Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B Construction Photos

Page 51

FSS Panorama From Behind 9099 Building, RCS Room Framing Erection Panorama (Original Scan)




Left: (Full-size)

Ok, we're gonna take a pretty good jump back in time with this one, as compared with what's been coming at you lately, up until now.

The RSS is mostly complete, insofar as the main outlines of the thing are all there, but it's also still sitting on falsework, so this is definitely pre-Ivey, back in Sheffield Steel days.

And the bright-red FSS tells the same tale.

The overbearing idiots who cooked up KSC-STD-C-0001 had yet to finish cooking, and had yet to begin their psychotic implementations which demanded finish topcoats on structural iron, as-delivered, prior to erection.

Inorganic zinc primer coat.

We had no idea how good we had things, back in those days.

Feh.

Ok, let's get moving.

This is a pretty unusual look at the FSS, from an unusual viewpoint, north of it, over behind the 9099 Building, which is all of the gray stuff over on the left side of the frame.

The 9099 Building was a fucking contraption, all by itself.

Ugly motherfucker, too.

Had none of the otherworldly sci-fi ambiance that attached to the FSS or the RSS.

Just a big dumpy, ugly... thing, lotta ungainly-looking platforms and bracing sprinkled around with heavy-gauge corrugated metal siding underneath it in places, sitting over there off to the side, dwarfed into insignificance by the FSS which loomed above it and which was much more arresting visually.

A lot of cryo and electrical crap went on with the 9099 Building feeding no end of stuff into the MLP, FSS, and (going on through the FSS) RSS, and in all the years I tromped around and on the goddamned thing, I successfully managed to learn almost nothing about any of it.

It was an in-place, as-built, cryo and electrical installation, and as such we, as structural people, had very little to do with it. It was already there, we didn't fuck with it, and my experience base with it was stunted accordingly. We hung a few flip-up access platforms off the MLP side of it, but even those were dumpy and ugly, and... I dunno.

Of all the stuff on that launch pad that I wish I could go back and revisit, the 9099 Building is one of the places I'd like to return to the most. I was an idiot to not have delved into its inner workings when I had the opportunity to.

Sigh.

Ok, back to the picture.

Lotta cool shit going on with this picture.

Another one of my favorites, in fact.

There's such an overwhelming mess of chaotically-complex crap going on here that I'm gonna need to be careful about jumping around too much, describing what you're seeing here.

Guess I'll go from near to far, low to high, and hope for the best, and I suppose I can start off with one little near, low, item, and that little item is the steel beam that's laying on a couple of pieces of 4x4 cribbing on the ground in front of somebody's blue car.

Take a look at the flanges on that beam. Take note of the thickness of those flanges. They're not as thick as the 4x4's the the beam is sitting on, but they're thinking about it.

Let's do a little eyeball-guesstimating with it, just for fun.

Our first guess is that the beam itself is a W14. W14's are very standard shapes, especially for heavy stuff. Skyscrapers. Big bridges. Stuff like that. So, just based on that alone, coupled with the appearance of the thing, we're going with that.

Now. Flanges.

4x4's are actually 3½x3½" so we then use 3½ as our starting point for estimating flange thickness on this piece of steel, and my eyes tell me it's about 2½" thick, and we'll toss in 1½" for web thickness, and let's go have a look at the steel book and see what that spits out for weight... and my eyeballing yields up a structural shape that matches things pretty closely (for good or for bad), and we see that a W14x342 looks to be that best match, so what we're looking at sitting here all so innocent and nondescriptly on the pad deck weighs a very substantial 342 pounds per running foot. And then we'll just guess some more that it's 10 feet long, and we're looking at over three thousand pounds of iron in just that one piece alone, sitting there on the cribbing, minding its own business.

And then we cast our gaze around a little wider, and look at all that goddamned shit that's out there all over the place, and maybe we can start to appreciate, maybe only the tiniest little bit, but still... and that's one hell of an installation they're putting together up on top of that concrete, eh?

Yeah. That it is.

And since we're having so much fun with this one single piece of iron, why stop now?

We do not know where it came from, nor where it's going.

But we can surmise.

And the surmise that makes the most sense to me is that it's part of the stuff Wilhoit made the falsework out of.

The stuff that's holding up the whole RSS before the RSS is ready to hold itself up.

