The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B

A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.

Page 41: North Pad Deck - Lingering Shadows of Apollo.

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Very well then, following the brutally-technical labyrinth I wriggled and crawled and walked and shinnied and climbed you through on Page 37, I took you up on top of the tower for a breather to enjoy the spectacular scenery looking downcoast toward Pad A, complete with a Space Shuttle sitting on top of it, and in so doing, awarded you some time off for good behavior with a well-earned respite from the technical end of things via the no-stress diversions of Page 38, Page 39, and Page 40, but now it's time to re-enter the world of actually building a launch pad, and we're going to be returning to that, and this time we're not just going to be jumping into the deep end of the pool, we're going to be swimming down to the bottom and grabbing heavy lead weights and then swimming back up to the surface with them, and we need to be in pretty good shape so we don't drown while we're doing it, so get ready for it, ok?

We're over on the east side of the Flame Trench, and we're looking across a panorama that extends from nearly due west to nearly due north, and this panorama encompasses a lot of things you've already seen from down at Pad-Deck-level and from up on the towers above, and also encompasses a lot of things you haven't seen, from anywhere, and whether you've seen it before or not, I haven't really given it the detailed treatment it requires for proper understanding, and that was because I knew this image was coming, and now that we're here, the time has come to stand with our boots on the concrete of the Pad Deck with a strong winter wind cutting though our clothing, noticeably colder than people expect for a place like Florida, right next to, and right across from, one of the most bewildering arrays of differing equipment, used for an equally bewildering array of differing purposes, and, with as detailed a photograph as I've got, work our way through it all, element by element, and in so doing gain still more insight, still more of a workman's understanding, and still more familiarity with our former Apollo Saturn V and Saturn 1B, and in-the-now nascent Space Shuttle Launch Pad.

And I guess, as a starting point, before we swim down to the bottom of the deep end and grab our first lead weight, we're going to need some kind of overview. We're going to need some kind of way to look at this stuff, technically, in a way that's not over-detailed and not overwhelming, at least not at first, so that we can kind of dip our toes in the water, just a little bit, to begin with, to maybe give ourselves a fighting chance to see what's what, and where's where, and then maybe start getting to the bottom of things for real, after that.

Unfortunately, of the three major Space Shuttle drawing packages in my possession, 79K04400 (Pad A, RSS, FSS, Pad Deck and Flame Trench), 79K10338 (Pad B, FSS, Pad Deck and Flame Trench), 79K14110 (Pad B, RSS), none of them have anything by way of a fully-encompassing vicinity view, or perspective view, or general elevation view which shows all of the things visible in our photograph, all at the same time.

And if that's not bad enough, a fair bit of what's up here is completely unchanged, leftover stuff from the Apollo Program, which means it's not going to properly show up at all on our Space Shuttle drawings, and so now I'm going to be introducing some of the old Apollo stuff in the form of the original 1960's Project Apollo engineering drawings for the Pad, done by the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers using the original A&E firm of Giffels and Rossetti, Inc., from Detroit Michigan, into this already too-large and too-detailed narrative, and some of those drawings are... shall we say... less than friendly, and leave it at that.

Sigh.

So we find ourselves at a disadvantage right from the beginning, and I'm going to do the best I can with it, but you need to know that's it's going to be a little chopped-up, and we're going to be bouncing around from drawing to drawing, more than usual, just trying to gain a generalized sense of what all this stuff is, ok?

And you also need to know that this page, all by itself, is most likely going to wind up book-length, with a very high word-count.

We're about to get into a lot of stuff.

We're about to get into a lot of stuff that's deeply-complex and ramified.

So take a deep breath, here we go.

I'll start off with the best I can do, as a general overview, showing you where you are, where you're looking, and what you can see, but it's missing things, and it's also one of the older Shuttle drawings, and as such, not everything that's shown in the drawing is correct, or even there at all, as we're seeing it in my panorama photograph.

The Apollo-era version of things (viewed from the opposite direction) looks like this, and is significantly different from what's showing in my panorama.

So now we can return to our photograph, and see things labeled with colors to indicate individual elements. Please keep in mind that the outlining and labeling on this photograph is pretty rough, and there's a lot more going on that I did not label (It's already bad enough with all this stuff, right? Why make it worse?), but for the most part, what we're about to get into with this, most of the main players, are marked up, and yes, it's still very confusing, but click on the image to make sure it's rendered at its full 4,000 pixel width, and then go slow, follow the solid and dashed colored lines, and just kind of do the best you can with it, ok?

If things still fail to make sense, do not trouble yourself over it, ok? Maybe it will come, later, when we get into the nitty-gritty of each thing, or maybe it won't, and it's ok either way.

