The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 35: Top of the FSS and the Hammerhead Crane.
| Pad B Stories - Table of Contents |
The top of the FSS.
Where the Hammerhead Crane lived.
And it was always such a fun place to go.
So of course I'd go, whenever I could, and of course we already know that Dick Walls was extraordinarily kind and forgiving and afforded me the grace of being able to just wander around up on the towers whenever time permitted (and it did so an awful lot), and there's no possible way I could count how many times I stood where this photograph was taken from, looking down the length of the Hammerhead Crane, standing above the top of the FSS, with a 360 degree all-around all-directions view to die for.
The Hammerhead Crane was already there before I ever showed up at the Pad, so I have no familiarity with how it was done, nor whether or not Wilhoit had any problems with it, but, knowing the place as well as I do, my guess is that there are stories.
Stories I was never told.
Stories that I never heard.
Stories that may well already be gone forever.
And this breaks my heart, and only causes me to redouble my efforts in trying to keep such tattered fragments, such dim and guttering candles, as I can...
...from disappearing forever.
Below, an eyewitness account regarding the Hammerhead Crane, from one of our Anonymous Benefactors.
Verbatim.
\\\\\\\
If you recall we would have weekly status meetings at 39B. Some attendees: Jim Herman, Pat Costello, Bob Haber, Lee Marsh, Fischbach and Moore (for FSS 79K10338), Dick Walls, Cecil Wilhoit (himself), Contracting Officer Ollie McCurry and Chris Miller and - me.
At the meetings, Cecil telegraphed his punches. He pointed out at many meetings clearly that his stacking booms were now operational. Two story segments from the old Apollo ML were getting hauled over from the parksite and are getting stacked. It is only a matter of time when we will be ready to install the existing hammerhead crane. It may not have been stated explicitly but it was understood that his temporary stacking configuration was not going to stand by and wait while the gov was still debating when to deliver the hammerhead crane. (You can imagine the weekly cost of that configuration.)
At one of the status meetings our CO, Mr. McCurry came completely unglued and we wondered if we had any sedatives nearby. It seems that over the weekend, Wilhoit's crew had stopped by the site where the hammerhead crane was being refurbished and hauled it away to the pad and installed it on top of the FSS. Without any notice given? The hammerhead crane renovations were not complete. The FSS elevator was not yet operational.
How to complete renovations in situ? Mr. Wilhoit suggested using the FSS stairs.
Looking back, they might have demanded an admission charge for me to attend that meeting. And I would have paid.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/146458279/cecil-thornton-wilhoit
///////
So it goes.
The FSS at Pad B started out its life as the Launch Umbilical Tower (LUT) which was the very large vertical tower on top of Mobile Launcher 2, from which multiple Apollo Program missions were flown.
After Apollo, the unused Mobile Launchers were parked, and sat unused for years.
And before I go any farther, let's get squared away with what we called all this stuff while I was working on it. The historical record and the spoken language used during the construction of the RSS at Pad B were different, and I find myself slipping into our native tongue often enough with this stuff that I'd better stop right here and clarify things, or otherwise you're going to see me using terms "incorrectly" and may get misled as a result, and that's not what we want to see happen.
Out on the Pad, the Apollo-era Mobile Launchers were invariably referred to as the "LUT" and although LUT, strictly speaking, only refers to the tower portion of the Mobile Launcher, the whole thing was, without exception, always referred to as the "LUT" and that was never expressed as an acronym, but instead was a word, and the word was pronounced exactly as it was spelled, lut, with a short 'u' vowel sound.
Always.
Never once did I ever hear anybody referring to one of those things as a "Mobile Launcher" and since there was still one left over, parked over on the north side of the VAB, for years, and which, on at least one occasion, they rolled out and parked on Pad A for a goodly while, testing their new pad for who-knows-what with a nice heavy weight, which meant I drove right past the thing at least twice every day, driving from home to work and then back again, the references were common enough, since the thing itself was still "common enough."
And Wilhoit cut the LUT which stood on top of ML-2 into pieces right where it stood in the Park Site just north of the VAB, and eventually hauled the pieces out to the Pad, and then put them back together out there as the FSS.
