The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Home Life: Page 5 - The Birthday, The Favorite Toy, The Flame Deflector.
| Pad B Stories - Table of Contents |
It is your fourth birthday and on your birthday cake, there are four small candles, and there is a Space Shuttle, too.
And your father works, out on the Cape, doing his part, building a launch pad from where, one day, Space Shuttles will fly into space.
And you live in the Shadow of the Launch Pads, out on the Cape, and you've seen with your own still-new-to-the-world eyes, the diamond-brilliant blazes of ascending flame, and you've heard with your own still-new-to-the-world ears, the volcanic basso profundo notes played beneath an overlay of uncannily-sharp popping and snapping, and erratically-staccato crackling, as the very air you are breathing comes to life in an unbelievable and unsettling way, and the distant pillar of dense smoke resting on the far horizon grows taller and taller, and bends, curving over to the side as it does so, and there are people inside that not-to-be-believed apparition at the top of the pillar, clawing its way across the high part of the sky, and you are very reasonably and very completely taken by this thing, and you give yourself over to the wonder and the awe, and to think that your own father is a part of it, however small, and despite your lack of years, lack of age, and lack of life's experience, you already know that you live in a place like no other, anywhere in the whole world.
And it is a good birthday.
And the Space Shuttle on your birthday cake becomes your favorite toy, and you are mindful about it, and you keep it for years, and then one day you lose it.
And then one day you lose it willingly.
Your father devises a plan, and asks you if you think it might be a good plan, and you tell him, "Yes."
And he takes your favorite toy away from you, and it is gone, and you will never see it again.
And your father puts his plan into action, and he takes your small plastic Space Shuttle, and he puts it in his car, and he drives away with it.
To the Launch Pad.
To the place where real Space Shuttles will one day fly from.
And it's not enough that your favorite toy, which you enthusiastically parted company with forever, has arrived inside the perimeter fence at Launch Complex 39-B at the Kennedy Space Center.
There will be more than that, more by far.
And your father arrives at the field trailer and leaves the Shuttle in his car.
Until a quiet time comes.
A time when the tasks and commitments of work relent.
And he exits the trailer, retrieves the small bit of black and white plastic from within the the car, and then walks alone, holding it carefully in his hand, toward the Launch Pad.
And along the way, beneath the sky, between trailer and Launch Pad, he takes his pocket knife and scratches deeply the letters K A I as large as he can in the space he is given, into the black lower surface of the toy Space Shuttle. Your own name.
And the Pad is an enormous raised construct, with bones made of concrete and steel, nearly a third of a mile in length along its north-south axis, and that great length is bisected in a single place, near-midway, by a tunnel that can be walked through, at ground level, from east to west, from one side of the Pad to the other, if one chooses to do so, and your father enters it.
But your father does not intend to walk clear through the width of the pad, all the way through the tunnel from one end to the other.
Half-way along the length of the tunnel, beneath and abutting the split-center of the Pad, there opens out a pair of great long high-ceilinged galleries extending northward which are called the Catacombs, one on either side of the Flame Trench, which is the place that the volcano erupts into, just before it vaults into the heavens.
In the exact center of the Flame Trench, the Flame Deflector sits closest to the fury, directly beneath the exhaust nozzles, directly in harm's way, ready to endure its punishment on Launch Day, and deflect the detonation of the volcano across and away, sidewise to the north and to the south, away from the the people inside of it, as it rises, to keep it from destroying itself in the rage of flames and incomprehensible storm of wind which it creates, and which it uses to force its great mass upward, away from the ground, away from the Earth.
And your father comes to the entrance to the West Catacombs and enters them.
Still holding your favorite toy.
And through the echoey gloom, beneath the thickened shadows and congealing darkness of the high ceilings, with their bare concrete lit dimly by light fixtures placed at widely-spaced intervals along the walls, from one chamber to the next, the soft scuffing sound of construction boots working their way northward, deeper and deeper into the heart of the 350-foot long gallery, was the only thing to break the profound silence hanging in the still air.
And mid-way, a corner was turned, into an otherwise completely anonymous and doorless cell, dim, darker even than what came before, with the wet and mildewy smell of unfinished concrete abandoned for decades to the endless darkness, heat, humidity, moisture, and occasional sheets of standing water that would form and linger after one of the many protracted spells of heavy rainfall that Florida is subject to, hanging heavily in the dungeon-like air.