We're just walking around the Pad, right? We're just taking a stroll on a chilly winter day, up on the Pad Deck, out at Launch Complex 39-B, ok? Nothing more than that. Just an easy walkabout through the cold sunshine beneath a cobalt Florida Sky.

We'll start with the easiest thing of all, and that's the FSS. It's giant and it's painted red, and although not much of it is visible in our photograph, it's easy enough to identify over there in the top left margin of our panorama. Also, we've already spent a fair bit of time with the FSS in these essays, and by now we're becoming pretty familiar with it.

Here it is here, in our photograph, all nice and labeled-up for you, just in case a gigantic two-hundred and fifty foot tall steel tower painted bright red might have somehow slipped your mind a little.

Easy as pie.

But now, we're going to go from easy, to.... not as easy.

Which is why we're here in the first place, right? We want to learn about this place, and we want to learn about the whole place, and after all, it is a Launch Pad, and everybody understands that rockets and launch pads are not known for their simplicity or ease-of-understanding, and everybody else who's not up for this stuff has already long-since autoselected themselves right on out of here, so it's just us now, and we can tackle this stuff on our own terms without having to worry about dumbing it down, right?

So ok.

So the Pad/MLP Utilities Interface Platform. Which we're not seeing all of, but we're seeing enough of to warrant delving into it.

And this platform, in and of itself, is about as straightforward and simple as you could ever ask for in a place like this, except that, as usual, there's a little more going on with it than might at first meet the eye.

A fair amount of our trouble with the Pad/MLP Utilities Interface Platform (and much of the rest of what's coming on this page, too) stems from the fact that it was originally Apollo equipment, built back in the 1960's and pretty much unaltered from that time, and in the days of Apollo, things were different up on the pad, not least amongst which is the fact that for Apollo, there was no "FSS", and in fact the "FSS" was sitting up on top of the Mobile Launcher as a "LUT" and everything had to be fed up into the Great Box which was the Mobile Launcher, to get it to..... anywhere at all up there, including the full vertical extent of the LUT, bottom to top.

And so they just ran all the stuff that we're finding in this area, straight up from inside of the Pad itself vertically right on through the concrete and steel of the Pad Deck, straight up into the underside of the ML with a happy little platform to work off of, in the gloom up under there, to let us manually connect and disconnect all the things that needed connecting and disconnecting every time that monstrosity of a Mobile Launcher (with or without the monstrosity of a Saturn V sitting on top of it) was trundled out to the Pad, set down on its Support Pedestals, put to whatever use it was put to, including sending people to the Moon for godsakes, and then jacked back up and returned to the VAB on the back of the Crawler, and tra la la, easy peasy, we're all good to go.

Or at least it was all good to go until they summarily decapitated the ML, cannibalized the LUT, turned it into an FSS, and then bolted it down to the Pad Deck, next to where the transmogrified ML, which had now become an MLP, sat placidly on top of the MLP Mount Mechanisms. The original Apollo construction was significantly modified for Space Shuttle, and some of the modifications are pretty sneaky, and result in alterations to things that might not be apparent, with a casual glance.

As an example of this sort of thing, consider that the FSS was a gigantic steel structure, weighing almost as much as the RSS, coming in at just under 4 million pounds, and it would definitely require additional foundation pile supports beneath it, and those piles went straight down through the pad and deep beneath the surface of the Pad Deck, carrying some seriously-thick, buried and not-so-buried, heavily steel-reinforced concrete caps and struts and pedestals, in the company of a few new tunnels, and... and anything that was preexisting, anything that was already there, and in the way, was going to have to move.

Primary Structure has the right-of-way over everything else, and for that reason, things move when Primary Structure is added to, altered, removed or whatever else might be deemed best for the most efficient construction of whatever it is you're trying to build.

And it's all pretty big stuff, and that too kind of becomes an impediment to understanding, all by itself, and...

How big was the MLP anyway?

And they give you numbers, and they give you facts, and they tell you stuff, but really.....

How big is it?

So I made a composite image for you, to try to give you an idea of how big this box is, and to do that we'll need to put our box someplace where it has something that everybody can relate to for size, to compare it with, so... how 'bout a baseball stadium?

So I slapped it in to a baseball stadium, sloppy as hell (but the scaling of the relative sizes of everything is correct), I'm no Rembrandt, and I'm sure there's a thousand and one things wrong here, but...

You're able, even with all the faults, to at least get some kind of an idea...

Just how big this thing is.

So take me out to the ball game, and bring the MLP along with me when you do.

Like so.

Phew!

Big enough, I guess.

