Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B Construction Photos

Page 39

RSS - Union Ironworkers - OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers - Titan IV Near-catastrophe. (Original Scan)


Top left: OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers installed on B Pad.

Top right: Gene Lockamy and I wish I remember the name, but I cannot. Sigh. But I remember the person. Both of these guys were straight-shooters. Really good people.

Bottom left: Up under the RSS 135 level, shortly before the Purge Covers were lifted into place. In this frame, you get a pretty good view of some of the goofy turnbuckle "actuators" that NASA engineering had cooked up to tweak the location of the Purge Cover to account for slight variances in where the orbiter actually wound up when the MLP was set down on its support pedestals (which is just a wee bit different, each time they did it). This view, from the 125' elevation, only shows some of the top ones. There was another set of them down lower. It must have looked good on paper, I suppose.

Bottom right: Purge Cover installation.

Additional commentary below the image.




Top Left: (Full-size)

And here we are, looking at the RSS, on the day we hung the OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers. The left one (right in this image, never forget that things like left and right are almost always in reference to the orbiter's left/right up/down forward/aft frame of reference) was hung first, and the right one still appears to be attached to the crane (although at a peculiar angle, and this is furthermore impossible to verify in this image, which lacks sufficient detail to see things at that scale), with someone (hard to believe it's an ironworker wearing that oddball white shirt) standing on top of it.

This might be a good time to step back, and give the front of our unencrusted RSS a bit of a look, while we can, before they cover it up with no end of OWP and all the rest of it, and give things a look with an eye to identifying various items of interest.

Perhaps let's start with hypergol, and some of the things which that entails.

The RSS was, in addition to its primary function as a payload facility, also, very much so, a facility for the operational handling of industrial quantities of hypergolic propellant. Monomethylhydrazine and Nitrogen Tetroxide are both extraordinarily toxic and corrosive chemicals, and an integral part of the respect with which they must be treated comes in the form of safety-showers and eyewash stations which need to be readily available for emergency use, should a spill occur and somebody get hit with the stuff.

The Space Shuttle itself, as well as many of the payloads it carried into space, used hypergol by the barrel, and anywhere that people could get any of it spilled on them needed to have emergency showers and eyewashes nearby.

Which means the RSS itself, and all five levels of the PCR needed to be equipped for it.

And in this image, I count no less than seven safety-shower/eyewash stations as visible in plain sight, one for each level of the PCR interior platforms, located just outside of the PCR emergency egress doors near each landing of the PCR emergency egress stair tower, and another pair, down at the 125' level, very close to the bottom ends of both hypergol spill ducts.

And, needless to say, this is by no means all of them. There's plenty more elsewhere which cannot be seen in this image. They took this kind of thing very seriously, and were as well-prepared as anyone in a working environment could possibly be, when it came to readiness for a hypergol spill.

Of other note in this image, you're getting about as good (not very good at all, actually) a view as I can give you of the general area which I mentioned before where Sag Rod took his little "ride" on the elevator tower diagonal bracing. The linked images are not the elevator tower, but are instead the stair tower that lies immediately adjacent to the elevator tower, on the Column Line 7 side of it. The elevator tower is immediately to the right of the stair tower in the linked images, but is blocked from view by the insulated metal paneling which sheathes both the elevator tower itself, as well as the elevator "lobby" areas for each level of the PCR Interior Platforms, and which paneling is visible in the images above as the featureless light-shaded areas directly in line with, and directly behind as seen from this point of view, the emergency eyewash stations which I mentioned above.

The point of all of the above being to give you a feel for what was involved, and where it was located, when Sag Rod had to pass a pop quiz, but on that fateful day there existed no insulated metal paneling at all, no Payload Changeout Room, no stair tower whatsoever (it went up later, after the elevator tower was completed), no floor framing, no steel-bar grating or deckplates, no nothing except for a bit of thin steel skeleton high above the unyielding concrete of the pad deck, filled with nothing more than the lightest whispers of thinnest air.

So now back up to the main image. The one with the whole RSS visible, and the pad deck too, and mentally remove everything, leaving the RSS as a very-open latticework of iron, some thick, some thin, with far more blue sky showing through than might be deemed sensible for people getting unexpectedly twanged around, holding on by one hand and one foot, on too-flexible iron, into places where humans are not generally expected to survive visiting.

Yeah, that's the stuff.

Fucking Union Ironworkers. These people are NOT fucking around.


