Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B Construction Photos

Page 59

Movie Prop on Pad 34, Inside the Field Trailer, Inside the Catacombs (Original Scan)

Top is a V2(!) sitting out at Pad 34, shot taken during the early 80's. Somebody or other was making a movie, and the Air Force obliged them. I have no idea what movie it might have been. I quit watching movies when I was a kid. Apologies.

Middle is Joe Pessaro (electrical tech rep for BRPH [Briel, Rhame, Poynter, & Houser, Architects and Engineers]), Can't Remember Name (Gary?), Can't Remember Name (Olson Electric general foreman), Jack Petty (structural tech rep for BRPH) in the PRC (Planning Research Corp) field trailer out at 39B.

Bottom is a shot of the innards of the Catacombs, down inside the bowels of the pad.




Top: (Reduced)

And some times, when you're driving around out on the Cape, you find yourself passing by something that's pretty weird, even for a place that's already overflowing with plenty enough weird stuff, on its own, as it is.

And so, one day, I'm on Beach Road, and off in the distance I see the top of something above the greenery with a very familiar look, that's way out of place, cannot possibly be real, and needs a bit of further examination to see what the hell's going on with it.

And, just so you know, as far as I'm concerned, Pad 34 is hallowed ground, and I do not approve in the slightest of what's going on here, so let us get that out of the way right up front.

And so I turned off of Beach Road, down the access road to Pad 34, turned right on to the Perimeter Road, and then did a slow counterclockwise circuit of the pad.

And you're viewing the pad from the beach side of things, looking back inland, in a place where the intervening vegetation was low enough to permit a clear view of the pad itself.

And what you're seeing is some bogus prop, for some bogus movie that some damn body or other was making (Nope, I have no idea who it was or what movie it was, or any of that kind of thing, because by this time in my life I had already long since quit watching movies, and my ignorance of the entertainment particulars of that whole subject is pretty complete.)

Every once in a while, the Air Force allowed themselves to used by the Entertainment Industry (which I despise, in all of its manifestations), and so it was that this day, somebody was, once again, using the Air Force, and I happened to chance by, with the camera in my possession.

I can only hope that it was as good for the Air Force as it was for the Entertainment Industry.


Center: (Reduced)

And when you're not hanging by your tail from high steel up on the tower, you're doing this kind of stuff down in the field trailers, either your own, or someone else's, and in this case it's PRC's (Planning Research Corporation), but you're in the BRPH end of it, and it's not even a single trailer, although it is one big open space, and yeah, things are just as goofy and complicated down on the ground as they are up on high steel.

It's just the nature of the beast, that's all.

Very few things on the Cape are single things, and instead are composed of, and comprise, further intertwined entities, to greater or lesser extents, nuances, and shades of gray, and yet somehow, everybody knows exactly what's what, who's who, how it all fits together, and how to get from here, to there.

It is, in a very real sense, a Great Dance, and different dancers take different places on the stage at different times, and dance first this way, and then dance that way, and dance together, and dance alone, and dance in groups that form and dissolve, with new dancers constantly entering the stage, even as other dancers leave the stage, and in the end, all of the dancers leave the stage and are replaced by a completely different dance troupe, doing a completely different dance, and then the cycle repeats, and some kind of dance continues to go on, or sometimes it doesn't, and stillness returns all around, and the wind sighs and whispers across deeply-lonesome tracts of uninhabited land, showing only the barest, faintest, traces of that which went before and is now forever and irrevocably gone.

It's all so very strange and wonderful and surreal, and at the same time so dull and tedious and boring.

Today, it would appear that us structural people (myself, who took the picture), and Jack Petty who works for BRPH, have crossed paths with some damn thing or other (I have zero recollection of what exactly was going on when this picture was taken) which had to be electrical (Joe Pessaro, BRPH's electrical tech rep, and Olson Electric's foreman, and Gary was a draftsman and I have no idea where he fit into all this, but clearly, at some point, he was going to have to make a drawing of the sonofabitch, and for that reason he needed in on it too), that raised significant enough questions to cause all of us to head down to the trailer to see if we could get to the bottom of things on our own, without a work stoppage, without getting money people (who everybody hated) involved.

These are all high-end people, and yet they all look so ordinary.

But they are not.

They are one and all extraordinary.

And they are one and all doing extraordinary things.


Bottom Right: (Reduced)

The Catacombs.

That a thing so cutting-edge, so modern, so futuristic, as a Launch Pad, should even have such a thing.

Such a thing as The Catacombs.

But it did, and it was real, and was very different from the rest of the pad.

A snippet of words from a previous page that had a photograph of the Flame Deflector.