And in the heavy gloom enveloping the far wall, so dark as to be nearly-unnoticeable, a smooth patch of steel painted dull gray indicated the presence of a hidden door, of heavy blast-proof construction to keep it in place, keep it intact, against the ferocities of launch day, and he turned the unlatching handle to disengage the mechanism, pulled heavily against the stiffness of the hinges and the weight of the door, and opened it up.
Beyond, an even darker gloom beckoned.
Into an awkward opening beyond the door which is raised nearly two feet above the damp concrete floor, stepping across half-inch steel plates covering a thickness of three full feet of steel-reinforced concrete backed by another half foot of refractory bricks, which are the same things that line blast furnaces, and this is the entranceway into the insides of the Flame Deflector.
And it is now even darker, and a bit of time must be spent to allow for eyesight adaptation to adjust for a dimness no brighter than a moonlit night under a not-full moon, with such little illumination as there is, coming from the two-inch gaps on either side of the Flame Deflector where it does not quite touch the Trench walls high above, along with a bit more filtering in through similarly-narrow gaps beneath the the lowest margins of the Deflector at its north and south ends where it meets the firebricks along the bottom of the Trench, and every bit of this already-meager portion of light is further blocked and attenuated by the intervening dense forest of heavy iron inside of the Flame Deflector.
\\\\\\\
I will insert here, a link to an astounding gigapan image, courtesy of John A. O'Connor, which is taken from what is without the slightest doubt, the world's best collection of images of not only this area, but all over the place, including the whole Pad, hosted at NASATECH.NET, which was created inside of the Flame Deflector at Pad A. Please note that when this gigapan was created over at Pad A, lighting had at some point previously been installed inside of the Flame Deflector, and a bit of catwalk grating, too. Whenever I was in there at Pad B, there was no catwalk of any kind, and no lighting existed, and it was dark in there. Very very dark.
///////
And the Flame Deflector is made of trusses, and the first truss, Truss A, lies very close to the Flame Trench Wall, with a beefy W14x142 horizontal member having a lower flange that runs just six inches above the firebricks lining the bottom of the Flame Trench, constituting a another impediment to further movement, and your father has already worked his way across the potentially leg-breaking foot and a half gap between the not-quite-matched-in-elevation surfaces of the blast-door sill and the top of the W14 x 142, has put Truss A behind him, and is now standing with his boots on the firebricks that line the bottom of the Flame Trench, and he has stopped, once again, between Truss A and Truss B, and this time he has stopped to properly assay his surroundings, because he wants to be sure your favorite toy gets placed somewhere away from prying eyes, somewhere safe, somewhere protected, somewhere that it can never be dislodged from, even by the storm of flames that will assault the Deflector from point-blank range on Launch Day.
Your father is now standing directly under that place where the exhaust from the Space Shuttle comes down on launch day like the wrath of a vengeful god, seeking to destroy all before it.
Still holding your favorite toy.
Safely inside the Flame Deflector's protective cocoon.
And he espies a place that just might work, and now he has to get to that place, still holding the toy Space Shuttle, on his own, with no one else around, no one else who knows right now where he might be, alone in the dark.
Truss B is identical in general layout to truss A, and on its northernmost side, the tallest side, directly beneath the crest of the Flame Deflector, there is Heavy Iron. A W36x260 column extends vertically, nearly forty feet, straight up. Coming into it horizontally, from the next column south which is a W14x228, roughly half-way up, twenty feet up more or less, there is another W14x228 spanning the open space between columns, which is a little over twelve feet in length. Between these two points, one at the bottom of the W36 column, and the other some twenty-odd feet above it, over on the W14 column to its south, there runs a W14x127 diagonal brace which climbs upward and to the south at a steep angle.