Top Right: (Full-size)

And they look so everyday. So blandly unextraordinary. You cannot learn a single thing by looking at them.

You cannot guess the places they've been, and the places they will go in the future.

You cannot guess what things they've done, and what things they'll do in the future.

You cannot guess what they've seen and endured, and what they'll see and endure in the future.

Denim. Suspenders. Wristwatch. Sunglasses. Workman's attire in front of workman's equipment, standing in a workman's place.

Not one single bit of it lets on. Gives no clue. Causes you to pay any closer attention. Causes you to notice that anything is out of the ordinary.

Except perhaps, perhaps the tiniest little bit, perhaps the facial expressions.

People who know, know, and they know they know, and they know they know things, physical things, mental things, certain deeply frightening things, that mere mortals such as you and I shall never be given admission to.

We laughed and joked together when a scrap of time offered itself. But it could never last.

The bearing down, the immersion in water oh so very deep.

You're in the deep end now, and you must swim, and you must swim for yourself, and swim for your buddies, too.

Good Honest Work.

Seasoned well with stark terror, here and there.

Seasoned well with permanent injury and occasional death.

How many of these guys have all their fingers? Not all of them do. Did you know that? Did you know that ironworkers lose fingers often enough for it to become a sort of characteristic?

Most people do not know this.

Most people do not work with metal siding for large structures.

Most people do not work with things that, when set down gently on firm support, do so with sufficient concentrated force to sever an intervening finger or thumb as if it was not there at all. Which of course, then.....

Cold lifeless steel.

Empty stomach-churning drops into fearsome voids lined with death all along their lower margins.

And they know their own strengths.

They know exactly who they are.

And what they're made of.

And they know exactly who you are.

And what you're made of.

And they measure, and they find you wanting.

But they endure you just the same, because they are Good Men.


Bottom Left: (Full-size)

And here at last, we have come to the end of the line with the fabrication and installation of the OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers.

Here, you are standing at the lowest level of the RSS, down at the 112' elevation (APS Servicing Platform level), 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 135' (PCR Floor level), and 125' (APU Servicing Platform level).

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. 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-complex and difficult image 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 murderously-complex and difficult things together in the first place. So ok. So let's give it a whirl, whatta ya say?

To a first approximation, the left side of the top third of this image depicts the 135' level Floor Steel, but none of this is any kind of straightforward, because in addition to the floor steel itself, additional Pod Cover support steel had to be fabricated and installed, just beneath the surface of the 135' floor steel, and when viewing this stuff from below, it becomes hard like a motherfucker to distinguish between the two sets of steel framing members, and the poor quality of this image 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 is 125' level Floor Steel, and it too contains its own bewildering extraneous crap in the form of unistrut, 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, you can see the Adjustment Turnbuckles, and you can also see the Pod Cover Mounting Haunches.

Stop a minute here and study this. Notice that the support brackets for the Adjustment Turnbuckles are just as heavy, perhaps even heavier than, the Support Haunches for the Pod Covers.

Hmm...

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 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.

Drift around in here for a while, zoomed in 300 percent. 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. 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 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.

A few scraps of what I did in this area have survived.

Memory no longer informs me as to 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), but just looking at the sketch itself, you can see that something was fucked up with the hinge lugs on this little double flip-up platform (stuff like that was all over the place. Flip-ups on flip-ups. Gah.

Memory serves me just fine as to the story surrounding this field sketch of the entire OMS Pod Mold Line at the 135' level, though.

It was a fucking nightmare.

Nothing fit. Nothing worked.

We fabricated the miserable shit exactly the way they told us to, and then we couldn't install any of it 'cause all of it was wrong, and the ironworkers wound up coming in there and more or less field-fabricated the goddamned thing, cut it in the field to whatever dimensions actually worked, and installed it to snugly fit into its existing surroundings, as opposed to some of the imaginary surroundings you would find drawn so carefully, drawn so neatly, drawn so precisely, on large sheets of paper, some of which paper wasn't even worth the paper it was made out of.

So yours truly became one of the ones who had to go up on the iron and look at the fucking thing, and for a couple of the measurements I had to make, I found myself in a few quite-nasty positions of having to lean out over the edge of the existing floor steel, reaching down and across with a fucking tape measure, unable to grasp anything in the area to steady myself as I knelt upon the smooth steel deckplating of the PCR Floor, and just sort of hope that I did not lean just that one additional whisker too far, and suddenly find myself plummeting to the pad deck eighty death-dealing feet beneath me.

