Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B Construction Photos

Page 46

GOX Arm Lift 5 (Original Scan)


Final bolt-up.

You live in the penthouse suite at the very top of a high-rise condominium in the most expensive district, of the most expensive town, on a resort coastline, famous for its unparalleled views of utterly-undeveloped endless white sand beach, cerulean blue ocean water and waves, and a world-class nature preserve, the like of which exists nowhere else on the planet.

Except that you don't.

But you do.

And your condominium is so exclusive... that you must show a badge to the armed guards who will prevent you from entering the area without one. Your condominium does one hell of a job of excluding, which of course is what exclusive is all about in the first place, right? And your condominium is so exclusive, that even the richest people in the world cannot ever hope to gain entry. Cannot ever hope to share your view. Cannot ever hope to exercise their financial muscle to shove other people aside, and grab that which they might wish to grab.

And while the grabbers are forced to stay put, right where they are, on the other side of the perimeter fences which surround your splendid isolation, you get to not only enjoy the view, you also get to work with spaceships and the equipment that is used to get them into space.

Your condominium operates as a meritocracy and if you do not merit access to the spaceships and the equipment that is used to get them into space, then you shall not enter here.

The realtors, the developers, and their monied clients all gnash their teeth in a towering frustration of unrequited greed, believing themselves worthy, believing themselves possessed of the right to come and despoil every square mile of this place in exchange for thirty pieces of silver, but they shall not pass.




Top: (Full-size)

While the arm remained slightly mis-aligned with the strongback that will support it, I departed the Camera Platform at elevation 285' and moved over to the north side of the FSS at elevation 280' where I then leaned out over the handrail as far as I could with a reasonable expectation of safety, and took this image.

Look close at the extreme top-left corner of the frame, and you can see a very small bit of someone's arm. I have no recollection of who this might have been, however. It could have been one of the ironworkers, directing the crane operator or keeping an eye on things from a point of view that the ironworkers who were hands-on with things could not see, or perhaps a member of NASA Engineering Oversight, or a representative of one of the other craft labor trades, or even Wade Ivey himself. I have no way of knowing, alas.

There is much else in this frame to consider, and some aspects of it display things well, while other aspects display things poorly, and I'll just try to do the best I can with it, ok?

Perhaps we can begin with Upper Hinge Access Platform 'B' which is noted on the elevation view as "NOT SHOWN FOR CLARITY", leaving us kind of wondering what's actually going on with it, and which can be seen in this image near the top left corner, partially obscuring the Upper Hinge Box, giving us a little bit better appreciation of the tightly-crowded area into which the crane operator had to finesse the great awkward mass of the arm without making contact with any of it. And, I might add, doing so without having any actual view of what was happening as he did so. Watching professionals go about things in a professional manner... well, that's always nice, isn't it? It's always nice to be able to watch experts do expert work.

While we're in the area of the Upper Hinge Box and its Access Platforms, we need to be able to see what's going on a little better, but in order to keep the rest of the image reasonably true-to-life as regards color and contrast, I wound up giving a few things away, and this area was one of them. So I went at the photograph again, to give a better look at what's going on in this area, and in the enhanced view of this area, you can now perhaps gain a somewhat better understanding of how Access Platform 'B' comes around the south side of the strongback. Additionally, you can now see that there are two ironworkers bent over at their tasks, one on the 'A' platform to the north, and the other on the 'B' platform to the south.

Farther down, in the area of the Lower Hinge Box, a similar lack of fidelity occurs, and I enhanced that portion of things too, and in the enhancement, you can see that there are three ironworkers down there, going at it.

Easier to see in the unenhanced image is the fact that the Lower Hinge Box (and the unseen portions of the Upper Hinge Box too) remains out of square alignment with the surface of the strongback which it will soon be fastened to, with plenty of daylight showing between itself and the strongback.

Getting this stuff to come into proper shape to proceed with the work can sometimes be a bastard, and you must deal with things on their own terms, or you don't deal with them at all.

All of the people in these images are well-versed in dealing with things, and things will be no different this day, either.

And peeking though, up at the top margin of the frame, between all the heavy iron and heavy work, the distant Atlantic abides, serene and blue, just beyond the wetlands of the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge.


Center: (Full-size)

Down on the Lower Hinge Box, the work goes on.

