Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B Construction Photos

Page 57

RSS Hurricane Locks, My Ratty Little VW, 9099 Building, MLP Access Stair Towers(Original Scan)


Left: North end of Flame Trench pad deck panorama.

Lotta stuff going on in this panorama. Across the way is the 9099 Building, which sits just north of the FSS. Beyond that, is the west end of the North Piping Bridge (the nasty story about getting shafted by NASA with that thing, which you've already heard). Directly in front of you, in the middle of the picture, is one of the access stair towers for the MLP. Struts for one of the MLP Support Pedestals can be seen partially blocked behind it. And on the far right is the east end of the North Piping Bridge and the stair tower that accesses it.

Right: My little yellow VW beetle. The story here is that I drove a piece of the RSS Hurricane Locks up to the pad deck in this car. It almost went through the floor of the car when I put it in there. Look close, and you can see a couple of the locks already installed next to the rail, peeking out above and left of my left rear fender. They're kind of a dead gray color. The gang of ironworkers is getting ready to weld the new locks I just delivered, into place. I believe the ironworker dressed in brown, facing away from the camera is Elmo McBee, and the shorter ironworker facing the camera (but looking down to his right at the work) is Ray Elkins. Both of these guys took pity on me for being the greenhorn that I was, and were careful at all times to ensure that I understood what was going on, and, even more importantly, to ensure that I did not kill either myself, or anyone else, as I blundered around on the launch pad. Thanks guys, it was, and is, appreciated.




Right: (Full-size)

And, as mentioned on the previous page, we shall now revisit the Hurricane Locks.

Zoom in on the image, 250 percent or so, and center it up on the group of ironworkers with my little VW in the frame, too.

Ok.

You're looking west, at the Forward RSS Hurricane Lock area.

The RSS was a gigantic thing, weighing literally millions of pounds, but it could not be trusted to stay put if a hurricane struck the area directly and the wind decided to ramp up to somewhere over a hundred miles an hour, perhaps well over, and so they set some pretty stout iron on the pad deck that could be used to pin the RSS in place, with large steel pins which passed through openings in the stout iron on the pad deck, passed through matching stout iron on the RSS Drive Truck, and then further passed through another opening in another piece of stout iron on the pad deck.

There. That oughtta do it.

And for reasons I do not recall, one of the pieces of stout iron in question did not make it to the job site in a timely manner, and the guy who delivered it was not a regular truck driver, but instead just some guy in a car or pickup truck (I do not remember), and instead of taking it up on the pad deck, and putting it in the shake-out yard with all the other iron that got delivered to the pad, he brought it to Sheffield Steel's field trailer, got his paperwork signed, drove off, and at that point I became involved with things.

I was always looking for ways to get out of the trailer and up on the pad, and since I knew my way around up there just fine by this time, I told Dick Walls that I'd be happy to take it up to the pad deck, where the ironworkers were now getting ready to install it, and Dick gave me a bemused smile and said, "Ok," while giving my rattly little VW Beetle a look that did not inspire confidence.

Look closely at the zoomed-in image, at the ironworker on the left, dressed in lighter blue, and holding something in his hands.

He's holding the part of the RSS Hurricane Lock System that I had just delivered, and we can get a fairly good idea as to the weight of the thing, and why Dick Walls gave my car a "look" as a direct result of that.

I'm going to guess that the piece of black iron in question, sitting on edge, is 10 inches wide by 20 inches long, by 3 inches thick. So 600 cubic inches of iron, and it's got a notch cut out of it, so we'll pull that figure down to 500 cubic inches because of the notch cut out of it, and... what does 500 cubic inches of common A36 steel weigh, anyway?

Let's turn in our workbooks children, and look this shit up.

And the ever-handy AISC Manual of Steel Construction has us covered, and amongst all the other marvelous little nuggets of wild-ass information you can find buried in that thing (and yes, on boring days, I'd just sit there idly and read it for fun), we discover that rolled steel (which is what we're working with, in case you were wondering) comes in at a quite respectable weight of 490 pounds per cubic foot (which calculates to 1,728 cubic inches), which means that our little piece of the Hurricane Lock which we've guesstimated at being roughly 500 cubic inches, will tally up at something just over 140 pounds. And my guesstimate might be low, too. Might be high. I dunno. It's my best guess and it's all we've got, and it's just gonna have to do.

