was restrained by that "just in case" chain which Rink had previously secured it with, hung up on the support haunch, and was unable to fall. It stayed put.

And the effect was that of having the door hung up on its bottom-right corner (from where I was watching in horror), even as the rest of it tipped madly over to the left and down, heading toward the soft underbelly of the MST East/West framing which tied the two Main Structural Towers together.

And as this was happening (and oh god did it ever happen fast, oh god it happened so fucking fast), the crane boom was snatched along by the door (which it remained ineluctably tied to), falling away to the north and west, and a terrifyingly-uncanny thing then happened to the crane itself (which, remember, still had the operator inside the cab, still attempting via gut instinct and white-knuckle reflex to somehow regain control, to somehow bring things back in).

The door, falling and lurching ever leftward across the front of the UES, pulled the entire rear end of the crane up off of the ground.

And as the crane began to tip forward to the sounds of terrible crashing and banging, both rear outriggers came completely up off the ground to a point where my disbelieving eyes (into which this image was burned indelibly, and I remember, and I can see it, just as clearly as if it had happened only an hour ago), saw that there was enough room beneath the footpads of the rear outriggers for somebody to walk beneath them with plenty of room over their head to spare.

At which point.....

Everything stopped.....

And it was as if the Angels, for just a moment, were deciding amongst themselves where things should go.....

.....next

Even the sound stopped.

It could not have been more than a second or two but the adrenaline-fueled terror of the situation caused time itself to just about, but not quite, stop dead.

And the Angels .....reconsidered.

And impossibly, the door lurched back, to an upright position still supported on its haunch. And the rear outriggers of the crane came back down, once again resting on solid ground.

To the blood-curdling sounds of recontinued loud metallic crashing and banging.

Until everything stopped, once again.....

Until all was silent.....

.....once again.

And while all of that was going on, yours truly freaked out and ran around the back corner of the flimsy little field trailer we had parked up on the pad deck, in a comically-stupid attempt to somehow protect myself while still being able to peek around the corner and keep watching as things unfolded.

Now stop a minute here and try to visualize that one.

I'm less distant from a 240 foot tall steel tower which weighed 2 or 3 million pounds, than the tower itself was tall, which tower was very likely in the process of collapsing as the UES Door knifed downwards though the steel that tied its two Primary Framing Structural Components together.

And I ran around behind the flimsiest-imaginable twenty-five foot field trailer, made out of what amounted to heavy-grade aluminum foil and ticky-tacky, and sure and I'll be safe here, safe from whatever comes flying my way from an imploding multi-million pound steel tower.

Sure, laddie. Sure and you will! Safe as a babe in his mother's arms you'll be!

Once things like that are over, it becomes quite amazing to consider what you will do, in an adrenaline-fueled haze of terror-driven animal reflex.

And while that was going on, up on the tower, there were ironworkers right there, right there with this thing in their laps!

And I'll never forget the story that Glenn Johnson told me.

Glenn was working a torch on the pillow-block bolts, lower down on the door if I recall correctly, on the East Main Structural Tower, and since the door's hinge-pipe was just a teeny bit outboard of the tower's platform framing, he was tied off with a (standard) 6 foot safety line, which was attached somewhere else, just outboard of the platform he was immediately adjacent to, and when things let go, he told me that he instinctively, reflexively, dropped what he was holding, turned and vaulted the handrail which surrounded that adjacent platform, hot-footing it in a headlong dash directly away from that goddamned 80-foot tall steel door the instant it began crashing, beelining it across the platform deckplates toward the stair tower over on the far east side of things, getting the hell away from that fucking door, all in one seamless instantaneous move.

Except that's not what happened.

What happened was that his safety line came taut in the exact middle of his vault, as he was in motion flying directly above the top handrail pipe, and it snatched him back and threw him right back down on whatever little work area he had for himself there, and before he even knew what he was doing, or what had just happened to him, as the horrific crashing continued, he instinctively, reflexively, jumped up and vaulted the handrail again(!), once again with the exact same result of him getting snatched back by his safety line and thrown once again flat on his ass, on the little work area he had for himself, there, and it was only then, only after being thrown flat on his ass twice, before he realized that he was in this one to stay, and whatever was going to happen, was going to happen before he was able to properly unhook himself from his safety line and get the hell out of there. Which, in pretty short order, he did. But by then, whatever was going to happen, had already happened, and since he was alive when he told me this story, whatever happened did not, by purest of pure luck, kill him.

And if you wonder why ironworkers sometimes loathe and detest things like safety lines... well... this was one of those times... when the safety line would have been the very thing that killed somebody. Yes, they save lives, but no, not indisputably so, and there are occasions... and nimbleness of foot, up on the iron... is a thing that Safety Departments everlastingly fail to grasp the life-and-death importance of having... sometimes. And it's a no-win situation... but it's very real, and... there are times...

