Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B Construction Photos

Page 52

Danny Sheffield, Skip Box on Pad Deck, Cocoa Beach Sunrise (Original Scan)

Top: Danny Sheffield, in the Sheffield Steel field trailer. Danny was the owner's son.

Middle: Skip box, beside the Flame Trench. Need to take a quick look at something up on the tower that's a little hard to get to? No problem. Hook this thing to the crane, get in, and take yourself a little ride. It was always fun to ride in the skip box, but looking at this thing now, I'm guessing that the safety people would throw everyone in jail for using it. And never forget, boys and girls, it's always going to be the Safety Man who winds up killing you.

Also, in the background, you can get a fairly good look at both Side Flame Deflectors. They were moved into and out of position on a set of rails that ran right down the edge of the Flame Trench on both sides, and in this shot, the near one is the launch position, and the other is retracted position, to the north.

Bottom: What I'd see if I decided to stop on the way to work and check the surf (no, what you're seeing is not considered good surfing waves). I missed a lot of waves while working out at the pad, and in Florida, decent surfing waves are a rare and precious commodity.




Top: (Reduced)

And as you sit at your desk, and a moment of inactivity presents itself, you pull out your trusty Zeiss Ikon Contessa, and snag a shot of Danny Sheffield while he's trapped there right in front of you, going over some damn thing on the blueprints while he discusses the matter with somebody on the other end of the phone, and since he is Dan Sheffield Senior's son, and since Dan Sheffield Senior owns Sheffield Steel, you might safely presume that he's looking at something depicted on a drawing that either requires further clarification for the people back in Sheffield's fabrication shop in Palatka, Florida, to actually be able to fabricate it, or perhaps there's an issue with a piece of steel that's been delivered to the pad and something's not right about it somehow, and that might be because the drawing was fucked up, or the underlying engineering was fucked up, or maybe the guys on the shop floor fucked up, or perhaps something up on the tower is fucked up, or maybe he's ordering pizza.

I'm sure I'll never be able to know.

You've already seen the picture of my desk, and this picture has very clearly been taken by myself, while sitting in my chair, looking south toward my boss Dick Walls' little office space in the far end of the trailer across the open center area, which was dominated by the makeshift drawing table which the blueprints Danny has a hand on were laid out upon, and I'm squinting as hard as I can at this picture, trying to figure out if it's a detail drawing or an erection drawing, but I can't quite see well enough, but then again just the generalized look of the lines on that sheet of paper give me to believe it's a detail drawing and that would stand very much to reason, 'cause it was the detail drawings which were used to actually fabricate the stuff which was then delivered to the pad and placed on the tower per what was on the erection drawings, and why would somebody on the shores of the beautiful St. Johns river in Palatka, Florida, give a rat's ass about how something was going to be getting hung by a crew of ironworkers a couple of hundred feet up in the air, when there's plenty more than enough trouble right here trying to figure out what the goddamned draftsman was thinking when he drew this impossible piece of bullshit up, and now everything on the shop floor has come to a halt, and Dan Senior is NOT happy, and I guess we better call down to the pad, 'cause Danny's down there today, and maybe HE can find out for us and let us get back to work before Dan Senior comes around the corner and kills all of us for wasting outrageous sums of his money, standing around out here with our thumbs up our asses.

And Dan Senior was one of those people...

Dan Senior always scared the hell out of me, but the good news is that he hardly ever paid a personal visit to the launch pad, which means he hardly ever scared the hell out of me... but when he did pay a visit to the launch pad, he had this frighteningly low, oh so very low ambiance about him, and he was ruddy-complected, lean but not any kind of light or thin, retaining a full compliment of thinnish reddish-blond curly hair on his aging head, and he was Southern and he moved with that peculiar slow southernness that somehow always manages to get twice as much stuff done in the same amount of time that some yahoo from New York who yammers and bounces and twitches around all over the place gets done, but it was his voice that was the scariest thing about him.

You could hardly hear the guy when he talked.

He'd move across the room with that syrupy slow-motion way he had, and he'd... not whisper... no, it was definitely not a whisper of any kind, and instead it had this sort of muted low-frequency tone to it, but there was nothing heavy or basso profundo about any of it, and it was very much a low-decibel kind of thing, so low that you had to pay very close attention to it, and it caused you, and everybody else in the room to all go very quiet, and listen to whatever it was he was saying very hard, even when it was only, "Good morning," and I don't believe I ever heard the guy waste so much as a single word, ever, which meant that his word-count was really low, and every single word carried significant meaning, and... and I've met a few other people in my life with a somewhat similar mien about them, since, but none of them ever came close to the just... presence... of Dan Sheffield Senior.