And the Utilities Interface Platform sat up underneath this huge thing, and I didn't add it into my composite image, but if I did it would be somewhere between home plate and third base, almost all the way to third base, a little over toward the pitcher's mound some, and it kind of gets lost up under there. Kind of gets hard to see over there in the gloom underneath the MLP over there.

And, despite the fact that I have accumulated what, at this time, probably amounts to two or three thousand very-large-scale contract drawings of this stuff, I have not been able to locate a single drawing that actually tells you how to build, or modify, or deal with existing, for this platform. I have no dedicated structural rendering of this platform.

Anywhere.

In any one drawing package.

The Utilities Interface Platform, after all, held no actual significance in the larger scheme of the overall design of the Launch Pad. It was a means to an end, and the end consisted in the connection and disconnection of multiple systems, who's only common point of intersection was that they all needed to be run from down inside the pad, vertically through the concrete and steel of the Pad Deck, and then from there, up and into the Mobile Launcher, in more or less the same place. Firex did not care about Ventilation Air. Potable Water did not care about Chilled Water. And so on. They rubbed shoulders together here, and that's fine, but the overarching engineering which governed their full particulars never did, and was never intended to, interact communally with each other above and beyond staying out of each other's way and ensuring enough working space around any individual element to permit the Pad Technicians to do their individual jobs, and for that reason, with the Pad/ML Utilities Interface Platform, we find ourselves having to pick through things, one system at a time, working out the details of any given pipe or duct running up through this thing.

So I'm going to have to do the best I can, indirectly, with what I've got, and we'll be ok, but we're going to have to bounce around some, and I guess our first bounce will be the Pad Deck, to see if we can find anything maybe that this platform attaches to.

And sure enough, when we take a close look at the original Project Apollo structural drawing that shows us the Pad Deck (back then they called it a Pad Apron, but by now we're hip to those kinds of shifts in nomenclature, and we know full-well exactly what we're looking at here), we discover, exactly where our Utility Interface Platform would be located, via the callouts on the drawing. One of which specifies 1"Ø Anchor Bolts, with four inches projection (which is how far up out of the concrete they're embedded within they protrude), and the other four of which specify a spacing between each pair of anchor bolts at all four corners of where the platform goes, as being 5". Further examination (you can really learn a lot when you look close at things) reveals there to only be two anchor bolts at each corner location, and that whole deal, only a total of 8 anchor bolts, only 5" apart per pair, lets us know in no uncertain terms that whatever it is that's being attached to the Pad Deck here is nothing particularly heavy, nothing seeing any kind of high stress loads, and all of this screams, "Yes, this is where the Utilities Interface Platform goes," and it's also telling you how much space it takes up, including it's shape, and...

Guilty as charged, case closed.

Also, in our photograph, we've just entered the dreaded Zone of Structural Elements Overlap, and the Bewilderment Factor promptly takes a huge leap upwards as we find ourselves attempting to precisely locate what's what, faced with multiple overlapping lines and shapes, some of which are part of what we're interested in, and some of which are not, resulting in a confused labyrinth which refuses to give itself away to us with sufficient clarity, so in this particular instance, insofar as figuring out what the deal is, with exactly where this platform goes, we find that we can trust the drawing more than we can trust the photograph, and that's kinda nice to be able to do a thing like that, every once in a while.

So ok, so now that you know where it is, I'm going to crop down on the photograph, and highlight it again, this time in more detail.

And of course, now that we're properly zoomed in on things, we are free to make the horrified discovery that it's a mess down there, and you may rest assured that in this more-detailed image that I've highlighted, I've missed more than just a few things, and the image itself cannot possibly be showing us everything that's down here anyway (some of which was terminated with a blind flange just above the concrete surface of the Pad Deck, and couple all of that with the fact that this is an active construction area with somebody's giant diesel fuel tank (for compressors, generators, trucks, cranes, you-name-it) on a multi-wheel trailer sitting right there, and ladders, and hoses, and stuff in the background, and.....

And now we can look at another one of our drawings to see how some (but not all) of it was reworked, where we can at least see the platform itself, along with the stair you had to walk up to get on top of it, and give that a look.

They've decided to call it, blandly and unhelpfully, a "service" platform (as if there's not another thousand or so "service" platforms located all over the place on both towers, the Pad Deck, and who knows where else), but they've also given us the actual outline of the platform in plan view (barely, but it's there) which means we can now get a proper look at what's coming up though the pad deck into this platform starting underneath it in the Catacombs, if we want to identify it, and then compare it with the original Apollo drawing, which of course is how this stuff was furnished and installed, back on Day One.