All of this steel is arranged such that the flat faces of the flanges on the columns face each other across the gap, and the diagonal brace and the horizontal member spanning the gap between the columns both have the flat aspect of their flanges facing up, and for a person who might want to climb farther into things twenty feet above the firebricks that line the bottom of the Flame Trench, this provides not only an unobstructed flat surface to support themselves on, it also means that they can grip the flange edges of the diagonal with their hands, and, placing their boots firmly beneath themselves, they can sort of half-shinny and half-coon their way up the diagonal, and where it comes in underneath the horizontal member above it, which is completely blocking their further vertical progress, they can, carefully, let go of the diagonal with one hand, reach up, and around, above their bowed head which is touching this beam from below, and grab hold of the far side of the top flange, and then pull themselves up and around, and from there clamber on up to where they are now standing on the flat surface of the top flange of that horizontal beam, twenty feet up.
This sort of work requires both hands, and the toy Space Shuttle has by now been shoved inside your father's waistband behind him, completely out of the way, yet still firmly in his possession.
Cross the open span northwards, over to the W36 column, and another W14 diagonal member is angling down from above to meet it, but this one is on a less-steep angle, and it's more than enough to work your way across the horizontal W14, over near the W36, hold on to the diagonal coming in from above with a hand gripping the edge of its upper flange, on its far side, and lean out, around, and over it, and gain an excellent view and easy-enough access to the connection-point where this topmost diagonal comes down and encounters both the W36 column, and the W14 horizontal beam which connects to the column, beneath the diagonal, on its south side.
And from here, there can be no doubt that this is The Right Place.
⅝" welded gusset/stiffener plates extending vertically from both flange edges on the diagonal, extending across and tying it to the column, form a neat pocket which is open on top, enclosed on either side, with a bottom that slopes strongly upward away from the smooth flange face of that W36 column which is backing it.
Anything small enough, placed in this pocket, can never be seen from the side, or below, and it can never fall out.
The pocket itself is split vertically by a third ⅝" stiffener plate located between the other two, forming a pair of narrow vertical slots into which a thing once placed, will remain there for the life of the Flame Deflector.
A more perfect place could not be imagined, nor found.
The toy Shuttle is retrieved from its stowage in the waistband of the blue jeans, kind loving thoughts are allowed to flow for a moment, and then the Shuttle is placed in the left slot, the westernmost one, tail-first, with its nose looking out from its Safe Place, angling upward toward the sky.
And then your father left, the same way he came in, and he never said a word to anyone about any of it.
Except you.
And your father works, out on the Cape, doing his part, building a launch pad from where, one day, Space Shuttles will fly into space.
And you live in the Shadow of the Launch Pads, out on the Cape, and you've seen with your own still-new-to-the-world eyes, the diamond-brilliant blazes of ascending flame, and you've heard with your own still-new-to-the-world ears, the volcanic basso profundo notes played beneath an overlay of uncannily-sharp popping and snapping, and erratically-staccato crackling, as the very air you are breathing comes to life in an unbelievable and unsettling way, and the distant pillar of dense smoke resting on the far horizon grows taller and taller, and bends, curving over to the side as it does so, and there are people inside that not-to-be-believed apparition at the top of the pillar, clawing its way across the high part of the sky, and you are very reasonably and very completely taken by this thing, and you give yourself over to the wonder and the awe, and to think that your own father is a part of it, however small, and despite your lack of years, lack of age, and lack of life's experience, you already know that you live in a place like no other, anywhere in the whole world.
And it is a good birthday.
And the Space Shuttle on your birthday cake becomes your favorite toy, and you are mindful about it, and you keep it for years, and then one day you lose it.
And then one day you lose it willingly.
Your father devises a plan, and asks you if you think it might be a good plan, and you tell him, "Yes."
And he takes your favorite toy away from you, and it is gone, and you will never see it again.
And your father puts his plan into action, and he takes your small plastic Space Shuttle, and he puts it in his car, and he drives away with it.
To the Launch Pad.
To the place where real Space Shuttles will one day fly from.
And it's not enough that your favorite toy, which you enthusiastically parted company with forever, has arrived inside the perimeter fence at Launch Complex 39-B at the Kennedy Space Center.
There will be more than that, more by far.
And your father arrives at the field trailer and leaves the Shuttle in his car.
Until a quiet time comes.
A time when the tasks and commitments of work relent.
And he exits the trailer, retrieves the small bit of black and white plastic from within the the car, and then walks alone, holding it carefully in his hand, toward the Launch Pad.
