Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B Construction Photos

Page 41

Flame Trench (Original Scan)


Flame Trench panorama from the East MLP Access Stair Tower.

The Flame Deflector, sitting there in the middle of the trench with its row of SSW Spray Headers running along its crest, has a nice new coat of Fondu Fyre on it, but the rest of the trench shows the effects of the beatings it took from the Saturn V's and Saturn 1-B's, pretty well. Especially the south end of it. The fire bricks had a slick glassy surface which was produced by the accumulated effects of the exhaust from each launch. Almost like volcanic glass or something. Not quite obsidian, but it was thinking about it.



The Great Gash of the Flame Trench at Pad B.

This panorama of print photographs was taken at the same time, from the same place, as the panorama on the previous page.

You're looking at over 350 linear feet of a thing that was 450 feet long, 58 feet wide, and 42 sheer-sided feet deep. Fair-sized object. Quite impressive when viewed from close-range.

Dominating the whole left side of the image, the blackness of the south side of the Flame Trench sits silently, giving more than ample testimony to the Furies which engulfed it, the Furies which demanded it be designed and built in the first place.

It is black all along its bottom surface, from the toe of the Flame Deflector in the center of the image, across and to the left, all the way to the upper end of the ramp where it merges with the wider surface of the pad deck.

Along the sides, the blackness is low, nearest the Flame Deflector, and then it rises higher and higher as you move farther down the the length of the Trench.

And the blackness follows the path of the Furies exactly, as they first encountered the central Deflector in its center, and were then sprayed, splashed, deflected, farther down and across and to the side and then back up again, encountering the vertical walls of the Trench and being momentarily contained by them, redirected by them, and funneled escapingly across and away, even as that which created them lifted itself up and out of harm's way with an earth-shattering roar.

You look at that black, and if you're not careful, you might be persuaded that it's some sort of industrial thing.

Some sort of pollution, or grime, or some other nasty or toxic thing, or something along those lines.

It certainly looks it, doesn't it?

But it is not.

It is nothing of the sort.

It is clean.

Give it a bit of a wipe with soap and water, and you could eat a meal off of it in perfect safety.

Which is what you do when you eat any other meal off of any other ceramic dish or plate.

Because what you're seeing here is more or less a sort of black ceramic.

What you're seeing here is the altered surfaces of the fire bricks with which the Trench is lined, all along its inside surfaces.

Fire bricks that have been touched by the Furies which came upon them suddenly, without warning, riding a thunderclap as they did so.

Fire bricks which were purpose-built to take this sort of thing, but which, in the taking of it...

...were altered.

And wherever they were touched, their dingy pale-yellow surfaces remain as such no longer.

The original gritty, grainy, pale-yellow surfaces have been transformed.

To a smooth, and, all along the bottom of the Trench, near-seamless, almost shiny black expanse.

And the work was done in the twinkling of an eye.

How long would a Saturn V or a Saturn 1-B linger above the Trench, filling it with a fire unlike any other?

Not long.

And how many times did they launch one of these impossible machines from this pad?

Not many.

And yet...

The bricks lay silent...

...and black.

Waiting patiently for the next impossible machine.

Waiting for the Space Shuttle.

Spanning the Flame Trench near its south end, and extending beyond it on both sides in a arc, the steel rails which carried the RSS can be seen.

In this view, you can get somewhat of an idea of the layout and orientation of the support pillar located mid-span, in the middle of the Trench, which supported the rails mid-span, and you can see that it is noticeably longer, north-to-south, than it is east-to-west, and this stands to reason, as they wanted to minimize the impacted surface area of this obstruction, facing into the exhaust blast coming down the Trench, away from the Deflector, as the Shuttle began flying.

As the arc of the rails continues on toward the right, it disappears beneath the Forward Drive Truck, which supports the weight of the RSS which was borne by the heavy iron of Column Line 7, at Line B.

Just before you get to the Drive Truck, extending out across the grassy open area of the pad toward the Perimeter Road and the VAB in the far distance beyond it, you can see the cross-country piping run which went to the Hypergol Fuel Facility, sitting there beneath its white roof, with unwalled open-air construction. That equipment out there needed protection, which is what the roof is doing, but it did not want to be enclosed, since any monomethylhydrazine which might have been spilled in there would produce copious vapors, and copious vapors of monomethylhydrazine is something you do not want to be concentrating behind closed walls.