Whoa.

Fucking. Whoa.

And finally wits were regathered, and things were promptly assessed with that stratospheric level of cool grace under life-threatening pressure that only ironworkers can achieve, and everybody went right back at it, and the door was secured, and the crane was moved to a position of better leverage, and the door was unceremoniously brought to the ground and laid there on the grass just to the east of the pad deck.

And the MST, and all of the people involved in this little event, lived to see another day.

And when matters were examined afterward, it became clear that the door was MUCH heavier than it had been calculated to be, and we were extraordinarily lucky that the crane had just enough margin of additional counterweight, to keep it from overbalancing altogether...

And yours truly went over to the NASA side of things, to NASA's Wire Rope Shop south of the VAB on Contractor Road, and borrowed a sling dynamometer from Bill Lary, who ran the Wire Rope Shop, and brought it back to Pad 41, and with the dynamometer in the lifting sling, the door was picked back up, just off the grass it was still laying on, no farther, and weighed, using a fucking scale (which is all a dynamometer really is), and it was found to weigh almost three times what it was originally calculated to weigh, and when that little mystery was delved into, it was only then discovered that all of the extra weight was in the form of water, which by this time, decades after the door was originally constructed, the foam-in-place insulation inside the door had become absolutely saturated with, and you could poke it with your finger, and it was soaking wet.

Whoa.

And so now, now at last, I can return this distantly-diverted story back to the stupid OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers from whence it diverged so very long ago.

And remind you, dear readers, once again, that one full side of the Pod Covers was lined with this very selfsame foam-in-place insulation



And here we are, wrapping this chapter of things up, fastening the lower inboard (inboard being in relationship the the longitudinal centerline of the orbiter) adjustment turnbuckles to the Right Pod Cover.

In this frame, you get an additional (limited, but finer-detail) look at the construction of the Pod Cover, with its welter of oddball-angled cuts in the Cover's main framing, and diagonal bracing, all of which had to be fit together just so, and all of which had to be welded up, just so, resulting in a deceptively ho-hum outward appearance when covered up by the topcoat of white paint these things were finished in.

Dave Skinner kneels on a bit of scaffold boarding with a seventy-foot free drop to the concrete of the pad deck yawning out of frame directly beneath him, and the fingers (oh so soft, oh so crushable) of his left hand push against the last bit of steel you're ever going to be getting with these things before the aluminum starts.

Everything to the left of his hand with the Pod Cover, every last bit of it, is aluminum. Except for the bit of foam-in-place insulation you can see down near the bottom, looking for all the world like gray mashed-potatoes sprinkled with dirt.

Here's the photograph, labeled to help you see and understand things a little better.

As I've already mentioned, the insulation was sprayed on, allowed to foam up and then set dry, and then it was ground off, or scraped off, or whatever people do to the stuff to knock it down some, and then it was covered in some kind of semi-rubbery black coating which was sprayed on top of the original tan foam, and that was that.

And even by now, even though the stupid Covers were only just now being hung on the tower and were still new, there were already clear signs that whatever it was that they sprayed on top of the foam was already aging, and it was not aging well. By this time it had already gone from slick shiny black to a sort of dull oxidized gray, and its initial rubberiness was slowly losing its flexibility and its forgiveness.

The Reactive Air you encounter in seaside Brevard County was once again, slowly, creepingly, invisibly, working its evil magic on things people never expect to... transform.

And the foam itself was riddled with holes and pockmarks. You can see evidence of them for yourself in the photograph. Pockmarks skinned over with a coating...

...that was aging before our very eyes.

That "dirt" which the gray mashed-potatoes is "sprinkled" with is holes. Voids. Cavities. And this is...

...business as usual with this stuff, and you encounter it every time you use this stuff...

...except that you never encounter it...

...because it's always hidden inside of some wall, or attic, or passageway, or something else you can't see inside of, which is where they always spray this stuff.

NASA QC had no problem with the holes, and the voids, and the cavities.

It's insulation! Of course there's holes in it. Doesn't hurt a thing. Doesn't affect its insulation characteristics at all.

It's fine!

And it was fine.

Fine for accumulating...

Devious.

Patient.

Water.

And this whole schmutz was from then and forevermore left hanging out into thin air over a hundred feet above the surrounding wilderness of suffocatingly-humid swampland, directly and unobstructedly facing Florida's notoriously active weather, and The Cape's notoriously reactive air, and what were the people who cooked this thing up thinking when they decided that, "Yeah, this oughtta do the trick. This oughtta work just fine," and immediately thereafter began implementing this crap?