And along the way, beneath the sky, between trailer and Launch Pad, he takes his pocket knife and scratches deeply the letters K A I as large as he can in the space he is given, into the black lower surface of the toy Space Shuttle. Your own name.
And the Pad is an enormous raised construct, with bones made of concrete and steel, nearly a third of a mile in length along its north-south axis, and that great length is bisected in a single place, near-midway, by a tunnel that can be walked through, at ground level, from east to west, from one side of the Pad to the other, if one chooses to do so, and your father enters it.
But your father does not intend to walk clear through the width of the pad, all the way through the tunnel from one end to the other.
Half-way along the length of the tunnel, beneath and abutting the split-center of the Pad, there opens out a pair of great long high-ceilinged galleries extending northward which are called the Catacombs, one on either side of the Flame Trench, which is the place that the volcano erupts into, just before it vaults into the heavens.
In the exact center of the Flame Trench, the Flame Deflector sits closest to the fury, directly beneath the exhaust nozzles, directly in harm's way, ready to endure its punishment on Launch Day, and deflect the detonation of the volcano across and away, sidewise to the north and to the south, away from the the people inside of it, as it rises, to keep it from destroying itself in the rage of flames and incomprehensible storm of wind which it creates, and which it uses to force its great mass upward, away from the ground, away from the Earth.
And your father comes to the entrance to the West Catacombs and enters them.
Still holding your favorite toy.
And through the echoey gloom, beneath the thickened shadows and congealing darkness of the high ceilings, with their bare concrete lit dimly by light fixtures placed at widely-spaced intervals along the walls, from one chamber to the next, the soft scuffing sound of construction boots working their way northward, deeper and deeper into the heart of the 350-foot long gallery, was the only thing to break the profound silence hanging in the still air.
And mid-way, a corner was turned, into an otherwise completely anonymous and doorless cell, dim, darker even than what came before, with the wet and mildewy smell of unfinished concrete abandoned for decades to the endless darkness, heat, humidity, moisture, and occasional sheets of standing water that would form and linger after one of the many protracted spells of heavy rainfall that Florida is subject to, hanging heavily in the dungeon-like air.
And in the heavy gloom enveloping the far wall, so dark as to be nearly-unnoticeable, a smooth patch of steel painted dull gray indicated the presence of a hidden door, of heavy blast-proof construction to keep it in place, keep it intact, against the ferocities of launch day, and he turned the unlatching handle to disengage the mechanism, pulled heavily against the stiffness of the hinges and the weight of the door, and opened it up.
Beyond, an even darker gloom beckoned.
Into an awkward opening beyond the door which is raised nearly two feet above the damp concrete floor, stepping across half-inch steel plates covering a thickness of three full feet of steel-reinforced concrete backed by another half foot of refractory bricks, which are the same things that line blast furnaces, and this is the entranceway into the insides of the Flame Deflector.
And it is now even darker, and a bit of time must be spent to allow for eyesight adaptation to adjust for a dimness no brighter than a moonlit night under a not-full moon, with such little illumination as there is, coming from the two-inch gaps on either side of the Flame Deflector where it does not quite touch the Trench walls high above, along with a bit more filtering in through similarly-narrow gaps beneath the the lowest margins of the Deflector at its north and south ends where it meets the firebricks along the bottom of the Trench, and every bit of this already-meager portion of light is further blocked and attenuated by the intervening dense forest of heavy iron inside of the Flame Deflector.
\\\\\\\
I will insert here, a link to an astounding gigapan image, courtesy of John A. O'Connor, which is taken from what is without the slightest doubt, the world's best collection of images of not only this area, but all over the place, including the whole Pad, hosted at NASATECH.NET, which was created inside of the Flame Deflector at Pad A. Please note that when this gigapan was created over at Pad A, lighting had at some point previously been installed inside of the Flame Deflector, and a bit of catwalk grating, too. Whenever I was in there at Pad B, there was no catwalk of any kind, and no lighting existed, and it was dark in there. Very very dark.
