Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B Construction Photos

Page 49

PCR Anteroom Installation, RSS Straight Up the Centerline (Original Scan)

RSS Anteroom Extension installation.

More views of this iron getting hung.

In the top right image, an ironworker gets from here to there across a steel beam.

In the bottom right image, looking straight down from above, you get a pretty good look at what our ironworker, in the shot mentioned above, is walking across. A couple of men can be seen in this image, walking high steel, and a look at the gentleman on the left gives a fair impression of just how narrow those beams are (although these guys would probably call beams like this a "sidewalk" and routinely walk much narrower pieces than these).

Top left image is unrelated to the Anteroom job. You are looking directly up toward the hook of the 90 ton hoist, which is directly above the platforms of the RCS Room, from the ground, exactly straight down underneath it. A different perspective that you don't see very often, of the RSS.


And once again, we're a little out of sequence as regards our standard procedure of working top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right, so I'm going to begin with top-right, and save top-left for last, and I'll also be masking things that were overlapped, to reduce visual clutter and confusion, too. Just so you know, ok?

Top Right: (Full-size)

You are looking along the length of the RSS from near Line 2 in the direction of Line 7, and you are beyond Line A into some kind of "negative" alphabetic zone which I don't actually remember how we dealt with, when it came to locating things in the great alpha-numeric grid system, when you'd dropped below the lowest letter in the alphabet, the letter 'A'. Probably "negative A", perhaps written "-A" but I do not recall right now.

Look closely at the gaps between the last three vertical framing members of the back of the Anteroom in the distance, along with the closest, much lighter, vertical member of the door frame in the yet-to-be wall that faces you from the far side, and you can just make out the darker smudge of the VAB in the far distance, sitting on top of the horizon.

You're looking at an ironworker, walking high steel.

I do not know this gentleman's name.

Nor do I recall him as an individual.

Union Ironworker.

Local 808.

Stepping over an air-hose draped across the eight-inch width of the steel beam he's casually walking across, adjusting his gloves.

Eighty some-odd feet up.

Paying no more mind to where he is than you might if you were absentmindedly walking down the hallway in some anonymous building somewhere.

These people are a little different from you and me.


Bottom Left: (Full-size)

And another ironworker, and another non-remembered name.

Sigh.

Prosopagnosia.

This gentleman I do remember, although I could never say that I ever became particularly friendly with him. Late middle-aged guy. One of the people I worked with, of which there were far too many to become particularly friendly with each and every one of them. Sitting on his little scaffold-board, working his arc-welding rig, probably just put another rod in his stinger, getting ready to pull his hood down and get back on it, and then noticed some fuckwit pointing a camera at him, off to the side over there in the middle distance.

I seem to recall him regarding me with typical ironworker disdain mixed with just a sprinkling of the standard puzzlement that some idiot in a button-down shirt, looking waaay out of place up on the iron, holding a camera of all weird things, usually elicited.

But I could be wrong about that. Dunno.

The moment came, went, and was gone forever.

Except that it's not.

It's right here. Right now.

And sometimes that gives me a little shiver.

And for those who might be interested, we're just inboard of Line A, just past Line 5 at the 135' level, looking almost due north across the distant wetlands and out to the Atlantic Ocean beyond that.

A broken fragment of the ground behind the FSS shows through down near the bottom and includes one of the craft labor work trailers (not one of ours) which sat there, along with a couple of pickup trucks, and a little bit of black crane-boom spider-webbing, left of that.


Bottom Right: (Reduced)

In this frame, you've moved up to the top of the RSS, back behind the Hoist Equipment Room, and are now looking straight down through the Anteroom framing at the pad deck, over one-hundred fifty feet below you. You're very nearly in the center of the RSS, and that's the W27x94 of Column Line 4 there just to the left of you, with a pair of floats tied to either side of it right where the uppermost diagonal support member for the new Anteroom Framing connects to it, with a pair of horizontal members (white one for the roof framing, gray one for the floor framing, and please don't get me re-started on the manifold stupidities of the KSC-STD-C-0001 paint spec and the miserable little overcompensated Junior Napoleons who implemented it) connected to it.

Just to the right of that, we have one ironworker, walking high steel, headed back in toward the main body of the RSS, and farther to the right, and farther from the body of the RSS, we have another ironworker on a fairly substantial framing member which has been laid over on its side, constituting a true and proper sidewalk (in ironworker parlance) with no end of overample width for standing on or walking across.