I can only presume that the bizarre dual-turnbuckle adjustment rig you see Dave battling with as he deals with the ongoing results of his attempts to screw a pair of turnbuckle bodies in such a way as to cause the mounting plate to which they are both attached, on their Pod Cover ends, to be oriented in both distance and three-dimensional alignment well enough to get the damn bolt holes to line up, was designed this way to provide more than just a little bit of horizontal rigidity. Which you would hope would tend to keep the Pod Cover more or less firmly in place, even when it was being buffeted by the storm, or even hurricane, force winds which Florida is well-known for producing on a regular basis.

And as we mentioned earlier, this turnbuckle assembly is quite stout, and I might further presume that maybe, just maybe, some of this stoutness was maybe, just maybe, a bit of presumed insurance, perhaps just a bit of compensation, for the fact that the by-now well-hidden support haunches had nothing whatsoever by way of any ability to restrain the motion of the bearing pad which slid across their tops in a way that could keep it from going over the side.

But that's strictly guesswork, and I have no way of knowing what design principles were employed in coming up with these things.

But a little voice keeps whispering in my ear, "They made these fucking turnbuckle brackets this strong because they knew the bearing pad might come off the haunch, and if it did, then all that would be holding the Pod Cover up from there on would be the turnbuckles, and the brackets they attached to."

But I'm sure I'll never know the truth of the matter in this one.

What I do know, is that after I had left the scene of this crime, and moved down the beach to Pad 41, one of these Pod Covers took a fall.

And I cannot recall if I was ever told whether it was Pad A, or Pad B, and really, it doesn't matter which pad, because whichever pad it was, one of the OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers somehow came loose of things on the RSS in such a way as to permit it to fall all the way down to the pad deck and get smashed to splinters in the process.

Just exactly how a thing like that came to happen, I do not, and never expect to, know.

I have searched the internet mightily and have found nothing whatsoever which recounts any of this event, above and beyond my own words.

Things were swept well and truly beneath a very thick rug with this one.

They were lucky in this regards, because if it had killed anybody, or if it had badly damaged an Orbiter, then the cat would have well and truly been out of the bag, and they would never have been able to put it back in again.

But that didn't happen, and the cat seems to have never quite gotten out of the bag, and I find myself at times..... wondering.

I can only speculate that the bearing pad, as feared, went over the side of the haunch.

This, to me, seems the simplest, the most reasonable, explanation.

Imagine being stuffed up in here with these things.

Imagine being the guy turning the turnbuckles moving these miserable fucking things around, with each turnbuckle in the dual-turnbuckle setup fighting each other, trying to bind and freeze into place as it progressively became farther and farther out of alignment with its Siamese twin, and as the two of them together tried to bind and freeze as they fought to twist the entire Pod Cover around by its mounting plate.

This must have been an odious task, and it must have been hated by the techs who had to do it.

And it's dark up under there.

And you cannot see the support haunches at all, from where you're working down there well beneath them, fighting the turnbuckles with a steel pry bar.

And paint overspray, and birdshit, and dead bugs, and other unknown crap has gotten onto the threaded rods, and into the threaded areas of the turnbuckle bodies, and you find yourself using that fucking pry bar which you've inserted into the gap in the turnbuckle body, and you're applying main force to twist the miserable sonofabitch, and you've had to do this enough times in the past that it's become almost normal to have to do, and one fine day you're bearing down on it.....

And in the blink of an eye, jumping far too close to your face for comfort, the pry bar is bruisingly snatched from your grasp accompanied by the earsplitting sounds of screeching and crashing metal, and before your senses can even properly register what's happening, the whole goddamned two-story high wall which is the Pod Cover, suddenly pivots sharply around in a deeply-frightening way and then falls away and spins directly to the ground with a concluding burst of violent sound, seventy feet of wide-open space beneath your disbelieving eyes!

And you are very lucky indeed that it did not find a way to take you with it when it went.

And Engineering gave it such postmortem as they may have been permitted to do by their higher-ups, and who's to say what they found?

Further guesswork is all I'll ever have, and it's what I'm going use right now.

If it's good enough for them, then it's good enough for me, too.

And I'm guessing the Pod Cover weighed more than it had been calculated to weigh.

A lot more, in fact.

And I'm guessing that the extra weight had as its root cause, the very same thing that the extra weight of the UES Door had as its root cause.

Devious. Patient. Water.

And that extra weight, once set free from its initial static restraints, sitting on top of the Haunches, became dynamic and it became kinetic, and it packed enough of a wallop to simply tear aluminum things apart, as the Pod Cover twisted and fell toward the distant concrete below it.

And any considerations of extra-stout adjustment brackets went right out the window, because they could never be enough to compensate for the kinetic energy which was generated by all of that extra weight, all of that extra weight that nobody at all had considered, .....falling.

And the aluminum never stood a chance, and was rendered from the steel that held it up.

And so the damnable things, or at least that part of the damnable things which was still hanging on the tower, got removed from both pads, and that was that.

And that was the end of the OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers.

They will not be missed by anyone.

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