Go find something that weighs 140 pounds. Something small. Maybe head down to the gym. I'm guessing they've got something laying around in there that you could use.

And you discover it's not impossible to deal with, not by any means, but then again, neither could it ever be considered as being trivial.

Drop that fucker on your toe, and you'll discover quite rapidly just how non-trivial it really is.

And Dick Walls, who was a lifelong steel guy, already knew all of that just by glancing at our piece of iron, and so, even as he was giving me permission to schlep this thing up to the pad deck, he was also becoming curious as to just how this was going to work out in the real world.

So... "Oof, this thing's heavy," and I've got hold of it, and the car's already open with the driver's side seatback pushed forward to allow access to the back seat, and all the crap and towels and generalized rubbish that lived on the back seat had been tossed up onto the little shelf behind the seat up underneath the back window, and with a few awkward grunts along the way, I go to set it down on the back seat, and I immediately realize that the back seat of a 1972 VW Beetle is NOT designed for such work (yes, it' will carry your morbidly-obese Aunt Polly's enormous fat ass, but Aunt Polly's enormous fat ass is quite wide and distributes her ridiculous twinky-fueled weight across a much larger area), and even then, she needs to be careful when sitting down, and this piece of iron tried to go right through the damn seat, so I wound up having to put it on the floorboard back there, and anybody who's ever owned an old VW bug on the beach in Brevard County can tell you that the floor pans tend to rust out, and now I'm wondering if the damn thing is gonna go right through the floor, too, and I finally, very gingerly, very strenuously, got the damn thing in there, and Dick Walls is not doing such a good job of repressing his laughter, and I don't give a shit anyway, 'cause I get to go back up on the pad deck again, and where's my camera, and fuck all of you goddamned people.

And here you see the result of all that, and somehow the car did not experience a catastrophic structural failure of the back seat floorboards, and that's kind of nice, right?

Yes it is.

And regards the exact story with this piece of iron, I have no recollection. If you look at the image, you can plainly see the existing pairs of tie-down lugs, one set of which is partially obscured by the left side of my car, and the other set of which is mostly obscured by Elmo McBee (center) and itself, and that stuff already looks pretty damn sturdy to me, but maybe they needed to slap the piece I brought up there on the side of one of the existing ones to strengthen it up some, or... I dunno. And I did not stick around to watch the work proceed, 'cause getting set up for a thing like this can be quite time-consuming, and then when the work begins it's just a lot of welding (full-penetration welds) and Ray and Elmo were kindly-disposed toward me, but that doesn't mean they want me just standing around all day staring at them, and Dick's probably down in the trailer wondering what the hell's taking me so long, and so I hung around for a while, but really, once this thing had been delivered, my attention turned toward getting more photographs, which I did, and then it was time to get the hell out of everybody's way, and get back to work down in the field trailer, and so I got the hell out of everybody's way, and got back to work down in the field trailer.

And about that vertical SSW Pipe...

I mentioned on the previous page that the pipe was "capped" and that's not how it looks when the MLP gets involved with the pipe and they're going to need to be able to shoot water through the MLP like Niagara Falls, and in this image, you can see what sits at the top of that pipe which connects with the underside of the MLP after they've removed the cap that's on it right now, and it's laying on a pallet, and it's the round thing with kind of ribbing on it, directly, exactly, left of our blue-clad ironworker who's handling the piece of steel I'd just delivered, partially obscured by his butt, and further obscured by the sheet of plywood standing on end behind him that the ironworkers had set up as a bit of a windbreak for the substantial amount of welding that's about to begin, when they get to work on securing that piece of steel in its final working location. And now that you've looked at the picture of "Niagara Falls" maybe you can relate to my previous remarks about the pipe being strong enough, on its own, to preclude the requirement for any additional support steel to hold up the little access platform up near its top. And one more thing about that pipe, and some of what's coming in the next image, directly below, on this page.

