Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B Construction Photos

Page 10

Canister Fit Check, Fire at FSS Pad Deck Level (Original Scan)


Canister fit check. Fire.

Came down off of the RSS, and just as the FSS elevator doors were opening, we heard a pop, and the doors opened fully to reveal that one of the electrical panels there on the pad deck at the foot of the tower had unexpectedly failed in some manner and caught fire. So since I had a camera on me, I took some pictures of it.

Big excitement.

Shortly after the bottom right shot was taken, a security guy came up and demanded to see my camera permit.

Which I showed him.

And he seemed quite disappointed with that turn of events, and eventually departed to go scrutinize something else somewhere.

Ah well, such is life.

Also, in the bottom right photo, you can see that all the swing arms have been hung on the FSS. And the good old Centaur Porch is up there too, sticking out to the right up near the top of the Canister.

Additional commentary below the image.




Top Left: (Full-size)

Big surprise.

Just as I was coming out of the elevator at ground (pad deck) level, after taking shots of the canister lift operations from up on the RSS.

Fire!

Think fast!

There's a chain-link fence in the area right around the door to the FSS elevator, and this is my first frame and it was a hurried thing, taken through that chain link fence from a point of view standing more or less right in the doorway of the FSS elevator. In the split seconds between hearing that unpleasantly-unexpected "Pop" and grabbing this frame, I was also tasking myself with the deadly-serious business of near-instantaneously determining A.) The sensible nature of what the fuck was going on in the first place, and B.) Whether or not I should be sticking around or running for my life, and C.) If I was going to be running for my life, should I be getting back inside the elevator (Which they tell you never to do when there's a fire, but maybe this time we can kind of bend the rules a little, right?) and hitting the 135' level button for a sprint across the catwalks and grating panels, out across to the bottom of the RSS and maybe then further across the full width of it and then down the Column Line 7 emergency egress stair tower, or maybe up to the 215' level to access the top of the RSS, or even all the way up to the very top of the FSS, or maybe should I be running across the pad deck, and if so, to the left or to the right as I momentarily closed with the fire, before opening up some serious distance between it and myself, north or south, or maybe even west and down the stairs into the PTCR and from thence out and away toward the pad perimeter fence, and maybe what the hell else is out there that's just about to blow itself to hell, or come crashing down from above, or start spraying hypergol all over the place and take me and everybody else with it when it goes?

Turned out that my decision in the B.) part of things was a good one, and I stuck around. But that was by no means guaranteed at the time, and a wary eye was kept on things even after making that decision, and, had I been wrong... well... you wouldn't be reading these words right now, would you, 'cause I would not still be around to be writing them, would I?

This is a textbook example of why we do functional tests on things prior to using them in real-world situations where real-world assets are on the line. Sometimes, things are not exactly what you think they are, no matter how hard you've studied, and no matter how well you know the material, and once in a while, the parts of things that are not exactly what you think they are will interact in wholly-unexpected ways, and once in a while, one of those wholly-unexpected interactions will be wildly divergent from what you're expecting, and it will fuck you up if you're not careful.

So yeah, so it's expensive as hell to set the entire system up, from the O&C Building all the goddamned way out to the Payload Changeout Room, and it takes all fucking day to run the rehearsal, nevermind the time and effort expended in getting all the players organized and in their proper positions to do the run-through, and when you're done nothing happened, and nothing of substance was accomplished, but you do it anyway, 'cause if you don't you just might discover that you're the guy who destroyed something that's valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, or perhaps only just killed a couple of people, and now what are you gonna do, Mister Smart "We don't need to waste our time on any of this shit." Guy?

Functional Test.

Trust But Verify.

Any questions?

Ok.

And oh yeah, we never did learn what caused this electrical panel to blow. Somebody knows, but it's not me. Electrical panels are electrician work, and once the structural guys have been appraised of the fact that the electricity is not going to get them, they promptly lose all interest in it and immediately get right back to dealing with their own issues, problems, and duties.

There's a couple of high-pressure gas bottles standing right there, and they could easily have been somebody's torch kit, filled with some delightfully volatile acetylene and oxygen, but their gray color corresponds to carbon dioxide, which is harmless enough around flames, although it will certainly asphyxiate you, if you set things up properly and let it do so.

A little bit farther away, almost directly in line with the flames, sitting at an angle, you can see the tell-tale red of the bottle on a fire-extinguisher cart. Fire extinguishers are all over the goddamned place, and that's a good thing, every once in a while.


Top Right: (Full-size)

Out from behind the chain-link now, and the flames are rolling right along, but at least they're isolated from everything else around them. In the background, this little tableaux has everybody's full attention, and I kind of have to wonder if any of them were saying to themselves, "Where'd the guy with the fucking camera come from?" One can only imagine.


Bottom Left: (Full-size)

Well ok, that takes care of that. Somebody knocked it down with the extinguisher, and this is what's left. I have no idea whatsoever as to what circuit this might have been, why it popped, or if it had any significant knock-on effects anywhere else. Looking at the explosion-proof junction box that burned, you can see that the access cover has been removed (no, there's no way in hell anything from the inside could have blown in a way to knock that cover off, it is, after all, explosion-proof), and somebody has jacklegged some external wiring into it, and I've got a feeling that whoever did that, might be our culprit, but we'll never know, will we?


Bottom Right: (Full-size)

You can see a couple of guards, one with a hat on, and one without (no hard hats, of course, after all they're guards and guards don't have to follow the rules), in line with the firetruck behind them, but I do not recall if either one of them (there were others, out of frame) was the one that confronted me about the camera. My brain is telling me it's the one on the right, with the hat on, but I'm not quite willing to trust my brain right this minute.

To the left of the guy with the yellow hard hat on, far left bottom of the frame, zoom in on the image and you can see another guy with an acetylene bottle over his shoulder, walking away from a torch kit, right behind him. Good thing that torch kit never got involved with the fire, eh?

Above and behind the canister, the RSS (and just a little bit of the FSS) can be seen in all of its psychotically-complex glory. By this time, they had added an awful lot of extra stuff on to the RSS, above and beyond its original design, and things are hard to recognize, but I'll list a bunch of stuff (but by no stretch of the imagination, everything) in clear view, in whole or in part, original-design and later change-order installations, stuff we've already talked about and stuff I've never mentioned, all without bothering to further identify them above and beyond the fact that they're in plain sight, so here we go more or less from lower to higher, but there's exceptions, ok?:

Aft Reaction Control System platforms.
ARCS room.
Removable ARCS "stinger" covers.
Auxiliary Power Unit service platforms.
OMS Pod heated purge covers.
Left orbiter side seal panel.
Payload Changeout Room door (dimly, in deep shadow, to the left of the left orbiter side seal panel).
PCR Hypergol spill ducts.
MLP Deck access stairs ("stairs of doom, to nowhere")
SFD.
North piping bridge.
SSW MLP supply header.
Centaur porch.
Hinge column.
Hinge column struts.
Hinge column crossover platforms.
Payload Bay Kit & Contingency Platforms.
RSS main structural framing, column lines B, C, & D.
Orbiter Weather Protection system.
PCR emergency egress stair tower.
PCR elevator enclosure.
IAA
OMBUU
Orbiter Access Arm and white room.
External Tank access platforms.
ET Access Platforms Guide Columns.
FSS Operational TeleVision camera platforms.
Gox arm (underside only).
Gox arm hinge access platforms.
Gox arm latchback access platforms.
Gox arm gaseous oxygen vent ducts.

And remember, each and every one of these things, and a blue million of other things, can itself be deeply contrapted, complex, and confusing to understand.

Big launch pad fun!