Which had better be some pretty goddamned strong stuff, and a W14x342 qualifies nicely as fairly strong stuff.

So ok.

My knowledge of Wilhoit is woefully inadequate, but I'll try.

First off, on the first day I arrived at the job, my first day at the pad, everybody was pretty distraught over the the fact that Cecil Wilhoit had died unexpectedly, the day before.

I did not know Cecil Wilhoit from the man in the moon, but as time went by, I managed to pick up a few scraps of information, here and there.

Cecil Wilhoit was, apparently, originally from somewhere in South Carolina, and was one of the best you could ever hope to find, in not only what we were doing, but also in this sort of work as practiced over water, with barges and such all, doing bridges, or whatever.

Cecil had that savvy that only the very best had, and that kinda makes sense, 'cause he won not only this bid to erect the RSS at Pad B, but he also won the bid to erect the RSS at Pad A, and that was with a completely different prime contractor.

So Wilhoit the man, and Wilhoit the company, knew their shit.

I've got a feeling I would have liked the company of Cecil Wilhoit. Probably a difficult motherfucker. Probably wasted few words. On anything. Or anybody.

My kinda people.

But I'll never know.

I came this close... but I missed.

Anyway, my guess is that this piece of iron that we're talking about here, is part of what the falsework was assembled from, and I'm further guessing that all of it came from a bridge demo job somewhere (the funny dual-member, cross-hatched with x-bracing, appearance of so much of it is what's putting me on to this), perhaps back in South Carolina, I cannot know where, and it was grabbed for a pittance by a guy who knew his shit, and was very happy indeed to take it off of somebody's hands, as a favor, to keep them from having to deal with the leftovers from some damn bridge that might have been built back in the 1940's or something, and find a way to remove those leftovers and dispose of them properly without it costing 'em an arm and a leg to do so.

Cecil didn't know when that old iron would come in handy one day, but he know without a doubt that it would.

And here it is, holding up the RSS.

And that's my best guess for that.

Left of our W14, and a little bit farther away, a couple of side-by-side white piping runs, smaller one near, larger one just behind it partially blocked from view, can be seen coming up vertically out of the concrete of the pad deck, just inboard toward the 9099 Building behind some heavy tube-steel framing which very nearly obscures them, running up the back of the 9099 Building.

Cryo, hypergol, HVAC, you name it, a lot of stuff came into the the pad at ground level, and a lot of that was then run vertically up through the "roof" of the pad into daylight above the concrete of the pad deck, and from there it went...

I do not know.

The cloud of my personal ignorance which surrounds the 9099 Building extends beyond the limits of that building itself. I wish it were not so, but it is.

What these runs of pipe/duct/whatever actually deal with is something I'll never know.

Alas.

My brain is handing me "ECLSS" but I am mistrustful of that.

Environmental Control and Life Support System just does not seem "right" but who knows?

This particular run stays behind the very-sturdy vertical tube-steel framing along the back side of the 9099 Building which is supporting some equally-sturdy platforming which runs toward the FSS, and I do at least know that this run of platforming wound up supporting (among other things) the runs of cryo piping which took LH2 and Lox to the FSS, and from there to the RSS, into the OMBUU, which delivered Liquid Hydrogen and Liquid Oxygen to the storage Dewars for the fuel-cell system that provides the orbiter with electrical power when it was on orbit, and is why the Space Shuttle A.) did not have solar panels for electrical power production, and B.) could not stay on orbit all so very long, 'cause Lox and LH2 were both consumables, and once they were consumed, once they ran out, they were out, and if you're out of electrical power and you're still in orbit, you've got yourself a pretty serious problem, so best we come back down before any of that happens, eh?

Zoom in on the image, look close up at the top of these white pipe/duct runs, and you can see they take a left-hand bend and head horizontally farther into/above the 9099 Building.

Are these the same runs that appear farther away, over on the right side of the FSS?

I do not know.

One of those dives into the FSS just under the 120' level, and looks very much like it wants to probably head on over to the RSS from there, but that is unknowable from looking at this image. The other one goes all the way to the top of the FSS, literally just beneath the decking at the very top, up at the 300' foot level, but I have no earthy idea what might have been up there that needed that line of white pipe to go to it, nor what any of it meant.