This is also a teachable moment insofar as it becomes an opportunity to show you a few of the very numerous and very sneaky differences between Pads A and B, and I've marked up the corresponding Pad A drawings and will be providing you with links to them, so that you can kind of play a little bit of "Spot the Difference" with it, and give yourself a better feel for the hidden difficulties in dealing with a pair of Launch Pads that are identical twins, except that they're not. And the differences are more or less randomly sprinkled around, each of them with its own lost history of what it was that caused the change, so we wind up flying blind with this kind of stuff, feeling our way along, and we hope very much to not make some kind of serious mistake with this stuff, which could very easily cost us a bundle of money, wind up damaging something very expensive, and/or pose a very realistic threat of getting somebody hurt or killed. So go ahead and have a little no-consequence fun with it if you want, or if you want to immerse yourself in my world just a little bit deeper, in an effort to gain a greater understanding of how things work.

As far as letting you know where "The Difference" really is on this stuff? No. You're on your own with it. Just like we were. Godspeed and good luck.

And here's your first "Spot the Difference" drawing (and no, differences in my labeling and highlighting do not count as things we're looking for), showing us the exact same thing we just looked at a couple of paragraphs above (but for Pad A this time), when we were locating ourselves as regards where the Utilities Interface Platform is, and what's actually feeding up into it from inside the Catacombs, below the Pad Deck.

So, despite all the obvious and not-so-obvious pitfalls along the way, we actually can figure out what the hell we're looking at here. In the photograph, the two largest "stovepipe" looking things coming up above the deck of this platform are (left) a 42" diameter Ventilation Air Supply duct for the MLP, and (right) an 18" diameter Dehumidified Air (about which more, later, when we get to the ECS stuff farther down on this page) supply duct, also for the MLP.

The other stuff visible in the photograph is identifiable, but I'm not going to get into that level of detail with things here and now, and I'll leave it as an exercise for the student to use the reference material I've already given you to pick through it all and identify it, so here's a bit more reference material (But it's not a complete detailing of everything that's headed up into the underside of the MLP from here, ok? Never ever assume that just because something fails to show on any given drawing, or drawingS, that it's not there. All that means is that it's not on the drawing(s) you're looking at, and it's your responsibility as a contractor to have gone through the entire engineering drawings and specifications package, and to have found, on your own, every last bit of it.) for you to look at, to help you understand what's going on with this stuff here, ok?

And one of the things you're going to be identifying as you pick through this stuff is "Chilled Water", and if I don't do it right now, I'm probably never going to do it, so we're going to stop right here and address "Chilled Water" both supply and return, and find out what that's for, because on the surface of things... why? Why chilled water?

And it turns out that for institutional-size or industrial-size air conditioning systems, the business of cooling the air in some location or other is a more efficient process when it's done by cooling ambient air with Air Handler Units out at the endpoints of the system, out where the ambient-temperature ventilation air is just about to be pushed into the room it's going to be used in, instead of cooling that air back at some central location and then ducting the already-chilled air for great distances to its endpoints, or installing a whole bunch of individual air conditioners and/or Evaporators all over the place.

So they chill the water at the central location where the Chiller (which is a giant contraption, but nobody cares because it's outdoors and it's not taking up room inside your facility) lives, and then they pipe the chilled water, through insulated pipes, out to where they need it, and then they use that Chilled Water Supply to chill the ambient air in heat exchangers out at the endpoints of the system, and then they continue with the savings by sending the water right back to the centralized chiller again. Once the chilled water has done its job cooling the air in the heat exchangers out at the endpoints of the system, it's still a little coolish, and sending that coolish water in the form of Chilled Water Return back into the central chiller results in even more savings, in the form of reduced energy that's required to pull it all the way down to the temperature it needs to be reduced to to perform its job in the heat exchangers, and this lets them turn it right back around once again in a closed-loop system, and send it right back out there to the endpoint heat exchangers once again, as Chilled Water Supply.

It might sound clumsy and complicated and inefficient (and maybe even a great way to spring a leak, too), but when you actually start building things at industrial size, it turns out that it's much cheaper and easier and more efficient to do it this way, so that's how they do it, and now you know why... CWS and CWR.

Out here, at the Pad, there are additional complications owing to (in addition to many other things) the fact that the MLP is built like a submarine, sealed up drum-tight, and the immediate area around it holds the potential for serious problems with air contamination from no end of exotic and life-threatening things, so instead of just grabbing ambient air from the immediate vicinity with a simple-enough intake fan, and then pushing it through a heat exchanger for interior air conditioning (and continued maintenance of happily-livable oxygen levels, too), they very wisely decided to locate the source of their ambient air way the hell out away from everything else, over near the Pad Perimeter, at what was called the "Remote Air Intake Facility," and from there, it was sucked into the Pad through a quite-long buried concrete tunnel that also doubled as an emergency egress escape route that could be reached by going through a short corridor extending out of the Rubber Room which was buried deep within the Pad, and there's no end of stories about that thing too, but enough already, let us not launch off into yet another ten-thousand word digression right now, ok?