I previously gave you a link to locate that pipe on the isometric view of the whole pad.

And there's something that I'm pretty sure nobody noticed, but it jumped right out at me once I started giving these photographs the good close going-over they needed, in order for me to talk at least semi-intelligently about them, and that thing is the location of the MLP Access Stair Tower that's shown on the drawing, and it's exact, precise, relationship with this SSW pipe.

And on the drawing it's wrong, and it typifies precisely the exact nature of the kinds of things I've been ranting and raving about, all through these stories.

The fucked up drawings were wrong, but the blockheads who administered and engineered the contract that's based on those very selfsame wrong drawings, would move heaven and earth to keep from admitting their own culpability in the matter, and labor mightily to find a way to make it our fault. Every. Single. Time.

And here, at long last, I get to give you a teeny tiny eency weency example of things, and when you first look at it you will wonder what the big deal is, so I'll then elucidate things from there, to help you understand.

And before we go any farther with this one, in the isometric view, as-drawn, they show the east Side Flame Deflector in its southern, launch position (and actually that's a little off too, and shows the deflector too far south, overlapping the crest of the Center Flame Deflector, which it does not really do, but we're not gonna be getting into that right now, thank you very much), and the northeast corner of the damn SFD is right behind the SSW Pipe as shown in the drawing, and it was causing a difficult thing to see to become an impossible thing to see, so I just wiped that motherfucker off the face of the earth, using GIMP, and that way, with the SFD simply gone, it becomes much much easier to see the rest of what I'm talking about here. So in the interests of full disclosure, I figure I oughtta let you know where I've manipulated a drawing that I'm complaining about as being incorrect.

Ok?

Ok.

Now. The alignment of things up on the pad deck in this area is such that the southeast corner of the FSS, and the crest of SSW Spray Headers that runs along the top of the Center Flame Deflector, in addition to the south side of the MLP Access Stair Tower and the Hurricane Locks which are over on the east side of the Flame Trench, all line up in the same generalized area with each other, pretty close to a straight east-west line which you can insert into the drawing, if you like.

So I inserted that straight east-west line as a double-headed arrow coming off the southeast corner of the FSS, into a cropped version of the drawing, and I also highlighted the Stair Tower in yellow, and the SSW Pipe in blue, and then added in the Hurricane Locks in green (they're TINY), and here it all is for you to look at while I continue with the discussion below.

Notice please, that the SSW Pipe, as shown on the drawing, is noticeably north of that line I drew.

Notice further that this location places the SSW Pipe directly in front of the Stair Tower, as you look straight west across the pad toward the FSS.

And now go back and look at the photograph above these words, and notice if you will, that the SSW Pipe is actually a fair bit south of a line running east-west from the southeast corner of the FSS (which we're just a little bit south of as viewing things in the photograph, and you can also see we're even farther south of the line made by the crest of the Center Flame Deflector, a very small bit (but enough to see) of which is showing in the photograph, as a light gray area just above the roof of my VW, just to the right of the float which is standing on edge, and just to make damn good and sure you see this, the line of spray headers, as it gets obscured by the edge-up float, is meeting the far side of the Flame Trench just about exactly where the gentleman wearing the red hardhat is standing over there on the far side, looking directly at us.

And every bit of this is real stuff, in the real world, and no, nobody moved any of this between the time the drawing was made (hey, look, no OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers) and the time the photograph was taken.

And as a final bit of clarity for this stuff, get a look at my marked up version of the drawing, with the SSW Pipe and the Stair Tower standing there cheek-by-jowl, and imagine yourself taking the photograph from a place that looked like the drawing looks, instead of the real world.

And you immediately realize that as I backed away from things headed east to get this photograph, looking due west across the Flame Trench toward the Hinge Column Struts through the centerline of that SSW Pipe, I would have had to be behind the Stair Tower, to get the image you're looking at.

No damned Stair Tower.

So.