I've got a feeling that being Dan Sheffield Senior's kid was not the easiest task in the world.

Danny was Good People, but Dan Senior was just so fucking overwhelming, without ever showing any sign of actually intending to be that way, in this completely weird Twilight Zone way that he had, that... I dunno. I've got a feeling that being Dan Sheffield Senior's kid was not the easiest task in the world.


Center: (Reduced)

Still Life with Skipbox and Stretcher Basket.

And it almost has a renaissance look about it. Somebody like Rembrandt or perhaps da Vinci could have produced quite the fascinating piece of work from this setting.

Darkly massive, pressing down on everything around it with a gloomy, near-Gothic ambiance, the West Side Flame Deflector dominates the left side of the image with its mysterious triangular mana, and in the distance its mirror-image twin bides its own time in its own place.

Across the frame from there, things lighten up into a snarl of angular steel elements beneath an incongruous sky of clearest blue, giving little away as to their true identity, true purpose, true nature.

In the foreground, center, the skipbox waits for its next occupants, waits to have its lifting sling which hangs in twisted disarray without bearing any weight in tension, to be placed once again onto the crane hook, waits to levitate its burden like a magic-carpet, taking them up through the air to some place that only eagles might be expected to gain fair access to, and to its right, strapped against a run of handrail which warns of a hidden four-story fall immediately beyond it, a further warning in the form of a stretcher basket gives mute testimony to the unseen dangers, unseen things that will kill in the blink of an eye, which fill the air all around like evil spirits, invisible, patient, waiting.

Welcome to my world.

The SFD's are mobile, and run, no different than a steam locomotive might run, along steel rails which allow them to be moved here, or perhaps there. And be locked down, in either place. And like a steam locomotive, the SFD's were heavy, and if you look into the gloom at the triangular shapes of the steel framing in there, and consider that it's all solid steel, you might be able to gain some small understanding of just how heavy the SFD's really were, and once that understanding sets in, you start to think about why?

Why so heavy?

And then maybe what comes out of the bottoms of the Space Shuttle's Solid Rocket Boosters, only a small glancing part of which the SFD's were built to deflect, to try in some small way to manage, to keep it back in the Trench, and then things start to take on their true characteristics, their true form, and the energy release of a thing that might demand iron this heavy to deflect it... not stop it, no. Just deflect it some... and the scale of that energy release becomes a little more understandable and perhaps a little more frightening too.

On launch day, they are both rolled to the south, to the position where you see the nearest one, the West SFD, hard against the position of the crest of SSW Spray Headers which line the apex of the Flame Deflector, which divides the Flame Trench into two halves, north and south.

When not in the launch position, the SFD's are almost always to be found rolled back to the far north end of their rails, where you see the East SFD, partially hidden behind the West one.

Why the West SFD is where it is in this image, I cannot say. Something dictated it be moved and so it was. Were they testing it in its locked position for launch? I do not know. Was there work going on in the area it ordinarily occupies at the north end of its rails? I do not know.

But whatever the reasons, this image gives a decent look at the fact that the deflectors, as was so very much else on the launch pad, were mobile.

Across the Trench, east end of the North Piping Bridge, SSW Supply Headers for the MLP, MLP Access Stair Towers, SSW Water Tower, MLP Mount Pedestals.

And behind it all, the placid blue of the Atlantic Ocean.

On the near side of the Trench, steel elements which have yet to be lifted into place sit on cribbing, waiting their turn to have choker slings wrapped around them and then get pulled into the sky somewhere. A pre-assembled section of handrail pipes for a platform somewhere far above you, complete with toeplate. A fairly-heavy post with a substantial piece of channel-iron at its far end, and stiffener plates at its near, open, end, looking for all the world like stubby fins on the bottom of a rocket. Loose channel-iron with clip-angles, and a wide-flange beam without.

A pickboard lays, partially-shadowed by the giant steel tower which looms invisibly out of frame, over your left shoulder.

And the skipbox.

Ratty, ragged, looking like it had been slapped together by drunken rednecks out at a backwoods moonshine-still somewhere, into which you will willingly place yourself, trusting your very life to it, trusting your very life to this ratty ramshackle thing, as it flies you into the air a hundred feet or more, to the accompaniment of diesel growls from a large construction crane, to some place that cannot be gotten to, otherwise... unless you are an ironworker.

Which you are not.

Things you never forget in your life...

And I'm only an answering machine...

But my boss...

My boss, Richard Walls, has seen something in me.

Something I myself, in all of my thirty years of existence on the surface of the planet had not only never seen but had never suspected.

