Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B Construction Photos

Page 47

GOX Arm Vent Hood Lift (Original Scan)


The Gox Arm had finally been reassembled, placed on the FSS again, passed functional test, and now it was ready to have that which justified its existence attached to the end of the truss, and that's what we're doing here today.

Something else we're doing here today is having trouble deciding which color-restored version of this scan we'd like to use, and so we're gonna put links to alternate versions of this scan into the text, so you can look at them for yourself, and decide which one might be most useful, for whatever you might want to be using it for, ok?

Ok.




Top Left: (Reduced)

Beanie Cap lift.

Once we'd finally managed to get the swing arm that supported it installed correctly on the FSS.

And as I had mentioned previously, the whole Gox Arm system was delivered to the pad as a set of loose parts.

"Some assembly required."

The Vent Hood was a small enough object that it could be placed well out of the way, over on the east side of the Flame Trench, and not get in the way of anything over there once it was all stacked up on support cribbing more or less directly in front of Boeing's TTV trailer, which is what you're looking at in this image. But this image, while having sort-of acceptable color rendering, is pretty inadequate for detail so here's another version of it with worse colors and better detail. Boy, I dunno, this whole series of images for the Gox Arm has just been a dog. And an unpleasant dog, at that. So I will continue to do what I can with them, and I will continue to be unhappy with what I do with them.

Anyway, from the vantage point I initially took for this lift, over on the west side of the Flame Trench, far enough away from things to include enough surround as to give you a sense of location and what goes on with this, you can see that the Beanie Cap is up off the support cribbing, and just about to be swung around by the crane, over toward the RSS and FSS, where it was going to be attached to the Gox Arm Truss, already hanging from the tower, in its retracted, latched-back, position.

A few things of note.

To the left (north) of the TTV trailer, you can see one of the two large white ducts that attached to the Beanie Cap via flex lines, and which hung on the sides of the truss, which took the too-cold surface-ice-generating GOX which boiled off from the Lox tank in the ET, along with the heated GN2 that was supplied from the FSS to this thing for a whole series of strange and complicated, but vitally-critical reasons, out and safely away from the External Tank.

Hang the arm on the tower. Hang the Beanie Cap on the arm. Hang the ducts on the Beanie Cap. Ok, fine, sure thing.

Standing directly in front of his TTV trailer, Howard Baxter can be seen, arm out, hand in a fist, gesturing toward somebody over by the duct. Who he might have been gesturing to, or what he might have been gesturing about, I have no idea. Could have been anything from "Hello," to "Hey! Get the hell away from that stuff! Get the hell off my goddamned launch pad before I call fucking security on your ass!" I do not know.

Howard Baxter was a fearsome sonofabitch.

I've already talked about him.

I liked Howard Baxter a lot.

Howard Baxter did not fuck around.

Hovering in the air above Howard, the Beanie Cap along with it's actuator mechanisms and the framework that held it all together, can be seen in all it's psychotically-contrapted glory, in this enhanced view where I'm trying to let you see just how bizarrely-complex this thing really is. And this is before it ever got bolted to the arm. Before any of the flex-lines, ducts, hydraulics, electrical wiring, or any of the rest was installed. Complicated motherfucker.

And it was made so that you could get out there on it, while it was up in the air, hanging off into free space, far far above the unfeeling concrete of the pad deck, way the hell and gone, oh god, much too far, down there below you.

And it twanged and flexed around on you alarmingly when you attempted to get from the arm truss, through the bewildering thicket of ducts and pipes and wires, and actuator rods, and who knows what, right there in the middle, right there at the hinge-point, and once you made it through all that, passing way off-balance over completely open places that were plenty large and capacious enough to accommodate your falling body without so much as even slowing it down as it fell to the concrete waiting patiently below, twisting and turning through all of it like a contortionist in a mighty effort to keep from touching any of it, you still weren't in the clear, because now you were out on that ridiculous not-quite-even-a-whole-catwalk that went around the actual Hood part of things which sloped acutely away from you and which you could not reach in an effort to stabilize yourself, and the footing was narrow, and the footing was awful, and the stupid handrail had that weird vertical set of offset curves in the vertical members between the intermediate and upper horizontal handrail piping members, and the goddamned thing is fucking flimsy, and it's bouncing me all around up here with my ass hanging fully-exposed far above certain death, and now I've gotta figure out how to fucking contort myself back through that impenetrable thicket of crap back there at the hinge, and what the fuck were we thinking when we decided to go out on this thing in the first place, anyway?

And no, you can't tell me that they weren't making flying saucer jokes, and going back and forth between work cubicles making weird flying saucer sounds, and tossing disk-shaped stuff around through the air from desk to desk, when they were designing this thing.

I know for a fact that they were.

Even though I never set foot inside the place, wherever it might have been.

They were designing a fucking flying saucer.

How could they not?


Top Right: (Full-size)

And as the crane boomed left, I footed right, and got across to the other side of the Flame Trench right where the Beanie Cap had been staged on cribbing you can see there in the bottom left corner of the image, in time to grab this frame showing it sailing serenely out and across the chasm of the Flame Trench.

And yes, we were all making flying saucer jokes, and flying saucer noises, but there was nothing suitable laying around to toss at each other, which I'm sure is just as well. Most of the jokes revolved around what a piece of crap NASA's flying saucer really was, since it obviously could not fly on its own, and instead required the services of our crane to actually go anywhere.

Here's an alternate rendering, with worse color, but better detail, for those who might be interested in that sort of thing.

In the background, our Great Construct provided a more-than-suitable sci-fi ambiance for our little flying saucer as it bravely flew onward.


Bottom Left: (Full-size)

And up it goes...

And of course it's oh so very easy to lose perspective on things. To lose a proper sense of scale to things. But in this instance, fortunately, there's a guy almost smack dab in the center of the image, looking directly toward us, admiring the view from his lofty perch on the RSS 112' elevation crossover platform on the Hinge Column. Factor that guy in, and things one again, for the moment anyway, regain all of their completely outrageous true scale.

Elsewhere, on the north side of the FSS up near the top right corner of the frame, a pair of floats can be seen hanging out into open space at two of the connection points on the support structure which will carry part of the loads generated by the IAA, once it's bolted-up, way on up there. And yeah, the view from either one of those floats would have been to die for. Which, one must never forget, just might happen, if you're not being careful enough when you're working up there.

And here's your alternate rendering, for this one too.


Bottom Right: (Reduced)

And now, in this frame, I have walked back around the south end of the Flame Trench, and am west of it again, more or less even with the Hinge Column, looking up at quite the steep angle (but at least I'm not directly beneath things), as the Beanie Cap closes in on the end of the Gox Arm. And here's the alternate view.

In this enhanced image you can see for yourself that there is not yet anyone out on the end of the arm itself, tools in hand, ready to make the connection. But you can see, out at the very end of the 260' elevation camera platform which sticks diagonally out and away from the southeast corner of the FSS, that there's someone there, watching over things.

So yeah, so that's how all of that got done.