So clearly, something's off.

And of course, me being me, I just could not leave this thing alone, so I spent... you don't want to know how long... dredging through all of these photographs and found one taken from up on the RSS, looking at the Flame Trench, and mirabile dictu, it includes this entire area (just barely, but it's definitely all there), up in its far top right corner, and we get to see the bottom of the Stair Tower (with an air compressor cart up against it), the SSW Pipe (partially obscured by an air line hanging in the foreground), and the Hurricane Locks themselves, (or at least three and a half out of all four of them), and yeah, once you look at this, then there can be no doubt whatsoever as to the drawing being wrong about this stuff.

So it's fucked up on the drawing, and it's fucked up in a surprisingly subtle and non-obvious way, and if it was you that was bidding the job, and there was something in the job that depended on the stair tower being right next to the SSW Pipe where it's shown on the drawing, then you're fucked, and you're fucked twice 'cause NASA's gonna work like the devils they are to make it your fault.

See how they play this little game?

Such a fun little game it is, isn't it?

And just as a bit of unnecessary icing on this particular cake, I'm also going to draw your attention to one of the flag notes on the drawing, too.

Here's the full-size PDF, so you can see the whole deal.

Take a look at the Flag Notes, up in the top right area of the drawing, and notice please under the heading of "TO REMAIN" note number 7 inside of a little diamond, which says "ML PEDESTALS" which of course are the MLP Mount Pedestals, without which nobody's going to be able to park a rocket ship out here.

So yeah, "TO REMAIN" seems like a pretty good idea for the MLP Mount Pedestals on a demolition drawing.

But now, have a look down below the drawing itself, where it says "PAD 39B ISOMETRIC VIEW LOOKING NORTHWEST" and notice please the little '7' inside of a small diamond, just above the word "NORTHWEST" with 'TYP' right next to it, which stands for "typical" as in "we're not gonna spell this out every damn time, so just be aware that there's more than one of these things, and they're all going to be treated exactly the same," and coming off of that little diamond around the '7' are a pair of lines that end in teeny weeny little arrowheads, and the line on the right has its arrowhead butt up against the bottom of our SSW Pipe, which is most assuredly not an MLP Mount Pedestal, and yeah, this stuff snowballs in a hurry and when it's you that's bidding the job, it can get pretty scary going over this crap doing a material and labor takeoff, hoping one of these little "gotcha" motherfuckers isn't going to wind up bankrupting your construction company.

The stress of this kind of work is more or less unimaginable for those who have never experienced it, and it stays with you.

And before I go, let me just get on record right now as saying how phenomenally well-done this drawing is. This thing is a work of art, and we're not talking the kind of art you might buy in a department store. This thing is as good as it gets, and the guy who did it cannot be praised enough for the quality of his work. What you're looking at here is a washoff of a washoff of a washoff, copy of a copy of a copy, ad infinitum, and it has suffered accordingly. And I was lucky enough to get to work with the original, and let me tell you, the original stuff was better. Much much better. This thing really is a work of art, and I've often wondered where the original rendering is. Where might that thing be? I can only hope it's inside a sealed frame and hanging on a wall someplace where people know its true worth and treat it with the full respect with which it is due.

Which means I understand that these gotchas are by no means deliberate, when they get made.

Far from it, in fact.

It's more the way that the assholes over on the NASA side of the house decided to play them, that gets my Irish up.


Left: (Reduced)

And now we turn to our north, and grab another pair of frames that we can overlay with each other into a panorama, which show the area north of the FSS, on both sides of the Flame Trench.

What a mess!

Ugly, too.

More a scene from some abandoned Rust Belt factory than some kind of futuristic launch pad, but it does well to convey the truth of launch pads, which is that they are just great big industrial-looking things where a lot of heavy work gets done on a lot of heavy equipment, and the only difference is that the heavy equipment that gets worked on eventually lurches into the sky with a deafening roar and a spray of smoke and flames that would do a volcano proud.

So yeah, so heavy industry.