Now, where were we?

Oh yeah, the Utilities Interface Platform.

Viewed from off of the Pad, this photograph shows the Utilities Interface Platform doing its job underneath the ML, which is sitting in the launch position at the Pad carrying the Apollo 8 stack.

You're looking at the Saturn V which sent the crew of Apollo 8 to lunar orbit and back, sitting atop its Mobile Launcher, which itself is sitting atop the "Launcher Umbilical Tower Support Pedestals" (which nomenclature is taken directly from the Apollo as-built drawings in my possession), with the "Arming Tower" (again, nomenclature taken directly from the as-builts, although I will continue to refer to it as the "MSS" or "Mobile Service Structure" which is what I'm used to calling it), carried on the back of the Crawler, up on the Pad Deck (which the Apollo drawings refer to as the "Apron" and which, again, I'm going to continue to refer to it with the usage I'm familiar with as "Pad Deck."), closing in on its own final destination sitting atop its own "Arming Tower Support Pedestals" but it's not quite there just yet.

Here's the same photograph of Apollo 8 highlighted with a label underneath it, and our Utilities Interface Platform is nicely visible, and you can easily see the distinctive pair of big vertical pipes for Dehumidified Air and Vent Air coming up through it to the underside of the ML, and also the stair you'd take to get up on top of it, although the very northernmost end of the platform is obscured by that white semi-trailer that's parked up on the Pad Deck.

And we've already discussed how radically things on the Pad got altered between Apollo and Space Shuttle.

So anyway, what wound up happening is that an awful lot of what once just went straight up into the underside of the Big Steel Box back in the 1960's, is now cut and rerouted sideways over to the FSS, where it can then happily continue on with its vertical runs to wherever it's needed.

And down on the Pad Deck, beneath the Utilities Interface Platform, a LOT of what once sprouted from the concrete, still sprouts from the concrete, but it then takes any number of crooked whoop-de-doo's on its way over to the FSS, and that's what you're seeing down there.

And of course some of it was terminated or removed. And maybe a new thing or two was added, and...

And us structural people never liked this stuff anyway, because as far as we were concerned, it was a bunch of weeds growing on our structure, and if we'd had our way about it, we'd have gotten out the weed-whacker and cleaned the place up nice and good.

But they didn't allow us to do such things, and we just grumbled along with it, and tried not to knock our heads on any of it whenever we were forced into close-quarters with it as part of whatever we might have been doing at the time.

So the poor Utilities Interface Platform never got any respect from me, or anybody else in the structural world, and that makes me an idiot, because, as with the 9099 Building, here I am all these years later, trying to explain this stuff, and I'm too stupid to do it.

But I'm working on it. I'm trying. And who knows? Maybe we'll get there, despite my shortcomings and inadequacies.

So that's what's going on with this thing, ok?

Alright then, what's next?

And we seem to have started off working from left to right, in our panorama, so I guess we'll let that be the path of our walkabout.

And on this walkabout, the next significant object would be the West MLP Access Stair Tower, so let's go with that, ok?

More Apollo equipment.

Unaltered.

More stuff that was originally put in place by von Braun and Crew.

More stuff with which, in addition to construction, we also get history, which of course we will need to understand first, before we can understand the construction.

And I immediately find myself learning that, despite the fact that I had lived and breathed with this thing as the West MLP Access Stair Tower (being of course, on the job, much more often called, and lumped in with, "9099 Building" as was everything else over here), or sometimes just the "West Stair Tower", its actual name was "Stair 2."

But don't we already have a "Stair 2"?

Yes indeed, yes we do, already have, Stair number 2.

But that one is over on the RSS. And we've already seen it. And we've seen it from more than one point of view, too.

But the one we're dealing with now was here first, whether the people who designed the RSS were aware of it or not (which I'm quite certain they were, but the naming duplication over on the RSS was deemed acceptable anyway, by whoever or whatever might have been in charge of such things), and with or without an RSS entering into the overall picture of the Pad, this Stair 2 retained its name, unchanged.

Which stands as yet another example of the hidden trickiness of this stuff, in the form of how things get named, and how things remain named, sometimes with respect to one another, but sometimes not.

And you just have to be aware, at all times, and can never take anything for granted, no matter how mundane or trivial it might appear at first glance.

There are pitfalls. There are hidden pitfalls.

All over the place.

So ok, so Stair 2.