///////
And the Flame Deflector is made of trusses, and the first truss, Truss A, lies very close to the Flame Trench Wall, with a beefy W14x142 horizontal member having a lower flange that runs just six inches above the firebricks lining the bottom of the Flame Trench, constituting a another impediment to further movement, and your father has already worked his way across the potentially leg-breaking foot and a half gap between the not-quite-matched-in-elevation surfaces of the blast-door sill and the top of the W14 x 142, has put Truss A behind him, and is now standing with his boots on the firebricks that line the bottom of the Flame Trench, and he has stopped, once again, between Truss A and Truss B, and this time he has stopped to properly assay his surroundings, because he wants to be sure your favorite toy gets placed somewhere away from prying eyes, somewhere safe, somewhere protected, somewhere that it can never be dislodged from, even by the storm of flames that will assault the Deflector from point-blank range on Launch Day.
Your father is now standing directly under that place where the exhaust from the Space Shuttle comes down on launch day like the wrath of a vengeful god, seeking to destroy all before it.
Still holding your favorite toy.
Safely inside the Flame Deflector's protective cocoon.
And he espies a place that just might work, and now he has to get to that place, still holding the toy Space Shuttle, on his own, with no one else around, no one else who knows right now where he might be, alone in the dark.
Truss B is identical in general layout to truss A, and on its northernmost side, the tallest side, directly beneath the crest of the Flame Deflector, there is Heavy Iron. A W36x260 column extends vertically, nearly forty feet, straight up. Coming into it horizontally, from the next column south which is a W14x228, roughly half-way up, twenty feet up more or less, there is another W14x228 spanning the open space between columns, which is a little over twelve feet in length. Between these two points, one at the bottom of the W36 column, and the other some twenty-odd feet above it, over on the W14 column to its south, there runs a W14x127 diagonal brace which climbs upward and to the south at a steep angle.
All of this steel is arranged such that the flat faces of the flanges on the columns face each other across the gap, and the diagonal brace and the horizontal member spanning the gap between the columns both have the flat aspect of their flanges facing up, and for a person who might want to climb farther into things twenty feet above the firebricks that line the bottom of the Flame Trench, this provides not only an unobstructed flat surface to support themselves on, it also means that they can grip the flange edges of the diagonal with their hands, and, placing their boots firmly beneath themselves, they can sort of half-shinny and half-coon their way up the diagonal, and where it comes in underneath the horizontal member above it, which is completely blocking their further vertical progress, they can, carefully, let go of the diagonal with one hand, reach up, and around, above their bowed head which is touching this beam from below, and grab hold of the far side of the top flange, and then pull themselves up and around, and from there clamber on up to where they are now standing on the flat surface of the top flange of that horizontal beam, twenty feet up.
This sort of work requires both hands, and the toy Space Shuttle has by now been shoved inside your father's waistband behind him, completely out of the way, yet still firmly in his possession.
Cross the open span northwards, over to the W36 column, and another W14 diagonal member is angling down from above to meet it, but this one is on a less-steep angle, and it's more than enough to work your way across the horizontal W14, over near the W36, hold on to the diagonal coming in from above with a hand gripping the edge of its upper flange, on its far side, and lean out, around, and over it, and gain an excellent view and easy-enough access to the connection-point where this topmost diagonal comes down and encounters both the W36 column, and the W14 horizontal beam which connects to the column, beneath the diagonal, on its south side.
And from here, there can be no doubt that this is The Right Place.
⅝" welded gusset/stiffener plates extending vertically from both flange edges on the diagonal, extending across and tying it to the column, form a neat pocket which is open on top, enclosed on either side, with a bottom that slopes strongly upward away from the smooth flange face of that W36 column which is backing it.
Anything small enough, placed in this pocket, can never be seen from the side, or below, and it can never fall out.
The pocket itself is split vertically by a third ⅝" stiffener plate located between the other two, forming a pair of narrow vertical slots into which a thing once placed, will remain there for the life of the Flame Deflector.
A more perfect place could not be imagined, nor found.
The toy Shuttle is retrieved from its stowage in the waistband of the blue jeans, kind loving thoughts are allowed to flow for a moment, and then the Shuttle is placed in the left slot, the westernmost one, tail-first, with its nose looking out from its Safe Place, angling upward toward the sky.
And then your father left, the same way he came in, and he never said a word to anyone about any of it.
Except you.