So they left it open. Which is what they also did with the oxidizer facility over on the other side of the crawlerway, well out of view in this image, owing to the fact that nitrogen tetroxide is equally-horrific stuff in every way.

Hypergol is potent medicine. Here's the kind of thing they need to address, in advance, when dealing with just one facet of that marvelously lovely jewel which is hypergol.

Let us return to the Forward Drive Truck for a little while.

The Drive Trucks were very unusual insofar as they were one of the very few things that were excluded from the blanket "Buy American" clauses in the contract.

Apparently, nobody in the United States of America had the expertise to build something like this, so it was sole-sourced to, I think, something called Kochs GmBH in Germany (but I just googled that and got a window and door outfit, so something's off, somewhere), which fabricated them and had them shipped to the pad, and, again, I think, their field representative's name was Wernher Indorf, and me and Wernher got along famously, and although he was a seriously high-powered operative of a seriously high-powered manufacturing concern, he was also like a little kid in a candy store when it came to being out on a goddamned Space Shuttle launch pad, out where the goddamned Moon Rockets once flew.

So yeah, we got along pretty good, since we both shared a fine appreciation for the wonders amongst which we were walking every day at work.

And notice if you will, the little yellow cab resting on top of the forward side of the forward Drive Truck.

A curious little thing, that cab, and I'm guessing there was an entire government specification somewhere for things like this, for the particular shade of yellow they got painted in, which spec was duly invoked for this particular application too.

Zoom way the hell on in, and you can see that this thing is clearly something in which you might find a driver.

And yes indeed, they had a driver who drove the RSS.

The whole gigantic Rotating Service Structure.

Had a driver.

For in case maybe it jumped off the rails? In which case perhaps he could drive it back over to those rails, and get back on them, and then keep on driving to where they needed to go?

This thing aways astounded me.

Why in the name of Earthly Hell would you need a fucking driver for a goddamned multi-million pound monstrosity like the RSS?

Why not a few buttons somewhere, on a control paddle, maybe like they have for large bridge cranes or other such similar items?

But nope, the RSS needed a driver and by god it was going to have a driver.

And so it did.

And he sat there in his little cab, on his little seat, and HE HAD TO WEAR A SEATBELT.

There was a seatbelt in the fucking thing.

God, I wish I was kidding, but I am not.

I am dead serious.

Fucking seatbelt.

For safety.

And one last little oddball snippet of information was that the gearboxes for the Drive Trucks used some kind of weird-ass very special gear oil (which looked, and acted, like some very black, very nasty, Vaseline), and we needed to dump a bunch of it into the gearboxes before we could functionally test them by rolling the RSS around for the first time ever, and we got to searching for somebody, anybody, who actually had some of the stuff, and it came to pass that yours truly wound up driving his ratty yellow VW Bug way the hell out State Road 192, out somewhere in the middle of nowhere, not quite to St. Cloud (which, back in those days was still not much more than a lot of trees and mosquitoes), and picked up a 5-gallon bucket of the stuff at the most ridiculous isolated little redneck Texaco gas station you could ever possibly imagine as being the supplier for NASA's high-tech gear oil to use on one of their launch pads.

To this day, I still scratch my head over that one. Oh well.

Casting our gaze downward from the Drive Truck, we're getting a pretty good view of the Flame Deflector, sitting in the middle of the Flame Trench, with its row of SSW Spray Headers all along its crest, aboutwhich I have already talked, so we'll let that go for now.

To the right of the Deflector, the Trench yawns menacingly, and more SSW Spray Header can be seen at the top of the far wall, extending out of frame to the right, and yeah, we've talked about that already, too.

Above and beyond the far side of the Flame Trench, the very bottom-most portions of the "9099" Building, which abutted the FSS just to its north, can be seen, just past the MLP Mount Pedestal and all the rest of the stuff next to it.

"9099" has always bothered me.

It's one of those names which was very obviously chosen for very particular reasons, and yet, in all the years I worked out there, occasionally walking around on the thing, I was never able to learn the origins for the designation 9099, as regards the 9099 Building, no matter who I asked (and I asked plenty of people), and no matter how hard I researched, and that lack of understanding extends down the years to this very day, where you can tell by the fact that I'm writing these words about it, it still bothers me that I have never found the answer to that question.

What I do know is that there is something called a "9099 Interface" and it is electrical in nature, and it "interfaces" with the MLP, but beyond that... nope. Nothing.

Electrician work.

And I was a steel guy.

But I'd still like to know.

Goddamnit.