In this frame, I had already moved my car out of everybody's way, and then, in comparison with the frame up above on this page, I have moved a little south, and a little west, and if you look carefully at the line-ups of things you can see that. So we're not standing in exactly the same spot, and the car is no longer where it was when I dropped off the Hurricane Lock iron, because if it was, it would show in this frame.

So what are we looking at here?

Across the way, over on the west side of the Flame Trench, we'll start with the far left side of the panorama with the distinct red of that part of the FSS which is visible. Pretty hard to mistake that little item for anything else.

Between us and the FSS, partially blocking some of the bottom of it from view, we have a couple of vertical SSW Water pipes (I'm guessing the narrower one is for drain, 'cause the big one is definitely supply.) surrounded by access platform framing for techs to work that stuff when the MLP was out on the pad.

Immediately above that access platform at the tops of the SSW pipes, the first large red horizontal framing member of the FSS, extending out of frame to the left, indicates the 80-foot elevation of the FSS, which, unlike every other main framing level of the FSS, was twenty-seven feet above the level beneath it (which is the concrete of the pad deck), instead of the twenty foot increments from there up. So take another twenty feet up to the next large red main horizontal framing member of the FSS, and you're at elevation 100', and we'll talk a little bit more about the 100' level in a bit, ok?

Back down low, farther to the right, and looking very similar to the SSW pipes and their access platform with its support framing, you have one of the MLP Mount Pedestals, which has its own access platform around it up near the top, and it also has a large heavy diagonal brace coming down from its top, to the right, at about a forty-five degree angle, and the bottom of both the Pedestal and its Brace are obscured by somebody's long low tank, sitting on a trailer with three visible wheels underneath it, and my guess is that thing is most likely diesel fuel for compressors or anything else requiring portable power or whatever, but I might be wrong, and it might be painter stuff, and I really do not know.

Behind the MLP Mount Pedestal and the north end of the access platform for the SSW pipes, the West MLP Access Stair tower rises above everything around it as an open latticework of steel framing, with the zigzagging stairs it contained visible, but also partially blocked by the diagonal bracing of the tower itself.

Both MLP Access Stair towers took a pretty good beating on launch day, and were constructed with way-heavier-than-you-might-expect-for-a-stair-tower tube steel framing, and that gave them a kind of funny look, that nothing else anywhere around shared. Very distinctive look to that framing steel on those stair towers.

Directly behind the West MLP Access Stair Tower, a bundle of cryo, ECLSS, and I-don't-know-what-else, piping and ducting runs horizontally until it meets the FSS, just below the 100' level. On its north end, to the right, it meets the ridiculous snarl of... whatever the hell that stuff is, which is our old friend the 9099 Building.

And of course, the 9099 Building being the inscrutable motherfucker that is, it doesn't really have a proper place, either here or there where it begins, or finishes, and this effect was so pronounced that nobody ever bothered calling the West MLP Access Stair Tower by its rightful name, and instead just lumped it all in as being part of the 9099 Building, which it most definitely was not part of.

And some of this confusion can be laid at the feet of the Stair Tower itself, because you can see pretty clearly that the damned stair tower isn't quite just a stair tower, because a normal stair tower in a normal setting will have four columns, which will define the rectangular area that the stair itself, along with its intermediate landings, will be contained within, and the goddamned West MLP Access Stair Tower has six(!) columns, and the two northernmost columns, in conjunction with the columns immediately to their south, define a rectangle that contains... what the hell is that stuff, anyway?

And of course this is the beginning of that fuzzy Twilight Zone area where stair towers start turning into 9099 Buildings, and the whole thing is just too weird and too contrapted to make proper sense of, and that's even when you're looking right at it, with a photograph that shows every last bit of it, in plenty-good-enough detail.

Gah.

This "not a stair tower, not a 9099 Building" area is where the flip ups start, most all of which are locked in their flipped up positions and it's the quite-sturdy-because-of-the-beating-this-stuff-takes-on-launch-day undersides of them that you're seeing, and my goodness, there certainly is a lot of them over here, isn't there?

Yes indeed, there certainly is a lot of them over here.