"The interior of the pad is not solid all the way through. There are Catacombs down there, complete with growing stalactites up in dim corners, the occasional inadvertently-cornered raccoon, or who knows what else, spooky, echoey, creepy dim halls and mystery rooms, and in the middle of it all, around a perfectly nondescript corner, there's a little door, that you can stoop through, and come out up inside of the Flame Deflector. I always loved spelunking in the Catacombs, and did so at every opportunity."

And if I don't tell this story now, I'll never get the chance to tell it, so ok, so here we go.

The Flame Deflector was a large and very-sturdy thing made with fairly-heavy and fairly close-spaced steel framing inside of it.

But it wasn't so large that you couldn't climb around inside of it.

And so, one day, for my son, who A.) Was deeply interested in this stuff, and who B.) Was a little kid, who would get quite a thrill out of it, and who C.) Was (and is) the center of my life in a way that nothing else can so much as even approach, I took one of his toys, a small space shuttle, maybe about 10 inches long or so, plastic, white on top, black on the bottom as a Shuttle should look, and it was something he liked very much, and kept and played with as little kids will, and I scratched his name KAI deeply into the bottom of it, and when things slowed down one day, and free time presented itself, I surreptitiously walked from the field trailer into the West Catacombs and went down the long, dim, wet, echoey, spooky hallway and turned the corner where I knew the "little door" to be located, pulled the metal handle on it to open it up, half stooped, half crawled through it, and entered the Flame Deflector on its Orbiter side, climbed up into the steel framework to the intermediate level and found myself a connection with a diagonal wide-flange member coming down from above, into the gusset plates of the vertical member it connected to, and then very carefully placed that little toy space shuttle down into the protected area between the gusset plates, leaning against the vertical member, let my son know what I was doing even though he was nowhere around, and then departed, the same way I had entered.

And I know for a fact that until the next time the heavy framing of that Flame Deflector got sandblasted and painted, as must it would, years later, that little toy space shuttle with Kai's name on it, stayed there completely hidden from view by the steel which cradled it, in the deep gloom of the unlit spaces inside the Deflector, and I know for a fact that it felt the unimaginably powerful roar and rumble and shaking of each Space Shuttle that flew from there while it remained in place, hidden, safe, unseen.

And my son knew this too.

And my son knows this too.

And that was my gift to my son, that day.

In the photograph above, look on the floor, and you can see a substantial amount of standing water, with a caged ladder laying down in it, unused, most likely forgotten, by those who last laid hands upon it.

In addition to being ever so dark and gloomy, the Catacombs were always wet. Water could be found in patches on the floor, here and there, most often with no sensible source. I would imagine that it would work it's way down through the joints in the concrete that made up the pad deck, leaching minerals out of the sand and concrete as it did so, but I have no way of confirming that. Literal stalactites, small ones, but real ones nonetheless, found occasionally in the far upper corners of the high-ceilinged halls, galleries, and rooms (which gave the look of having been created as a side-effect of how the pad was originally mounded up out of sand and then concrete was poured to support the massive burden it was designed to carry) which the Catacombs comprised, would tend to back that theory up.

Stray bits of mystery equipment was always to be found every so often, here and there, in random places inside the Catacombs, and you'd see it, perhaps a section of removable handrail, maybe bits of a platform, or some other piece of unknown steel framing, and occasionally just junk, and you'd wonder to yourself, "Ok, how'd that get here?" but you'd never know the story.

Up above, running the length of the hallway on the left is a cable tray. Electrical power, or electrical data, I do not know, but my guess would be the more mundane of the two, electrical power. The lighting was always on, every time I went down there, but there were unlit places with doors that could be shut, and in those places, it became dark. Dark in that heavy, palpable, oppressive way which can give you the shivers if you let it. Dark that extinguishes all. And when all is extinguished by the dark, your brain automatically shifts modes, and the mode it shifts into can have unpleasant aspects to it. The Catacombs was yet another one of those places on the pad where you could feel things.

Lower left in the photograph, one of the large SSW supply pipes takes a bend and plunges into the concrete.

That's a big pipe, and they forced a lot of water through it at high speed on launch day.

I was never around for any of the tests on the SSW System, but I've often wondered what it would be like to stand right next to this pipe, maybe even with the palm of your hand flat against it, when they threw the deluge system into gear.

My guess is that you'd definitely know it.

And then you'd turn on your heel, footsteps slapping occasional thin sheets of water and echoing down the bare-concrete hallway, turn the corner into the tunnel that bisected the pad south of the flame trench, walk back into the brilliant, near-blinding, light of day, and then the spell would be broken, and you'd find yourself back, immersed once again, in the very different magic that hovered around the pad, outside.