And they bid the job and did the work per this quite brief section of the specs.
Below, another eyewitness recounting of things from the same Anonymous Benefactor, verbatim, complete with a small image this time.
\\\\\\\
Do you remember this one?
At 39B, Wilhoit stacked segments of the old ML umbilical tower (now the SSAT or FSS) using twin booms with hoists on the east side of the trench. Similar to the booms used to disassemble the umbilical tower - see below. I watched with curiosity.
Then as we foresaw the installation of the hammerhead crane and the lightning mast, the question came to me: how to lay down the booms? You cannot drop the booms to the east. They will free fall. You cannot drop the booms to the west because the hammerhead crane and lightning mast interfere.
I posed the question to Cecil Wilhoit. He smiled and said, "Just watch!" Finally the de-erection process started and I watched. The crew lashed the booms to the now existing FSS and another portable crane disassembled the booms segment by segment. The end.
How easy could it be?
Ahh, the mind of the steel erector?!?
///////
The part of the Mobile Launcher that the tower sat on top of before they cut it off, was repurposed for the Shuttle Program as the "Mobile Launch Platform" and that particular item was almost always referred to, out on the Pad, as the "box," but every once in a while it would be referred to as the "MLP," and only on exceedingly rare occasions would you encounter it as a "Mobile Launch Platform." "MLP" was always spoken as an acronym, "emellpee" and nobody ever attempted to make some kind of word out of it.
So we had a LUT and we had an MLP and that was that, and I never questioned the least of it at the time, and it sort of just soaked in through the pores of my skin, like so much else out there soaked in through the pores of my skin, unnoticed, unquestioned, with me being completely unaware that anything was even happening at all.
And that's the language that I learned my job with and that's the language I spoke at the time, and that's the language I unthinkingly fall right back into when I tell people about this stuff, so at least now you've got a somewhat better feel for things in this regards, ok?
After Apollo, Mobile Launcher 2 was next brought back to life as a temporary support, which Wilhoit used during the construction of Pad A. Here it is spanning the Flame Trench at Pad A, before anything major had been done with it above and beyond removing the swing-arms, next to the still-being-constructed FSS (notice no finished top, no Hammerhead Crane, and also notice the still-visible, as-yet-unpainted, scars where the perimeter main-framing columns have been welded back together to assemble it). And you can see it again here beneath, behind, and towering high above the bones of a nascent RSS that was already well on the way to assuming its final shape, standing next to a structurally finished FSS, complete with Hammerhead Crane.
Here is an image of Wilhoit removing the Hammerhead Crane from the top of ML-3 (which became the FSS on Pad A). You're standing over 400 feet above the surrounding countryside. Union Ironworkers from Local 808. Doing things that normal humans will never be able to do. Stepping out, over, and across certain death, as a completely routine part of their day-to-day activities, in deeply-frightening places that normal humans will never be able to go.
I suffer strongly from prosopagnosia, face-blindness, and in addition to that, I have very limited ability for the recall of names, too. But my disabilities are not quite complete, and as I look at this image, the Union Ironworker on the far left, stepping toward the in-progress lift, appears to be "Sag Rod" (In all the years I was out on the Pad, I never learned his real name, and Sag Rod was invariably the name he was referred to and responded to out on the Pad.), and on the far right, Elmo McBee. Sag Rod (occasionally referred to simply as "Sag" was the Union Steward for Local 808, and Elmo was one of the foremen, overseeing work performed by the "gang" of Ironworkers, and the position of these two individuals in this image, standing back, with a clear view of the gang as the work proceeds, to better be able to stay fully-appraised of a very dynamic moment in the work, reinforces my less-than-fully-confident assessment of their identities. Both Sag and Elmo were crackerjack ironworkers (they would never have occupied their positions in the hierarchy had they not been among the best), and they both were Good People, and they, along with numerous other ironworkers who worked for Wilhoit, took me under their wing, when I was a brand-new arrival at Pad B, with zero skill, background, or even simple awareness for any of what they were doing out at the Pad.