And the purpose of every last one of them is completely unknown to me, because I was a complete idiot when I was out there, and I completely failed to learn what any of this stuff is, and what any of this stuff does.

Sigh.

And so we find ourselves marveling at it from afar, having no idea what we're looking at, although we do know that the actual 9099 Building is that part of things over here with the heavy corrugated metal siding on it. The rest of it is, technically speaking, something else, but damned if I know the names of any of it, and like I already said, everybody just lumped it all together, stair tower and all, and called the whole mess "the 9099 Building."

The top deck of the MLP was at elevation 100' and we can see where that elevation is by looking at the FSS framing, and we can see that all of the flip ups in this area are either at that level or below that level, which means this whole schmutz was basically a gigantic umbilical, which connected variously to the side of the MLP, and yeah, that stands perfectly to reason, 'cause everything that went to the Space Shuttle when it was out on the launch pad, that didn't go through the OMBUU or through the Hypergol Umbilical Carriers down at level 112' on the RSS, was fed to it through the Tail Service Masts on the MLP, so yeah. Lotta damn crap in here.

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Addendum:

Ok, me and Kai got to talking on the phone about this stuff, and it started out as an innocent enough conversation about how the SSW Header was mislocated on the big isometric vicinity drawing, and of course the two of us being the two of us, neither one of us was having any fun at all not understanding this stuff, and so of course we start digging, and we've both got our computers out, and neither one of us is any kind of slouch when it comes to research, and away we go.

I'll not waste anybody's time with the details of the conversations, but the bottom line is that, after several days of digging, the stuff that Kai found, and the stuff that I found, can be summarized as "We finally figured out what all this crap over next to the 9099 Building is, and I'll link to some stuff to show everybody.

It's old Apollo stuff, and that would stand perfectly to reason, since the whole pad is old Apollo stuff, and since the heyday of Apollo, NASA has never gotten enough money to do the jobs they've been tasked with (by the people who dole out the money, no less), and so everything from then on has been done on the cheap (and you want to fly in this thing?), and wherever they could reuse existing stuff, well then, that's exactly what they did.

So ok.

The West MLP Stair Tower is pretty straightforward, and it's a leftover, and we really do not need to get into any of the why's and wherefore's on that one.

But the bizarro thing, that shares columns with the West MLP Stair Tower... well.

Back in the days of yore, people who wanted to fly on Saturn V's had to get up on the damn LUT somehow, and to do that, they took an elevator, and the bizarro stuff that sits in between the West MLP Stair Tower and the 9099 Building is the tower for an old hydraulic elevator, which they used to access the Mobile Launcher (which was renamed for the Shuttle Program and became the Mobile Launch Platform) at level 'A' which is interior, inside the thing, and the elevator landing from outside that takes you to that interior level, takes you to a corridor which you can go down and get to the elevators on the LUT (which is the gigantic tower on top of the ML) which will then take you all the way up to a nice Apollo Capsule that you can walk across a swing arm and get inside of and take a nice ride to the moon.

We'll start with a vicinity drawing of the whole pad deck, Apollo era, with the elevator tower highlighted.

And then we'll take a look at a cropped portion of one of the original Apollo drawings, which shows the ML Access Elevator highlighted, which also shows how it was part of a larger system to get people to the top of the LUT and back.

And while we're admiring this little work of art, notice please, to the right of the Saturn V which is sitting there on the ML, where it says "Vehicle (N.I.C.)" to the side of it.

For starters, they never called it a "rocket" and instead always called it a "vehicle." Took me a while to get used to that when I first showed up out there. But the goofiest part is the "N.I.C." part. Not In Contract.

How nice.

How very nice of you swell fellows to tell me that I do not have to furnish and install a complete fucking Saturn V as part of my contract to maybe build you a hydraulic elevator.

Look for little "N.I.C's" all over the place when you're looking at the reference drawings I've so very liberally sprinkled this thing with. You'll find 'em if you look for 'em. And lots of times, they're vital, and make the very real difference between profit and bankruptcy, so yeah, we need the damn things, of that there can be no doubt. But somebody, somewhere, has either been talking to too many lawyers, or has quite the puckish sense of humor.