The Hammerhead Crane is up there, but I cannot think of what there might have been on the hammerhead crane, or, for that matter, the elevator equipment room up there either, that would have been serviced by such a thing. Stuff like that drank electricity, and electricity was furnished through an amazingly-ramified system of cable trays, which, when you begin looking close for them, start jumping out of the woodwork at you from all over the place, and I'll just mention the three separate near-touching runs of them that come up out of the ground at a funny angle, almost but not quite exactly vertical, into the right side of the FSS, starting from a hidden place behind somebody's stake truck with a white cab which is parked pretty close to the northwest corner of the FSS, as an example of what cable tray looks like, when viewed straight-on. From the side, it's a lot narrower, and you can see some of it viewed from that orientation too, a little ways below the first level of floor steel on the FSS below the 80 foot elevation.

So again. I do not know.

That whole zone over there, just north of the FSS, looks like it's been commandeered by the electricians, and left of the stake truck, three separate curved radius-pieces of cable tray are on the ground there, waiting their turn to get taken up to god-knows-where, and get installed on the tower someplace.

And while I'm at it here, what the hell was I standing on top of when I took this picture?.

No idea.

None at all.

But I'm up above, just a little.

I'm not standing all the way down on "ground" level.

I dunno. Me, being me, I can easily imagine that I just climbed up on something. Somebody's car, even. Who the fuck can know? Not me, that's for sure. But the perspective of the image is not to be denied. I was up, just a little bit, on something.

And my goodness, but isn't that FSS a lovely shade of red?

Yes. Yes it is.

Didn't last, though.

During my tenure between steel jobs with Sheffield first, and Ivey second, they came along and sandblasted the whole tower and repainted everything gray.

And periodically, from then on, every few years, they'd come back and do it again.

Which means the whole, the entire, the absolute ALL of the bullshit we were put through by the malicious fuckwits in charge of corrosion "control" who invoked KSC-STD-C-0001 and made us topcoat all inbound steel, with finish coatings, and who then attacked us for every little scratch and scrape in their precious finish coatings, on very unfinished iron, being erected in the most industrial setting imaginable, was a complete waste of time and effort, 'cause they just came along and sandblasted and repainted the whole fucking tower whenever they felt like it, and all that "finish" crap, was just that, a bunch of crap.

GodDAMN but does that mentality in some people ever piss me off.

Jail time starts looking better and better, as a very small price to have to pay, in exchange for just decking those sonofabitches, whenever I cross paths with 'em.

Fuck that noise.

Fuck those people.

Wipes foam away from corners of mouth.

Ok, where were we?

Oh yeah, the pretty red FSS.

Quite appealing, actually.

I miss the pretty red FSS.

I really do.

It was pretty.

This is also a nice angle for getting a proper look at the Emergency Egress Slidewire Platform on the back of the FSS, too.

Five wires, five baskets.

They increased that number to seven, later on in things. Not sure exactly what drove that decision, but at some point they decided that five was not enough, so ok. So seven it shall be, from henceforth.

And so it was done.

Just above the slidewire platform, as viewed in this image, to the left, more or less as a part of the main body of the FSS, you're getting a nice look at the support structure which helped bear the load of the IAA once it got bolted on, kind of angling up and leftwards diagonally in there.

That thing was a brute, so it needed some extra-sturdy support framing to keep it out of the Flame Trench, after we'd finished bolting it up to the rest of the FSS.

And behind the FSS, the RSS stands upon its falsework.

The thing that jumps out at me first about this particular image with the RSS in it is that the RSS only has one of the two large HVAC ducts that run up the back of the PCR. So yeah, we're still pretty early on with things in this picture.

Zoom in on the falsework beneath the RSS somewhere around 200 percent or so, and give it a good look, now that I've mentioned "the funny dual-member, cross-hatched with x-bracing, appearance" part of things, and maybe you'll get a little bit better of an understanding of where I'm coming from with that. There's no real engineering reason why the falsework needs to constructed out of this kind of stuff, and, knowing the business to the extent that I do, it makes a lot more sense to me when I look at it in terms of "whatever we had on hand to use" as opposed to any purpose-designed kind of thing.