But you're reading these words, so obviously it all ended well, but the mere act of writing that paragraph above brought some of it all back, in far-too-great of detail, complete with raised heart and breathing rates along with tightened muscles throughout my whole body.

Fuck that noise.

Fuck every last bit of that goddamned noise.

And all because some fuckwit or other in some comfortably air-conditioned room didn't want to look bad, so the miserably life-threatening bastard took the easy way out (for himself, not anyone else, naturally), and put someone else at very real risk of ending their lives in an attempt to rectify the problem they created.

And you wonder why I HATE these people as much as I do?

I have good and sufficient reason for hating these people. Some of these people tried to kill me and the people I worked with, all because they didn't want to look bad.

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

Alright. Back to work.

Let us consider the mounting haunches shall we?

Yes, yes we shall.

Here they are again, just in case you've lost track along the way, and by the way, if you've lost track along the way, please do not be hard on yourself, ok? This is to be expected. Happens all the time. You're doing just fine, whether you believe that or not.

This whole area is rotten with extraneous crap, so in the interests of continuing to try and sort the fish from the fowl, here's another nice tight closeup, highlighted to show a confusing... something that was not ours and that we had nothing to do with. Never forget that the mechanical and electrical trades were all over the towers at all times too, diligently prosecuting their own work efforts, oftentimes with no coordination between themselves and other crafts. The Pod Covers were a contraption and as part of that contraption, they blew heated air through the Pod Covers all around the surfaces of the OMS Pods in an effort to sort of use a blow-drier to keep water from entering the spaces between the TPS Tiles and wicking down in there and causing unseen trouble as a result. And my guess is that our something has to do with supporting the flexible ducting that was required to take the air (heated elsewhere) and shove it inside the Pod Cover where it belonged, so it could do its job, and of course since the stupid Pod Covers were adjustable... sigh... that meant that everything else associated with them had to be adjustable too, and whatever this thing is, it certainly looks plenty adjustable because I can see what looks to be some kind of vertical screw-jack threaded rod in there, and I can also see the nice bright white parts along its uppermost margin bear more than a passing resemblance to our own adjustable brackets for our own Pod Cover Adjustment Turnbuckles. Ye gods! What a fucking mess!

But that's what they wanted, and that's what they got, so fuckem.

Oh yeah, the mounting haunches. We were talking about the goddamned mounting haunches, weren't we? And did I mention how easy it is to lose track along the way? Yes. Yes I did.

Ok, take a look at the mounting haunches and please note that for the purposes of supporting a mobile object that's larger than the two-story foyer facade 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.

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

It is not.

Water.

Devious. Patient. Water.

I will 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.

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.

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 closed-cell foam), to provide... you guessed it, insulation, so as they could keep the temperatures inside the UES where they wanted them.

Ok, fine.

And rockets were launched, and payloads were handled (including both Voyager's which were launched from Pad 41), and everything was fine until the money ran out, after which point poor old Pad 41 was abandoned, 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 thier 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 thier 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 side 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, or somebody, 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 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, 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 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.

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 restraining chain, tied back to the primary structural framing of the MST, down around the bottom end of that hinge pipe, just above the haunch for the lower thrust bearing, 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, 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 a hundred feet up in the air, was considered even more dangerous than usual.

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 on the pad at all, or well outside 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, 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 drawings 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 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 siding, and the metal siding was 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 on 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 between the framing and the skin, narrow gaps 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.

It 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, and nearby rocket launches, 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 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 maybe 25 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 on 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 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 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 MST Framing which ran east and west between the MST's Main Structural Support Towers, tying those two towers together rigidly, 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, it's wide-open down there.

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 Support 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 foot pads 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 weighted 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 framing that tied its two Main Structural Towers together, and I'm running around behind a twenty-five foot 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!

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 Glen Johnson told me.

Glen 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 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, making a beeline 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, 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.

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 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.

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.


Bottom Right: (Full-size)

And here we are, wrapping 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, 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.

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, 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.

And the foam itself was riddled with holes and pockmarks, and this whole schmutz was from then and forevermore left hanging out into thin air over a hundred feet above the surrounding wilderness of 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 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 brackets this strong because they knew the 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 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.

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 a 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.

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 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, 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 so the damnable things, or at least that part of the damnable things which was still in the air, 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.