Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B Construction Photos

Page 50

Lox Tank Spray Test, LH2 Flare Stack, Union Ironworkers (Original Scan)

Top left: LOX Tank Fire Suppression Water Functional Test.

Right, top and bottom: Erecting the LH2 Flare Stack.

Bottom left: Unknown and Steve Parker.





Top Left: (Reduced)

You walk around out there, dealing with some of Wernher von Braun's leftovers, and every once in a while you stop and say to yourself, "Hey, wait a minute, this shit's pretty fucking radical."

And the Lox Tank was one of those places that could do that to you.

Looking with just your eyes alone... and yeah, ok, that's a nice-size metal tank you got there, guys, but so what? Beaumont, Texas has a zillion of these things, filled up with no end of petroleum stuff and scattered all across the landscape, here and there. And so do a lot of other places.

And then you look again, and add your mind to your eyes... and holy shit. "Liquid? Oxygen? How cold? How much of the stuff did you say? Really? That much? Sitting right there? Right there in front of me where if it ever gets loose and blows up it will incinerate metal and concrete (and maybe flesh and blood) things everywhere all around me by the acre? Really?"

Old Wernher really knew how to build things, didn't he?

Yes. Yes he did. Old Wernher really did know how to build things.

They decided to add some water-spray some damn thing or other to the Lox Tank area, for fire-suppression, (yeah right, that oughtta quell the flames produced by 900,000 gallons of liquid oxygen just fine) and it fell to us to build the (surprisingly substantial) steel support framework for it (over the aggrieved howls of protest coming from the pipefitters who thought it should be their work), and that was kind of interesting, 'cause of course the engineering drawings failed to account properly for all of the existing mechanical and electrical installations which were already in-place, and we got into a broil with NASA Engineering over that too, and in the end, the old construction-site law of Whoever Gets There First Owns It was invoked, and a substantial modification to the steel support structure had to be designed and implemented 'cause it would have been much more time consuming and expensive to rework the electrical or mechanical (I do not remember which) interfering thing that was blocking us from installing our support, and yeah yeah yeah, same old shit no matter where you go, and in the end, well ok, there you go, a nice new support frame and the fitters have piped it up all nice and pipey, and it's time to give the damn thing a functional test, and yours truly was hand-picked to stand around with his thumb up his ass to satisfy NASA that a representative from the structural contractor was there in case something went wrong (So... whatta ya want me to do? Pull out a torch and cut the motherfucker in half? Weld something to it? Not gonna happen, Bucko, but oh well. I would have written some paper, so maybe that's all they wanted? Who the fuck knows?), and so I brought my camera 'cause I knew well in advance that I was going to be doing nothing the whole time, and in the course of wasting most of a whole day's work productivity, I grabbed a couple of frames, one of which you see here. And it put on a nice show, as you can well see, and who knew that in addition to everything else, NASA was also detail-oriented enough to include a few aesthetically-pleasing fountains here and there, too, so that was kind of nice, right?

Tra la la.

But Old Wernher, yeah, Old Wernher really did know how to build things.


Top Right: (Full-size)

And way over on the other side of the pad, there's an equally-ridiculous gigantic metal ball, and this one's even worse than the Lox Tank.

This one's filled up with Liquid HYDROGEN for god's sake!

Full-tilt, Hindenburg-grade, more-explosive-than-a-dynamite-factory, fucking HYDROGEN, chilled down to an alarmingly-low 423 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.

As I was saying, Old Wernher really knew how to build stuff.

And no matter how hard you try to keep stuff that cold, cold, it's not gonna all stay quite cold enough, and it's gonna boil off into its more-normal gaseous form, and since it's explosive as all holy fuck, you'd better have yourself a little something in place to deal with that shit, so as it don't go blowing you and half the town around you clear to hell.