Cecil Wilhoit was all about successfully bidding jobs and keeping the cash flowing, and successfully bidding jobs consists in keeping the bid amount as low as you can, and keeping the bid amount as low as you can consists in finding ways to not spend money, and using "whatever we had on hand to use" is one hell of a good way to not spend money whenever the usefulness of whatever you had on hand to use cannot be exceeded by purpose-designed-and-built alternatives. It's holding up the RSS. What the hell else do you want it to do for you? Sing you a song? Get outta here.

So that's how that works. Or at least most of the time it does. Not always. Nothing is "always."

And, speaking of that, there's no reason to believe that all of this stuff came from the same place. Same demo'd bridge. Or whatever. It's a dog's breakfast down there. A very successful dog's breakfast, but a dog's breakfast nonetheless. No damn telling about it. None at all.

We've already talked about the PCR Anteroom, both old and new, and in this old image, you're getting a pretty distinctive look at the old Anteroom, kinda sitting off to the side of the nearest corner of the RSS, with distinctly white and uncluttered surfaces, against the background behind it which is dark with framing steel.

Directly above the Anteroom, (bring the zoom back up to 200 percent or thereabouts please) you can see, sticking out into empty space with the body of the PCR as backdrop, one of the monorail beams which wound up getting hung with a drum-hoist that was clocked the wrong way per NASA Engineering instructions. We've already talked about that thing, too. Too much, probably, so we'll leave well enough alone, now.

And there's more, too, but isn't that enough for now?

We'll hit the other stuff somewhere else, ok?


Right: (Reduced)

This one definitely needs to be clicked on, to open up the full-size view. The image here on this page is only 1200 pixels wide, and the original is 2879 pixels wide, so you're losing a fair bit with the reduced version.

Another early, Sheffield Days, image.

Back when I was still transitioning from being an answering machine to something a little more useful.

And do not ask me why I like the goddamned RCS Room so much, 'cause I'll never be able to tell you, 'cause I don't know why, but I do know that I liked the goddamned RCS Room from the very beginning, back before it was ever a room in the first place, back when it looked like it looks in this picture, just a bunch of steel framing.

I dunno. I just like the fucking thing.

So sue me.

We're just above the roof of the RCS Room, looking south from the FSS.

The roof of the RCS Room is at elevation 242'-0" and the nearest FSS framing elevation is at 240'-0" and since I'm six-one, this would put my eye-level camera right around elevation 245'-9" or so, and that seems to match the ever-so-near lineup with the elevation of the roof of the RCS Room in this image, so that's what we're going with.

You're looking south, down the crawlerway, with the VAB and the last remaining LUT sticking up above the horizon in the far distance to the right, and you're standing at the 240' elevation level on the repurposed remains of another one of those LUT's.

Dominating the center of the image, the structural steel framework if the RCS Room crowds in on itself, dark, impenetrable, inscrutable.

On its left margin, partially obscured, the crane which is lifting the iron it's being constructed from stands tall, load line descending to an unknowable place deep within the impenetrable thicket of dark steel.

To the right of the RCS Room, the Hoist Equipment Room gleams white with it's newly-installed skin of insulated-metal paneling, with a run of cable tray supports taking a turn in their pathway across its roof.

Distant, down and to the right, contractor field trailers crowd around dirt roads and ditches in a weedy backwater area of the pad.

Between the RCS Room, and the Hoist Equipment Room, Union Ironworkers ply their craft, including one of which, if you zoom way in and look close, is bent over, almost obscured by the near corner of the Hoist Equipment Room, but not quite, behind a large stand-up fan used for cooling people and work areas, with an arc struck on the welding he's doing.

When you see that piercingly-brilliant blue-white flare of light, even when it's way over on the edge of your vision off to the side, you'd better be putting a hand up to block that light from reaching any part of your eye, turning around sufficiently to move it completely out of the field of your vision, or moving some place where an intervening object blocks the light, or you're going to be getting a case of welding flash-burn, and that's not only no fun because it stays with you and it can become painful at worst of simply very irritating at best, it's also no fun because it can cause permanent damage to your eyes, and your eyes are not really one of those things that you can tolerate very much permanent damage to at all.

And if you look at the closely-spaced steel of the RCS Room, you might notice that it's not only closely-spaced, but that it's also surprisingly heavy for what amounts to being a simple thirty-foot-tall box. Joe Money's three-story McMansion certainly isn't framed out like this, so why here? Why this place? Why the RCS Room?