After taking the frame before this one, I went down to the 260' level of the FSS and stepped out on the Upper Latchback Access Platform, so I could get farther out and away from the face of the FSS, out where I had a straight-line shot that would put me exactly in plane with the mounting surfaces of both the strongback and the Hinge Boxes. There are things that you can see from this precise location that you cannot see from anywhere else, and I was fortunate enough to have that Upper Latchback Access Platform there, unencumbered by anyone else who was directly involved with the work, and who would have very reasonably prevented me from getting all up in the middle of their shit if they were there, so I was free as a bird to position myself just as precisely as I might have wanted to.

And there is some fascinating detail in here.

We'll start off by making sure that you can see that there are three ironworkers working on things, one of whom is talking to the crane operator on a walkie-talkie and another of whom has his head buried into the narrow defile between the two vertical columns that make up the bulk of the strongback, and he's just below the damned Hinge Box, which at this point is tied securely to nothing, and continues to dangle from the crane hook in the breeze, and... yeah. Pretty ballsy. Life-threateningly so, in fact. All in a day's work for these guys.

And then when we give things a real close looking-at, we make the further discovery that things aren't quite fully in contact yet. Almost, but not quite. And this explains my fussiness as regards my exact location on the Latchback Access Platform. Move so much as a couple of inches to the side in either direction, and you lose precise alignment with that razor-thin slice of things, lose sight of the daylight which is showing in there between things, just above the heads of our ironworkers, and you lose all sense of just how close things can be, just how close things have to be worked, even when one of those things is 250 feet tall, and the other one of those things, the one you're moving, and moving with exquisite precision, is 65 feet long and weighs close-on to twenty-five thousand pounds.

The skill, trust, and bravery required to operate at this level takes your breath away.

You literally find yourself holding your breath sometimes, as you witness this stuff.

And for the people doing the work? "Yeah, whatever."

And that too can have an effect on your breath, sometimes.

And when we look really close (and yes, I am stupefied that this photographic print, well over forty years old, taken with a camera that had no telephoto lens, still yields up enough information to confidently identify things as being what they are to this level of accuracy) at the area where the bolts are nestled in between the stiffener plates on the Hinge Box, we can see that not only are they pushed past the end of the hole in the Hinge Box, and are in direct contact with the iron of the strongback but not quite passing all the way through it to the far side of the strongback column flange, but we can also see that these are not your everyday ASTM A325 hex-head structural bolts, but instead, they're some of the miserable 12-point aircraft bolts which NASA Engineering insanely dictated the use of, and which cost us a cool extra forty-thousand bucks to furnish and install, and which I have mentioned previously in these stories. As they're positioned in this image, you can see that the bolt shanks are sloped ever-so-slightly uphill, going toward the FSS side of things. So yeah, they're bound, and the ironworkers are going to have to drift that Hinge Box just the tiniest little bit, upwards, so as the bolts will pass freely through both sets of bolt holes, and as soon as that tiny little bit of extra elevation on the Hinge Box is gained, our ironworkers are right there on top of things, and they'll see it immediately, and they'll push those bolts all the way through, right away, before things can continue to move around any, and keep going right on past "Dead center," and off into "Goddamnit!" territory on the other side.

We have reached some sort of impasse here, where an attempt was made to insert these fucked-up aircraft bolts with their fucked-up machine threads, which hold the arm to the tower, but the bolt holes were misaligned by some infinitesimal amount, which was just enough to cause them to bind, and prevent them being passed all the way through both sets of bolt holes without the application of such main force as might get them all the way through, but would also irreparably damage the stupid over-fine threads on them. So there they sit, and you can even see the washer on the top one is back away from the hole, close to the bolt-head, while the washer on the bottom one is all the way down the shank of the bolt in near-contact with the iron of the Hinge Box.

Phew!

That's one hell of a lot of information to be extracting from some god-forsaken, long-forgotten, photograph from one of grandpa's old photo albums.

And about those bolts.

Things like the Fixed Service Structure, things that go together like bridges, or maybe skyscrapers, gigantic things that are made out of structural steel, go together per the well-considered dicta of The AISC Manual of Steel Construction, and even though they went together with rivets in the olden days, when we were building the pad, they went together with ASTM A325 high-strength structural bolts. They do not go together with aircraft bolts.