Their gruff but extraordinarily considerate concerns for not only my safety (and by extension, the safety of those around me), but my understanding of things, and my interest in things, went far enough above and beyond, as to leave me unable to even describe it properly. They were unstinting with their time and efforts to the maximum degree that the difficult and dangerous work they were doing would permit, furthering me down the path that I had somehow, without any advance warning of any kind, found myself on, sharing bits of their world with them.
My debt to these people still stands, unpayable, all these years later, and one of the reasons I'm writing these essays is an attempt to somehow pay it bit of it forward, in similar fashion to whatever it might have been that they, in their own turn, were paying forward with me.
The FSS on Pad A was built first (of course) and it was cut from Mobile Launcher 3, and reassembled on the Pad, and in our black and white photograph, both "LUT's" are sitting there, side by side, and both "LUT's" look very similar, but if you look at the Elevator Machinery Room sitting one level beneath their tops, you can see that the tower which is the FSS on Pad A is rotated ninety degrees counterclockwise compared to the tower which is on top of Mobile Launcher 2 sitting there holding up the growing RSS.
And over on B Pad, once A was done, and once Mobile Launcher 2 had been cut apart, that tower, which also became an FSS, would also be rotated ninety degrees counterclockwise, and it's funny how you can look right at things and still miss significant differences between them, and once in a while, this can cause trouble, later on, in the form of misapprehensions of things which you know for a fact to be true, but which are actually no such thing at all.
So you'd get to the top of the FSS using the elevator, except that the elevator didn't go all the way to the top of the FSS.
And you'd wind up taking the elevator for as far as it would go, and it would take you two levels below the top of the FSS because the Elevator Machinery Room (where all the lifting gear is) needed to be placed above the actual elevator hoistway, but the Elevator Machinery Room couldn't be placed on the roof of the FSS, because the Hammerhead Crane was up there, so you took the elevator up to the 260'-0" level and then walked around behind the elevator shafts (there were two of them, side-by-side) over on the north side of them, and then took the normal stair up to the 280'-0" level, and from there, you took the stair to the roof (note the incorrect, Pad A, elevations in the title block that slipped through on this wash-off drawing), which was different (and it was located way over there, all the way over at the west perimeter of the FSS, and it went way up above the grating of elevation 280'-0" over there, and the view was pretty damn nice over that way, and then, the last part, where it took a right-angle turn, was really more a ships ladder than it was a proper stair, and the whole effect was one of being up, and out, and over, and very exposed, and you either liked that or you did not like that, but of course I liked it a lot), and to actually get up on top of the FSS, up on the checkerplate that covered the whole place up there, you went through a kind of hatch thing, placed the palms of your hands down on the steel up there (and sometimes on summer afternoons the steel was hot to the touch, and sometimes on winter mornings the steel was cold to the touch, but most of the time you didn't notice things like that) and then you climbed on up and out through the hatchway, onto the expanse of checkerplate with the body of the crane sitting over there next to you, and of course you only did that when the Hammerhead Crane was aligned such that it wasn't covering the hatchway, and you also double-only did that when the Hammerhead Crane wasn't going to be getting used, and maybe in the process of getting used, it might also be getting swung around, 'cause if you were up there on top of the FSS when a thing like that happened, it would sweep you right off the roof.
So you gotta kind of watch what you're doing up there, ok?
And there's no handrail up there.
Anywhere.
The crane swinging around in a full circle precluded the installation of any handrail up there.
The crane would interfere with it, and so the safety people had to gulp hard and issue a waiver, and hope nobody went over the side, and that was it, there was nothing else they could do about it.
And the precipice would tend to draw you, and you would allow yourself to be drawn to it.
But there's no handrail, so you gotta watch yourself.
You're 300 feet up, and there's nothing anywhere around you. For miles and miles and miles, there's...
...nothing.
And the air is whispering, or maybe it's dead silent, and the sun is screaming down from out of one of those Glorious Florida Skies that has to be experienced to be understood, and the goddamned edge...
...which is right there...
...is drawing you...