Which, being original Apollo equipment, and which also, is kind of lumped in with all of that messy "9099 Building" stuff, and which shows up repeatedly on the Apollo as-builts, and which, whether you know it or not, you've already seen on the drawing that gave us the callout and locations for the Utilities Interface Platform anchor bolts...

We may as well familiarize ourselves with those Apollo drawings which show this stuff, and which also kind of lump it all together, too.

We'll start off with the Pad Deck (which the Apollo drawings will be calling the "Apron" as we already know).

And here's the whole "lump" including the ECS Tower, the "9099 Building" (which, together, on the drawing, are called out as "ECS and I/C Pad Tower", Stair 2, and Elevator 2 (called out as "Stair & Elevator #2"). All cheek-by-jowl. All, visually anyway, one thing. One big contrapted steel... thing. And I've dropped in the location of the Apollo-era as-yet-unimagined FSS in an effort to help you visualize this whole area on these Apollo drawings, in terms of the Space Shuttle drawings and photographs you've already seen, and are already familiar with to one degree or another. North is to the left, on this drawing, ok? And just for laughs, here's the Pad A version of the same drawing, so you can play "Spot the Difference" some more, finding the disagreements between the two pads.

Here you're seeing just the "9099" part of things with Stair 2 highlighted, zoomed in, in a series of plan views, from the Pad Deck at elevation 53'-0", and going up from there. And on this drawing, north is no longer to the left, but is now toward the top of the drawing, so be sure and keep that in mind, too, if you're looking at this drawing immediately after looking at the drawing I just referred to, in the paragraph above this one.

Stair 2 lives inside of a robust tube-steel structural framework that also serves to strengthen and stiffen the elevator framing right next to it (we'll get to that too, so hang on, ok?), and the stair is easily-enough identifiable as a stair tower on the panorama photograph in its upper reaches, but then, as you descend toward the Pad Deck, it begins to become confusingly engaged with the tangled dark silhouettes of the ECS Support Steel and Catwalk framing behind it, and then, dropping lower, first the MLP Mount Mechanism in front of it (the top of which looks confusingly similar to the Vent and Dehumidified Air "Stovepipes" on top of the Utilities Interface Platform just to the left of it), and then our Utilities Interface Platform which is also in front of it, and then down at the very bottom, the big diesel tank and other construction gear which is more or less sitting on the Pad Deck, and the overall effect is to make the precise location of all the elements of just the stair itself (stair stringers, handrails, landings, structural framing) impossible to properly, completely, and accurately sort out from all the rest of that stuff.

It's a complete mess over here, and none of this stuff gives itself away easily or willingly, so try not to be too hard on yourself if you're having trouble (or are even completely unable) making useful sense out of it, visually.

Here's Stair 2 here, on the Apollo concrete foundations drawing, which lets us see that things did not stop at the surface of the concrete, but kept right on going, down into the body of the Pad itself.

And here it is again, just the main structural framing for it (quite sturdy stuff), in elevation views showing the whole "9099" framework, looking east (from "behind" it) and looking west (the view we're getting in the panorama at the top of this page).

And just as a wee little hint of foreshadowing, I'm going to let you know there are problems with this drawing (and other drawings which show us this area too), but I'm not going to go any further with it than that, right now, but later on...

...oh yes, much much further down the rabbit hole shall we go.

Stair 2 is yet another emergency egress stair, and its original Apollo-era primary job was to provide an escape route off of the Mobile Launcher over on the west side in time of need, which I do not know if it ever got used for, even once. When we were converting the pad for Space Shuttle, there was never an MLP parked over the Flame Trench, and nobody ever used this stair. For anything. Including me. It didn't really "go" anywhere. It afforded no spectacular views of... anything, really. It was ugly. And it lived in an ugly neighborhood. Over in that whole blighted "9099" mess. And so it languished over there, alone, unloved, uncared-for. While the world spun madly along without it.

And right next to Stair 2, butt up against it, to the point of sharing one whole structural side with it, the elevator that I never even suspected as existing, the whole time I was out there. Five full years. Never suspicioned the least of it.

Elevator Number 2.

And that "Number 2" being in italics is because there was an Elevator Number 1, which I only just now, as part of researching this stuff, learned the existence of.

We'll get to more about that, later on here.

For now, we still have Elevator Number 2 to deal with.

"Don't look like any kind of elevator I've ever seen."

Which might help to explain why I never even suspected that it even was an elevator in the first place.

Old-timey-looking kind of deal.

And it was a hydraulic elevator, which means there was no "elevator machinery room" up on top of it.

No hoists. No wire rope. No metal siding to enclose it all and keep the weather off of it. None of the lifting gear that people just sort of automatically assume comes with an elevator. Any elevator.