And the answer comes as doublet, both halves of which have to do with one of the main tasks which the RCS Room must perform, and the task in question consists in providing support for the 90-Ton Payload Canister Hoist lifting and load blocks, as well as the boom pendants which hold the Canister rigidly in place once it's been lifted into place and unhooked from the Hoist.

90 tons, plus such safety margin as is deemed necessary, dictates fairly hefty steel, but there's a little bit more to it than that, so here comes the second half of our doublet.

In addition to simply holding the Canister and the payload it carries up, the supporting steel in the RCS Room must hold things in place very rigidly.

The tolerances for deflection, for motion of any kind, of that suspended Canister and payload, as it is supported by the steel in the RCS Room, with respect to the precise location and orientation of the rest of the RSS/PCR system, are tight.

Payloads routinely cost into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and are extraordinarily high precision instruments, being built to extraordinarily close tolerances, and the whole damn thing is over one hundred and fifty feet up in the fucking air, just hanging there, and no, when we're working with the Canister we do not want things to be moving around or deflecting in any way, to any amount, when the PGHM plucks a heavy item out of the Canister, when a thunderstorm rolls in from the west and the wind starts blowing like a motherfucker, when somebody places a substantial load into the PCR Elevator and takes it up to Level 5. Or walks out on the catwalks to either side of the RCS Room, to do some work on one of the SRB's. Or... are we getting the idea here? We want rigid. We additionally do not want the goddamned RSS/RCS Room system to go anywhere. To bend. To subtly (or not so subtly) relocate themselves over time. We do not want things hanging from our structure to be jostling into or banging up against Space Shuttley Things that are firmly planted on top of the MLP and which are nowhere actually touching the things that are hanging from our structure until we very carefully put them in some predesignated exact spot and nowhere else, and we'd best not fuck this one up, so yeah, we're gonna make damn good and sure that part of things which some of our insanely-expensive and delicate stuff is just sort of dangling from... is STURDY.

And so they do.

And so the RCS Room is sturdy.

'Cause if it's insufficiently sturdy... well then... is it gonna be you who buys 'em a new Hubble Space Telescope after your shit-ass low-rent structural design wiggled around in the breeze a little bit more than it should have and broke the motherfucker?

I'd love to hear what your insurance adjuster would have to say about that one.

So yeah, the RCS Room is sturdy.

And I guess if I don't tell this story now, I'm never gonna tell it, so ok, so I'll tell it now because it happened right here, somewhere right around this time, just a little this side from where the two ironworkers are standing, closest to the camera, between the RCS Room and the Hoist Equipment Room.

And it's not a big deal or anything. More like a small illustration of things out on the towers.

So I'm standing there, talking to Red Milliken, or Elmo McBee, or one of the Wilhoit guys, and I'm facing away and to the left, as the camera is viewing this frame, and whoever it was, was standing right there next to me, facing in my direction with his back to the iron of the RCS Room framing, and from out of nowhere, from up above (and remember, the RCS Room is thirty feet tall), a little piece of steel, maybe 2 inches by 2 inches by a quarter inch thick, comes spinning down on-edge into my peripheral vision, and just about the exact time my consciousness registered that something's going on, it landed on my interlocutor's hardhat with a sharp BAP, and then clinked down to the deckplates beneath our feet. And Red, or whoever it was, sort of blinked, looked over and up at the iron where there were a couple of ironworkers up there doing their thing, and nobody said anything, and the moment passed in mere seconds, and everybody went right on doing what they were doing, as if nothing at all had happened, which in fact is what happened, which was nothing at all.

Just a little spinning piece of iron, torched off of something, or knocked loose from where it had been laying on something, or something.

And I remember thinking, "Ok, so hardhat. Yeah, that's a pretty good idea," and thought very little more about it... until later.

And later on, I considered what had happened up on the tower, and the realization finally set in that if that hard hat had not been there to stop that eency weency little bitty piece of iron, spinning on edge as it fell, it very easily could have entered the bone on the top of the skull that it was stopped from hitting by the hard hat.

Sharp. Spinning. Steel.

Had it landed "just so" things might have turned out very differently.

But it didn't.

And nobody paid it the least mind.

Except maybe me.