...and you want to look down...
...down over that edge...
...just to see what's down there...
...and
...yeah.
So that was all just about as cool as it gets, and we're not even on the crane yet.
So anyway, you'd be up there, and I can never recall being up there with the Hammerhead Crane ever facing in any direction other than the one you see in the photograph at the top of this page, facing due east, straight out toward the Atlantic Ocean.
Most of the drawings, for whatever reasons, tended to show it pointed north, or sometimes west, or even south, but the everyday reality of things during my entire five-year stretch while we were building the Pad was what you see in the photograph, which is due east. In my very earliest days, when the Primary Framing bones of the RSS were still being put into place, with Wilhoit's steel-erection crane booms swinging back and forth from positions on the Pad Deck just east of the towers, the Hammerhead Crane faced west, as it is seen here in image 003, to keep it out of the way, but that was before I was heading up there very often, for the most part, and my overall experience with it is how you see it in the photograph at the top of this page, with the boom facing east.
And now that I've had a little time to think about it, I've decided I don't like that drawing with the boom facing south and the hatch over there in a weird place that completely fails to match my own experiences with it. It's unnecessarily confusing for what I'm going to be telling you about things up here from now on. So I've moved stuff around a little bit to make it look like the boom's facing east, just like it is in the photograph, and yes I broke a few rules along the way by doing it, but at least this way I've now got a drawing with a crane boom that matches what you're going to be seeing in a lot of the other photographs too, so... ok.
When they went operational, when they started launching Space Shuttles from the Pad, the preferred direction for the Hammerhead Crane became northwest, to get it out of the way, but then, after more time went by, they cut the boom off of the crane and swung the body of the now-boomless crane back around to where I was familiar with it, and then, after that, they completely removed it altogether (the thing was never very useful, truth be told, and despite its hulking appearances, it was surprisingly weak, and completely unsuited for real-world heavy lifting), and for those reasons, when you see pictures of the Pads on the internet, you hardly ever see it with the boom pointed out across the Pad Deck, toward the ocean.
And you'd walk over from the hatchway and take the few steps up on to the platform running along the side of the main body of the crane, which looked for all the world like an old World War II Quonset Hut without the corrugations, and from there you take a step down on the far side and go out on the boom if you wanted to (There will be much more about being out on the boom, a little while later on, ok?).
The drawing doesn't properly show this step, so I'm going to add it in. And even though it's facing away from us, and not directly visible in the photograph at the top of the page, its existence can be inferred by giving the handrail in that area a close look,
And if you didn't want to go out on the boom, you could take a different set of steps and go up and then down and inside the body of the crane where you would fine the actual machinery that controlled and effected the lifts which were the crane's job to do (and it was Black Grease City in there, so please do not touch or bump into anything or otherwise you're going to have a nice cleanup job to do, or maybe just go ahead and buy new clothing to replace the stuff you ruined and be done with it), or you could even go up and around on some other half-stair half-ladders that took you above the top of the "Quonset hut," where you could then grab hold of the ladder which led straight up, into the Lightning Mast, which contained its own ladder, heading another 80 feet, also straight up, and there's no end of cool stuff going on up there, but once again, not now, ok? We'll get to it later. I promise.
And you look at that drawing again, and you see the dimension given is 95'-1" from the centerline of the "SSAT" to the center of the Equalizer Sheave out at the end of the crane boom, and since we already know the FSS is forty feet square, we can knock twenty feet off of that dimension, and then, since we're probably not going to be on the inside edge of the catwalk out on the tip of the boom, we can add a couple of feet back on, and in the end, we find that we're just a little less than eighty feet out past the edge of the FSS when we're out on the end of the boom, suspended above an open freefall of 300 feet all the way to the bottom of the Flame Trench way down there beneath you, and yeah, when it's you that's out there, all of a sudden, eighty feet becomes a quite-large number, and...
...but not right now, ok?
We'll be headed out to the end of the boom, out on the end of that catwalk, soon enough.
But not right this minute, ok?
Return to 16streets.comACRONYMS LOOK-UP PAGEContact Email Link |