Hydraulic elevators work like some of the lifts you see in auto mechanic shops, with a sort of tube or column that comes up out of the ground underneath them, and pushes them, from below, instead of having wire ropes that are pulling them, from above.

And the elevator "shaft" is no such thing, either.

No walls. No enclosure. Just some steel framing "covered over" with expanded metal screen, or some other kind of wide-open steel fabric or "chain link fencing" kind of stuff.

Which the breeze wafts right on through, unimpeded, and which is also very much "see-through."

And the elevator cab itself completes the picture by also not being solidly enclosed. More of the same kind of open construction that you got with the elevator shaft.

Even the doors are see-through. And it had a pair of these "scissor gate" doors, one on the front and one on the back, which of course could be opened, from inside the elevator cab, in either direction, on either side, "front" or "back."

Along its front side, which you're seeing in the photograph and which faced east toward the MLP, three levels of counterweighted flip-up platforms which always stayed locked in the "up" position, further camouflaged it. Elevators and flip-ups just don't really seem to go together. Or at least in my mind they don't go together.

So... if you encounter one of these things. And if you were not expecting to be encountering an elevator, and then you find yourself encountering it buried deeply within a large surrounding snarl of disjointed-looking steel members and mystery-equipment which is all going every whichaway all over the place without apparent rhyme or reason...

...well then... perhaps we'll forgive you for failing to realize you're even dealing with an elevator in the first place.

But this elevator, Elevator 2, is no slouch. No lightweight item. No trivial thing.

This elevator is the real deal.

This elevator is how the astronauts of Apollo, traveled between the Pad Deck and the Mobile Launcher, and thence to their Apollo Capsule and back. Or at least when they weren't coming back, the long way around, by way of the Moon.

And right here, we need to re-examine the depth of my own stupidity in failing to even realize there was an elevator here in the first place.

I mean, come on, how did you expect people to get inside of the rockets they were riding, hmm?

Did you think they just sort of float on up there?

And in my own woeful defense of the profundity of my own astounding lack of awareness with this stuff, I can offer only the fact that, when I first showed up out here, there was already a great big FSS sitting right there, and for my own (very limited) understanding at the time, access to the MLP would be gained by taking one of the two FSS elevators, from the Pad Deck, up to level 80'-0" or 100'-0", exiting the elevator (but not the elevator over in that mess of 9099 Building crap) and walking over to the east side of the FSS, and then stepping lightly across the flip-down platforms that lived over there, either into (through a door in the side), or onto (out on to the top deckplates) the MLP.

When the time came for me to actually start walking around on the MLP, that was invariably done over at Pad A, and by that time Pad A had become active, and if there was an MLP spanning the Flame Trench over there, it was because there was a Space Shuttle sitting on top of it, and we almost always walked down RSS Stair 1 or Stair 2 from the undercarriage of the main body of the RSS to get there.

And it was sheer repetition. Sheer unthinking habit. And it completely blinded me to the fact that there was no FSS back when Apollo was flying, and what the implications of a thing like that might really be.

Which makes me guilty as charged. Guilty of being stupider than a box of rocks.

I throw myself upon the mercy of the court.

And I use my own unbelievable stupidity as a cautionary tale.

Just because you're whip-smart here...

...does not mean you're not box-of-rocks-stupid...

...there.

Back-checking. Cross-checking. Fact-checking. Self-checking.

There can never be enough of it.

Because if there was, we wouldn't be constantly finding more examples.

Examples of our own fallibility. Our own feet of clay. Our own stunning lacks and wants.

And the same goes for all the world around us, and in particular, it goes double, no... triple, for all things and all people which we believe to be possessed of The Truth.

So mind your "authority figures" ok?

Especially the ones you believe in.

You already know the "other guys" are beyond redemption.

But what about your guys?

Trust them not, for they are deeply fallible and venal, too.

And about those flip-up platforms on Elevator 2...

They do not look like the sorts of flip-ups we're used to dealing with.

Even the flip-ups over here are somehow... uglier, too.

They're definitely not as "neat" or "clean" looking. They have a sort of messy look about them and I can only presume that they look that way because they're all counterweighted, in addition to being covered with solid sheets of checkerplate instead of the steel-bar grating we've gotten used to seeing all over the RSS.

There are three of them associated with Elevator 2, at elevation 75'-11", 89'-7", and 99'-6", and in our photograph at the top of this page, you can see them in their "retracted" positions, locked in place, pivoted back, with their bottom sides showing.

All three of them are a little different, and here they are on the structural drawing.

And here they are (and some others, too), in detail view, showing not only how the counterweights were sort of underslung, behind the hinge, but that they had pretty nice bearings in them, too.