Unless they're being engineered by a bunch of doofus rocket-scientist weenies, who like to use doofus rocket-scientist weenie specifications to put everything together with, for reasons that I'm more than certain will never be communicated to me in a way that makes any fucking sense at all.

And so, when the time came to hang the Gox Arm on the tower, we noticed a small notation on the drawings that specified fucking aircraft bolts to do so with.

And we duly questioned the cognizant authorities, and it took a surprising amount of time for them to consider things, after which surprising amount of time, for insane unknowable reasons, they pointed at the obscure note on the drawings and forthwith very firmly held our feet directly in the fire and kept them there, and made us purchase $40,000 (1980's dollars, remember. Dollars were a lot bigger back in the 1980's.) worth of bizarrely over-spec'd attach hardware, to hang one piece of a structure to another much larger structure, all of which structure came under the lawful purview of the American Institute of Steel Construction, which purview was ignored and countermanded because...

...nobody knew.

...nobody could tell us.

All they could ever tell us was "Do it," which of course we had to, against our own much better judgment, 'cause they were the customer and they held the money, and they, I suppose, just sort of felt like it.

And so it was done.

And here we are, almost forty years later, and I'm still pissed off about it.

Feh.

And also, way off in the distance on the ground in the bottom right corner of the frame, you can see the IAA main structure sitting on its "Prime Mover" (yeah, that's what they called it), and to its left, going just a wee little bit out of frame down at the very bottom, the actual swing arm part of that monstrosity. The whole thing was shipped to the pad, and lifted into place, as two separate operations, although I could not tell you why it was done that way.

Lotta stuff going on in this picture.


Bottom: (Full-size)

Maintaining my line (As can be verified by comparing the light and dark pattern in the first clump of darkish vegetation in the distance, just above the toeplate on the far side of the platform the ironworkers are standing on, butt-up against the contact surface of the strongback, with the image above this one.) to within less than one full inch, I have grabbed another frame, and this time you can see that the Hinge Box is now flush up against the strongback, plumb, but maybe not completely square and true, or at least not yet.

The two aircraft bolts that were visible in the previous image are nowhere to be seen, and I'd bet my last dollar that what we're seeing there now, protruding darkly through the top bolt hole on the Hinge Box is the head of a drift pin, which very likely was required to apply the requisite amount of overwhelming brute force with surgical precision, and get this side of that goddamned fucking box where it belongs, for once and for all. That there exists only the single drift pin also tells me that the other side of the box may yet have a ways to go, and the outstretched hand of our ironworker on the far right, as he looks away from us toward the far side of the Hinge Box, matches well the position of someone's hand who is in the process of using hand signals to tell either the crane operator, or somebody somewhere on a walkie talkie who was passing things along to the crane operator, to hold their position after moving in whatever direction which was previously given, causing the Hinge Box to rotate around the drift pin which we can see, and bring things over there on the far side where we cannot see, into the same exquisitely precise alignment that they have reached over here, where we can see them plainly.

I sometimes wonder in disbelief at how I was given such opportunity to get such outstandingly well-positioned photographs of this kind of thing, when nobody else was permitted to be anywhere near any of it. Not one other soul.

There are times when the raw intensity of the whole thing just makes the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up.

Like it's doing right now.

And oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell the crazed story about the hinge actuators, which lived inside of the Hinge Boxes.

Ok, so here we go, and the first thing we need to know is that the Gox Arm was refurbished Apollo equipment, and the outfit that won the bid on that work was up in the Panhandle somewhere, I think, and they apparently shipped out one of the old Apollo swing arms off of the LUT, did the refurbishment work up wherever those people were located, and then shipped it back down to the Cape.

Ok, fair enough, and what's so bad about any of that?

And the reply to that question was "Nothing at all," and instead, the problems consisted in how the refurbishment was done, and in particular, the business of the match-marks on the pork chop.

Yeah. Pork chop.

That's really what it was called.

And the problem with the match marks is that there weren't any.

And that still might not have been a problem, except for the fact that the arm was shipped back disassembled.

And we had to reassemble it down where we set the support stanchions for the arm, far out of everybody else's way, down in the bottom of the Flame Trench on the north side of the Flame Deflector.

And I can hear you wondering to yourself, "So?"

So.