And it was that unseen, unsuspected, thing in me that had the two of us up on the pad deck, almost exactly where this image is showing.

And I'm oh so very very new at all this.

And oh so very unsure of myself.

And I'm surrounded with the Acme of Existence, a fucking Apollo Program Saturn Fucking V Launch Pad covered with all the Acme of Existence people who were rebuilding it into a Space Shuttle Launch pad, and you don't just go grab people off the street for this kind of work, and these are real people, and what the hell am I doing up here with these guys?

And if you look at the skipbox in this image, you can see that there are two sets of perimeter bars, one at an intermediate level that goes all the way around and is made from four separate pieces (one of which has taken a pretty good hit somewhere along the line) that span the open distances between the vertical rods that make up the cage of the thing, and another upper level of wider flatter bars that only goes three-quarters around the cage located somewhere just above the level of your own waist, and on the side which faces directly towards the darkness of the West SFD, there is no bar, and instead you can see a bit of chain hanging down on the left side of the thing, and Dick Walls is now telling me to step over that lower bar, and fasten the chain behind me, and Red Milliken is in the skipbox with us, and the crane growls...

And it was the most delicious, scary, fun, fucking sensation you could ever possibly imagine...

And we flew through the air!

Like fucking eagles or something!

And oh god, the concrete... the concrete of the pad deck. Oh god, it's too far. It's too far down there!. But I'm rubbing shoulders with high-end people in this ramshackle redneck cage which barely has enough room to hold the three of us, and I cannot show fear.

I. Can. Not.

And of course I'm sure Dick and Red could both smell it all over me.

They both knew that this was the first time I'd ever been in such a thing.

Ever flown through the air in a skipbox.

And after zooming into the air at an alarmingly high rate of speed, we wound up at the edge of the framing at the 135' level of the RSS, eighty feet up, and the crane operator brought the skipbox to an amazingly-gentle stop, not on, but leaning against the side, of the floor steel up there, and with my eyes bulging out of their sockets as I contemplated the distant concrete beneath us, I stepped out, over the intervening perimeter steel member of the skipbox at the lower level, through the now-open area where the chain had been, absolutely terrified of tripping over the intermediate perimeter steel member, and somehow wound up with the soles of my boots on the floor steel of The Great RSS of Pad B, solidly planted but still terrified at the horrible Gulf of Death which began inches behind me as I continued farther across to hopefully safer ground on the floor steel...

... and the tape stops right there, and if my life depended on it, I could not possibly tell you why we were up there, or what we subsequently did...

But that first ride...

Things you never forget in your life...

Flying like an eagle over a Moon Rocket Launch Pad...

And from then on, I was madly in love with the skipbox. Madly in love with flying like an eagle over a Moon Rocket Launch Pad.

And I always looked forward to every opportunity to get into the thing and go for a ride.

Which, as time went on and my legs for high steel got better, became less and less until it quit happening altogether...

...and that was good...

...but it was also bad.

I still miss flying in the skipbox to this day.

But the stretcher basket remained tied to the removable handrail that guarded the precipice of the Flame Trench Wall.

And it never said a word.

It didn't have to.

It was more than enough just to know it was there.

It was there for a reason.


Bottom: (Reduced)

I am standing underneath the cantilevered awning of the Islander Hut in Cocoa Beach, Florida.

The sun has yet to come up, but it's close.

As a lifelong surfer, the waves exert an attraction upon me which is completely impossible to explain to anyone who does not surf.

The waves this day are at least there, which in Florida is saying something, but the wind appears to be a bit north, and the surface skin of the water has a bit of north wobble on it, and it looks like it's closing-out, too.

Even when I was on my way to a full-day's work, I would check the waves anyway.

Waves I knew I would not get to ride.

I spent a lot of time at the Islander Hut with an astounding crew of remarkably-intense people.

Surfing, and surfers, are funny that way.

There is an intensity about it.

On my days off, if I wasn't surfing, I would take my son Kai to the beach at the Islander Hut.

Kai would run around with a stick, playing with his best friend, Stevie Slater, and the two of them, just out of diapers, were near-feral, a pair of laughing giggling wild animals without a care in the world.

I would drink beer and play pinball with Stevie's father, Steve.

And while Kai and Stevie ran free, and me and Steve drank beer and played pinball in the Hut, Stevie's older brother Kelly was in the water teaching himself to surf, just as thousands of other little kids have taught themselves to surf in the small gentle waves of Cocoa Beach.

And Kelly was intense too.

Maybe google "Kelly Slater" and see if he ever figured out how to surf or not, by the time he grew up.