The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B

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


Page 74: Steve Skinner on the Pad Deck, Intro to the PGHM Bridge Beam Lift.
Pad B Stories - Table of Contents

Image 139. Steve Skinner, Union Ironworker foreman working for Ivey Steel at the time, stands on the East side of the Flame Trench at Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, with the lower portions of the Rotating Service Structure and the Fixed Service Structure in the distance behind him. Mostly blocked from view, down on the ground, other Union Ironworkers are preparing the Payload Ground Handling Mechanism (PGHM) Bridge Beam for today's Lift. They will be placing it inside the Payload Changeout Room up on a set of heavy Rails, which will allow it to roll forwards and backwards inside the PCR, just beneath its ceiling. The Bridge Beam supports the rest of the PGHM (which was installed later) on a set of quite-large hinge-pins, hanging down beneath the Bridge Beam all the way to where you can step right off of it, onto the PCR Main Floor, which it contacts via a set of small guide rails, but is in no way supported by them. The PGHM was an incredible thing, possessed of capabilities that defy belief and even imagination, and the Bridge Beam that rigidly held it all up was very large, very sturdy, and very heavy. How Wade Ivey and Rink Chiles ever managed to work out their beyond-cunning procedure for lifting it up onto those rails, up in the very topmost reaches of the PCR the way they did, still leaves me wondering in awe-struck amazement, and this Lift was probably the most radical thing of any sort that I ever witnessed being done during my entire ten years working structural steel at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (now Cape Canaveral Space Force Station) and the Kennedy Space Center. To call this lift a ”tour de force” is to damn it with faint praise to an unforgivable degree. Photo by James MacLaren.
We will try to make it easy on ourselves here at the beginning, before the PGHM Bridge Beam has broken contact with the ground.

The Bridge Beam is back there in the distance, nearly but not quite, blocked from view behind Steve Skinner, and you can see one end of it directly in front of MLP Mount Mechanism 6, with a pair of jacketed Union Ironworkers within arm's reach of it, making ready for The Lift.

It was cold, and it was windy, and it was very early in the morning with the blindingly-brilliant orange crystal of the sun slanting in sideways at everything.

Steve, who you've met before in this narrative, and who was one of the very best of the very best, and a damn fine human being on top of it, was momentarily free from his Union Ironworker responsibilities as a foreman this day.

Steve was unstintingly gracious with me, and seemed to understand that I really wanted to know, and was really trying my hardest to do so, and he would oblige me if and when.

And on this cold and windy morning he was happy to once again...

...oblige me.

I took his photograph with the day's Lift just getting organized behind him.

Then the cold wind blew him away this early morning, and some years later blew him away forever, and I do not know where he is, or how he is, or even if he is, today.

But he was/is a Good Man, regardless.

Steve was one of the ones who caused what you see reaching into the sky in the distance behind him to take form, with his own hands and his own mind, and what you see behind him in the distance is no small undertaking, and no small thing, in every sense of the phrase.

And before the Bridge Beam breaks contact, I'm going to take us on another side-journey, this time to the PGHM, the astoundment which hung beneath the Bridge Beam. Or at least as much of it as I can scrape together. What little that remains of it which can be found, which can be considered, and which can be learned-from, lies very thinly-scattered across the ground, and it is a Great Shame that this is so. I will do my best with it. And that is all I will ever be able to do, alas.


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