So when it came time to put everything back together, to reassemble the Gox Arm from the collection of loose parts that we found ourselves dealing with, hundreds of miles away from the people who built it, we discovered that it did not come with a set of instructions.

Or at least it did not come with a set of instructions telling us how to reassemble the inner guts of the Hinge Boxes, which actuated the arm, and made it swing away from the tower, and back in again, whenever NASA wanted to use it on their Space Shuttle.

And the key ingredient to this whole ridiculous fiasco was the pork chop.

Which was a large piece of steel, maybe one inch thick, maybe even a little thicker than that, and about three or four feet across, and it was round, except for one part of it where the round business stuck out farther, kind of like an ear, but sloped differently on one side of the "ear" than the other, and by golly it really did kind of look like a fucking pork chop.

And the pork chop was as big and strong as it was, because its job was to more or less support the whole damn arm, internally, inside the Hinge Box, and it had a hole in the "ear" end of things that took a bearing that was attached to a sort of piston-like actuator that pushed back and forth against the bearing, and that caused the whole pork chop to pivot around a hole that was in its center, which carried another bearing, and all around the perimeter of the pork chop, there were a whole lot of pretty closely-spaced bolt holes, which took the bolts that secured the pork chop to the rest of the arm, and since the goddamned arm was made out of steel, and was cantilevered out into unsupported empty space, sixty-five feet long without the Beanie Cap on the end of it, and maybe by now you're starting to gain a bit of an understanding of just how fucking strong all this shit had to be, to keep it up in the air, directly above the Space Shuttle where it belonged, instead of maybe falling down and blowing the whole place clear to hell, leaving a giant crater in the ground where our launch pad used to be.

Ok, fine. So what?

So.

The pork chop had that row of bolts around its perimeter, holding it to the rest of the arm, and as engineers will do, especially engineers who are madly in love with symmetry and all the benefits coming from symmetry in the form of reduced work in having to do the brain-cracking calculations which need to be done correctly to kind of maybe keep from making a giant crater in the ground when you fuck 'em up, and so they went with symmetry when it came time to do the bolt circle on the pork chop.

Which is all well and good, all very reasonable enough, but what nobody ever seemed to consider was the fact that the symmetrical layout of that circle of bolts, in conjunction with the equally-symmetrical layout of the rest of the Hinge Box, meant that you could put the whole works together, with the pork chop facing either way up.

Put the pork chop inside the Hinge Box and assemble everything together in there with it, and it worked just fine.

But.

You could then turn the pork chop over on it's other side, and then go right ahead and assemble everything together in there with it, and THAT would work just fine, too!

And except for the one very minor detail of the pork chop rotating in one direction with one side up, or rotating in the opposite direction with the other side up, everything was just fine and dandy. Either way.

Except for that whole "Which way is this fucking thing supposed to rotate?" problem, of course.

And yes, this is exactly the nightmare position we found ourselves in, down there in the bottom of the Flame Trench, trying to put the goddamned Hinge Boxes together so we could put them on the arm, and nobody could tell us which way the goddamned fucked-up pork chops (there were two of 'em, one for the Upper Hinge Box, and one for the Lower Hinge Box) were supposed to go.

I kid you not.

Strewth.

So we kinda asked around, all casual-like, "Hey, anybody here know which way these pork chops go?" and nobody could answer us.

At which point the work stopped dead, and Big Excitement began to grow, over on the NASA side of the house, as they watched their schedule get ready to go straight to fuck.

At which point things started happening, and the first thing was that NASA got with the people who built the stupid thing in the first place, and inquired as to the why's and wherefore's of the pork chop, and were told to tell their imbecile contractors who were doing the work (that's secret code for us) to go look at the match marks on the pork chops and line them up with the match marks that were elsewhere inside the mechanism of the box (I don't remember where or on what, those matching match marks might have been located on in there), and get back to work, and make it snappy.

And we scratched our heads over that one, and looked yet again for any sign of any kind that might serve to match things up, and we once again came away empty-handed, and lobbed the ball back into their court.

And a Great Detective Story unfolded, as our people and NASA's people, and even a few knowledgeable bystanders who didn't actually have any direct connection to what was unfolding, all looked very closely at the fucked-up pork chops, and could not find a single thing resembling to any degree, the thing we were being told by the people who built the arm which should be staring us plainly in the face.