"Vehicle N.I.C."

How nice. How very fucking nice.

And now, at long last, we finally know what the fuck all that weird-ass crap over there by the 9099 building is.

But we don't know if the elevator still existed when I was taking pictures of the pad, way back when, in the early 1980's.

Hell, I never even knew the thing was there.

So we've gone just about as far as we can with it, ok?

Here's a photograph showing Apollo 4 out on Pad A, and I've yellow highlighted the Elevator Tower, and I've red highlighted the West MLP Stair Tower.

For what it's worth.

Close Addendum.
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And moving right along, to the right, to the north, we encounter the west end of the North Piping Bridge (about which already, far too much), and in front of that stuff, down at pad deck level, another MLP Mount Pedestal.

And now we can jump back across the Flame Trench, over near where we're standing on the east side, and continue with the tour.

On the left, immediate near foreground, the top portions of somebody's torch kit (looks like the acetylene is missing and it's probably Wilhoit's, but I can't know with certainty), complete with bottle, regulator, hose, handle of the little cart you roll it around with, and somebody's jackets, because in Florida, you'll start out at daybreak freezing your ass off, but by the middle of the day you'll be suffering heat exhaustion if you don't take off all those outer layers and put 'em somewhere.

To the right of that, somebody's portable air, probably the painters, but again, I do not know, and yes, it's the same one that's visible in the image I linked to above on this page (here it is again) and no, that does not mean that both images were taken on the same day, or even in the same month, cause stuff like this would get parked by one of the trades, and then sometimes left there for surprising lengths of time as the prosecution of whatever work that involved the use of the thing slowly unfolded.

And then the tube-steel framing of the East MLP Stair Tower, and in this view from nice and close, you can get a better idea of just how stout both of the MLP Stair Towers really are.

Behind and north of the Stair Tower, another MLP Mount Pedestal, this one having two big hefty diagonal support braces. This stuff was original Apollo equipment, and had remained right here from since those days, and the MLP Mount Pedestals to the north were the ones that sat under the box (under the Mobile Launcher), under its north end, which was the end of the box that carried the LUT (Launch Umbilical Tower), and that was a goddamned gigantic fucking thing, and was heavier than hell, and I seem to recall reading somewhere that these diagonal braces which we're seeing here on the pad deck, were also involved somehow with any potential on-pad abort of the Saturn V, which would apparently induce some serious sudden-onset dynamic loads into the MLP as that portion of the weight (which became substantially negative an instant before lift-off) of the Saturn V which had been negated by the action of the ramping-up of those enormous F-1 engines underneath that brute, was suddenly returned into the supporting structures if those engines all-of-a-sudden shut down a split-second before they released the hold-down clamps and the thing was irrevocably into the air, on its way, for good or for bad. But that never happened, and I'm unable to recall where I read that in the first place, so I dunno. Maybe, maybe not. We'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to chase that one down, unless I stumble across it again myself, in which case it will be included as a link somewhere into this document.

Heading north from the MLP Mount Pedestal, directly in line with the triangular-shaped concrete support for its diagonal brace, we encounter another, much smaller, much lighter, access tower for the MLP, but this one doesn't have a stair, and instead it has a caged ladder. No recollection of what this one was for, but it looks to provide very specific access for a very specific area, down at the lower margin of the MLP. Beyond that, I do not know.

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Addendum: In digging for the above information regards the mess over next to the 9099 Building, the answer to our question as to what this little tower with its caged ladder is, and it's on the same drawing as the (unlabeled) elevator, and it is labeled, and the label says "Pneumatics."

And that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Close Addendum.
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Continuing north, another MLP Mount Pedestal.

And past that, the east end of the North Piping Bridge, along with the stair tower that gave you access to it from that end.

And there you have it, and that concludes today's visit to Pad 39-B, and we hope you have enjoyed your visit as much as we've enjoyed having you here, and do hurry back again, every chance you get.