And just to the right of our second ironworker's (who's down on his knees performing some close-work task or other), hardhat, we can see the crane's headache ball, hanging straight down from the wire rope that extends upward to meet the tip of the crane's bright red jib, just a bit farther to the right in this image.

Straight inboard toward the RSS from the end of the crane boom, running along in the area of the lower margin of the right-hand side of the frame, one of the two large HVAC ducts that ran full-length up the back of the PCR can be seen.

A fairly-wide dark line sort of zigzags across, past the crane and almost out of frame on the right-hand side where it disappears behind some of the new Anteroom framing, and that's a cable, or perhaps, piping, trench, covered in very heavy steel-bar grating, taking whatever it took over to wherever what it took, took a 90-degree upward bend, headed to god-knows-where up on one of the towers.

Top left corner of the frame is the concrete enclosure (and you can see it casting a shadow on the pad deck in front of it, and you can also see the personnel door is open) which protected the freight elevator and the stairwell that accessed the pad deck from down in the bowels of the pad, down at ground level in the Pad Terminal Connection Room.

The PTCR housed all sorts of strange and wonderful things, including the largest Uninterruptable Power Supply I ever saw in my life. Most people, if they've ever even heard of a UPS at all, are familiar with them as smallish metal or plastic boxes that live next to computers that provide emergency electrical power to the computer for long enough to get it shut down safely after saving any work that may have been open. But not this one. There was nothing at all smallish about this one. I'm not sure what it actually provided power for, but it must have been fairly substantial, 'cause it consisted of a fairly large room filled with rack after rack, holding more large black lead-acid batteries, with heavy battery cables connecting all of them together, one after another after another after another, than I'd ever before (or since) laid eyes on, all in one place. These guys weren't kidding around when it came to making sure a power failure wouldn't have some kind of unpleasant effect on their systems.


Top Left: (Reduced)

Looking right down the barrel of the gun. Right down the centerline of the orbiter, tail to nose, as it sits enclosed by the RSS in the mated position.

Walk beneath the RSS, just so, and if you do so, and if you stop right here, and look straight vertically up, then this is what you see.

But of course nobody ever did that.

Or at last nobody that I ever saw doing it, or that said so much as a single word to me about it after they did so.

Except me.

I sure as fuck did it.

How could I not?

You'd have to be crazy to walk directly beneath this thing, on a regular basis, and not have the minimal good sense to stop and look straight up when you did so.

But I've mentioned the signal lack of interest or curiosity about stuff like this before when talking about the people I shared this place with on the job, and no, no, I shall never understand the slightest glimmer of any of it.

And the good news that I was free to do as I wished, and I had a camera, and I had an interest, and I had the unfettered imagination to go along with it.

So ok, so fuck you.

And the days are passing slowly, and it's the year 2020, and the plague is sweeping the world, and everything's locked down, and there's nowhere to go, and there's nobody to see, and the waves aren't any good (Florida, ah my dear beloved Florida), and you know what? I think I'm gonna go batshit-crazy with this image, and I'm gonna open it up in Gimp, or Photoshop, or some damn thing or other, and I think I'm gonna work with the text tools, and I think I'm gonna label everything in this fucking image, just because I can.

Be back in a week or so, when I'm done.

See ya then.

...

Well that was certainly lots of jolly fun. So many happy memories of so much weird fucking bullshit endured at the hands of overconfidently-megalomaniacal engineers and their crazed managers. With a few good ironworkers tossed in to help preserve my own sanity. 20 different list-items. Lots of happy little cutouts. Maybe I'll add to it later on, if the mood strikes. It's not like this is particularly complete or anything, but it's a start, right?

Here ya go, all nice and labeled up with see-through yellow overlay to let you see exactly what the labels are talking about.

Alphabetic order.

So it's gonna jump around some, ok?

90-ton Canister Hoist

112 Floor Steel Left Side

112 Floor Steel Right Side

Cushioned Bumpers

Engine Access Platforms

ET Access Platforms Guide Columns Hinged Support and Lifting Steel

ET Access Platforms Guide Columns

ET Access Platforms

Float

Left Orbiter Side-seal Panel

Monorail Transfer Doors

OMBUU

OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers

OWP Wing Covers

PBK & Contingency Platforms

RCS Room Floor Steel

RCS Room Mezzanine Deck

Right Orbiter Side-seal Panel

Rolling Ladder and Curved Monorail Beam

Temporary Guide Columns Access Scaffolding

So ok. So there you go.