And so you let it boil off under very controlled circumstances, which circumstances involve a very robust plumbing system, part of which consists in a nice tall stack, from which you can flare your boiled-off hydrogen, all nice and safe and far enough away from anything else that's even remotely flammable, and let nature take her course, which of course she will, and she'll let the flames combine your loose gaseous hydrogen with all that nice oxygen that's just sort of laying around in the air not doing very much at all, to make... wait for it... WATER!

Don't get no safer and more environmentally benign than water, right? So you just let it burn. And yeah, the whole concept of a fucking fire that makes fucking water kinda gives me the creeps too, but that's what really happens and that's how it works, so I guess it's ok, and I guess no crimes against nature are being committed with this stuff. I guess.

So they had us erect their LH2 Flare Stack, which somebody else furnished and delivered to the pad, and that's what this is a picture of.

You're standing directly on top of the fill and drain lines that go to and from the pad, from the LH2 Tank which is directly behind you (but not close behind you, 'cause they like to keep high-explosive stuff kinda separated-out, far enough away from everything else to sort of minimize the collateral damage in case somebody has an "oopsie" one day, so the Flare Stack is a good ways away from the Tank), as you look down the vacuum-jacketed piping runs toward the pad.


Bottom Right: (Full-size)

Out of our usual top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right sequence yet again, but by now I'm presuming you're getting used to it, so we'll just roll on with things and not worry about it anymore, ok?

In this frame we've come back down off of the vacuum-jacketed piping, stepped a little closer to things, and walked a little bit north, too.

And they're eyeball-deep in it, stack still hanging from the crane at a tilt, everybody up there on it, some working, some watching, as things are zeroed in toward the one and only orientation and location where the damn thing can be properly bolted down to its concrete support.

And yeah, I was being perhaps more than just a little bit smart-ass about the whole watching business when I described my day at the Lox Tank up above, 'cause one of the things that had better be happening with the ridiculous crowd of people watching is that each member of the crowd may or may not represent a different discipline, including, but not limited to, various subsets and sub-subsets of engineering, contracting, safety, quality assurance, and who-knows-what-else with a zillion different outfits, each one having a zillion different discrete tasks to perform, and the main reason any of them are there oftentimes is because they have to be ever-alert, because they're playing defense for their team, the other members of which team may be in a trailer up on the pad, or an office over at the Industrial Area, or maybe in a building downtown, someplace three time-zones away somewhere.

Crap like this is a conglameration of differing systems, and each one of those systems constitutes a full and complete discipline unto itself, and further constitutes a life's work just to get a sufficient understanding of the complexities involved with it to allow someone to successfully grapple with it out in the field, and out in the field, there are other people, not all of whom might share your own enthusiasm for whatever it is that you have made your life's work, and who further, in their ignorance of, and/or contempt for, the nuances of that life's work, just might fuck it all up while they're busily-engaged in beating and banging their own life's work into place, so you'd better be right there watching those motherfuckers, or otherwise they might very well just render your system broken in some god-awful partially-hidden, expensive, and possibly even life-threatening way, and if you're not eyeballs-on with it, the whole time, the hidden (and sometimes not so hidden at all) broken-ness which occurred at their hands will suddenly be on your hands, and some times, that turns out to be a most very serious matter indeed.

So you join the absurd crowd of people who are all just standing around, doing nothing, just watching, while only one or two people are doing any actual physical work.

But you're working too.

You're playing defense.

You're keeping the other team honest.


Bottom Left: (Full-size)

Steve Parker on the right, and no recollection whatsoever of the name for the gentleman on the left. Sigh.

Union Ironworkers. Fifteen-minute morning break. Couple of Good Men.

Not sure exactly where this image was taken.

That's the Lox Tank peeking out from behind Steve's right shoulder, and up in the air, top left corner of the frame, that looks like three of the Emergency Egress Slidewires up there, and since those things tie into the back of the FSS, that seems to put us on the RSS, but I dunno. There's just something about this image that I'm not sure of.

I dunno.

Wish I did, but I don't.