And after enough of that went on, NASA summoned an onsite representative from the people who built the arm, and directed them to send him down to the pad, now, and we'll get to the bottom of who or what may have done this or that, but for right now, get your ass down here and get this thing straightened out or suffer the consequences!

And so they did.

And their site representative turned out to be the lead engineer for the whole refurbishment job on the arm, and golly was that guy ever a piece of work.

HooBOY.

Long tall lanky guy, maybe in his late 60's, with long wavy/curly shoulder-length white hair, who always wore long sleeves and always dressed in solid black from head to toe, shoes and all. Always. Never once did anybody ever see him to the least degree otherwise.

The guy looked like something out of a movie.

Not a particularly confidence-inspiring movie, but a movie nonetheless.

And we took him down into the Flame Trench with us, and we all set ourselves to the task of getting the stupid pork chops inside of the Hinge Boxes right side up, instead of upside down, and the very first thing that happened was that Mister Site Representative, the fucking lead engineer of the whole damn project, couldn't find any match marks.

Well... We could have told you that... And in fact we did... Repeatedly.

To which our site representative redoubled his efforts, and found them.

Or at least he found something.

But not much, by the looks of it, truth be told.

Somewhere along the way during the manufacturing process of making the pork chops, somebody appeared to have taken perhaps a common chisel, maybe a little on the wide side, but otherwise as common as dirt, and punched straight down on it, creating a single, very fine, line over on the edge of the pork chop.

The word "obscure" does no justice to this line he found.

But there was nothing else on the pork chop that even managed to qualify in this most very underwhelming manner, and so it was determined that this line was the line, and the line was the match mark, and that was that.

And Rink Chiles grumbled, scratched his head, and said, "I don't think so," and Wade Ivey grumbled, scratched his head, and said, "I don't think so," and my boss, Dick Walls, grumbled, and scratched his head, and said, "I don't think so," and a lot of other people, a lot of other very knowledgeable people grumbled, scratched their heads, and said, "I don't think so," too.

But not NASA.

NASA directed us to proceed with the work, as instructed, and you guys better be quick about it while we set our guys on coming up with a fair and reasonable (read: unfair and unreasonable) penalty for your incompetence in failing to do your job per the contract plans and specifications.

Uh..... ok..... if that's what you really want."

And that's what they really wanted, and that's how we assembled the Hinge Boxes, and that's the way things went, down in the bottom of the Flame Trench, north of the Flame Deflector.

And that's also the way things went when it came time to hang the Gox Arm on the tower.

Which any fool can plainly see that we did, just by looking at the nice pictures on these pages.

Yawp, there it is. Right there. Right there on the side of the FSS, right where it's supposed to be.

And after we were done hanging it off the side of the FSS right where it's supposed to be, NASA and all their little friends came along and gave it the good and careful inspections that it so richly deserved, and pronounced judgment upon it saying "Verily, it is right there, right where it's supposed to be," and they all signed off on all of it, which then allowed things to proceed to the next and final step in this long and elaborate series of processes, the functional test.

And the functional test was simplicity itself.

Hook the arm up to electrical and hydraulic power, press the button, and swing it out into its extended position, and after you do that, then press the other button, and swing it back in to its retracted position against the tower.

Which they did.

Except that they didn't.

Because when they hit the motherfucking button to extend the arm, the goddamned thing tried to swing the wrong way, and couldn't go anywhere because the titanic mass of the FSS was sitting there, blocking it from doing so.

Yep. The fucking arm had been put together under extraordinarily-close supervision from NASA and everybody else, and it had been put together BACKWARDS.

And we took it back down off of the FSS, and took it apart and made a few match marks while we did so, and then put it back together frontwards, and then hung it back up on the tower.

And yours truly was tasked by Ivey to write a letter to NASA detailing the time and expenses involved in all of the trials and tribulations which we endured throughout the whole sordid affair.

And that letter was duly submitted through proper channels, and in the end it constituted the basis for the claim we filed against the contract, for which claim we were reimbursed in whole.

And that letter came to be known, in certain circles out on the pad, as "The Pitchfork Letter."

Alas, I do not have a copy of it in my possession anymore.

Maybe somebody out there will put in a FOIA request to NASA for a copy.

It'd be fun to read it again after all these long years.