Over on the RSS, whether or not it was because there was almost never enough room beneath flip-up platforms to permit the additional space envelope taken up by the counterweights, or that there was almost always enough room up above them combined with sturdy structural support, for whatever lifting gear might be needed to lift the heavy platforms up and down, or perhaps something else, the whole design philosophy of flip-up platforming changed, and counterweights were dispensed with and not used. But out here, in the "9099" area, counterweighted flip-platforms are the norm. I do not know why things changed, but the change is clearly visible with these things, and the only place I'm aware of which continued with the use of counterweighted flip-ups is on the side of the FSS that faced the MLP at elevations 80'-0" and 100'-0" (which we did a little work on, and is another one of those places where the ironworkers let me "play" with an arc-welder) and whether or not it had something to do with providing access to the MLP is another question I cannot answer.

These flip-ups provided the exact same access for the Space Shuttle's MLP as they did for Apollo's ML, two levels inside, and one level on top.

And with the counterweights, they required much less effort and caution to raise and lower into position. No winches, no hoists, no hooks, no gear.

Elevator 2 was the "ground" end of a larger system which reached all the way to the hatch on the Apollo Command Module, sitting on top of the Saturn V which propelled it to the Moon and back.

This elevator provided access to the Mobile Launcher Deck, but the preferred access into the elevators on the LUT was via interior Deck 'A' on the Mobile Launcher, which provided enclosed, weather-protected access to those LUT Elevators (which sat one-behind-the-other facing the Saturn V, as opposed to how the elevators in the FSS sat side-by-side facing the RSS), and while we're here, I never could figure out how they came up with the daffy naming system they had for the different levels of the Mobile Launcher, which goes (from the top down, which is already a little "off" to my way of thinking) Deck '0' (that's a zero, not the letter 'O') which is the top deckplates of the ML, sitting beneath the sky, down one level to Deck 'A' which is the mid-level deck, and then down one more level to Deck 'B' which is the bottom level, the lowest steel plates of the "box" itself.

So. From the top down: "Deck 0, Deck A, Deck B."

"Uh... ok. Ok... sure. Sure thing. Whatever you say."

And so did they say.

Here's a drawing of all this stuff in its original Apollo configuration that shows you how the whole thing fits together, as a sort of inset over on the right side of the drawing, with everything set up in "Run for your lives!" emergency egress configuration.

And of course by now, you're probably saying to yourself, "Ye gods, this is waaay more about Elevator 2 than I ever wanted to know, surely we're done with it, right?"

Nope.

Not yet.

Not quite.

There's the small matter of the "Camera Platform" that lived on top of it.

Which Camera Platform, in days of yore, when Apollo was still flying, came complete with a jib crane up on top of it, too.

And really, this Camera Platform is actually a part of Stair 2, but c'mon man, give it a rest. Let it go. There's no need to get completely psychotic about pointlessly-rigid adherence to nit-picky stuff like that, but, in truth, this platform could not be gotten to via Elevator 2, and instead was reached from the upper landing on Stair 2, by climbing a ladder which took you to the ¼" steel checkerplate that defines this platform, which just happens to share the envelope of Elevator 2, by sitting directly on top of it, using its structural framework as its own.

But it's not really any part of Elevator 2, no matter what it might look like, ok?

And by the time I showed up, the Jib Crane was already gone, but since we're here, and since we're doing a little history with this stuff, we may as well dig all the way down to the bottom of things, right?

So let us continue to use our old Apollo drawings, and get oriented, and see about our little Camera Platform and (no longer existent) Jib Crane.

And here it is here, on one of the Apollo architectural drawings, A-311A, with a pair of elevation views that show us the whole "9099" schmutz, viewed from the west as a section cut, taken vertically along the western perimeter of the elevator and stair structural framing, looking east (which is the opposite direction we're viewing this stuff from in our panorama photograph at the top of this page), and also viewed from the north as a section cut also taken vertically, right down the centerline of the structural framing that is shared between elevator and stair, to the exclusion of the elevator, looking south, which means that only the stair is visible, and not the elevator. Both views are simple enough to deal with conceptually, now that we're starting to get into this stuff, without being too simple, and are both quite instructive for this whole area.

Among other interesting features that are visible in this drawing, is a pretty good rendering of the concrete elevator machine room immediately south of Stair 2, which housed the hydraulic machinery for Elevator 2. When I was out there, Elevator 2 was no longer used (hell, I didn't even know it was there, and without an MLP sitting over the Flame Trench, it had nowhere to even go, anyway, and I'm pretty sure by then that they'd already removed the actual elevator cab itself, and who knows, maybe even all the hydraulic equipment from the machine room, too) and they left the hoistway framework for it in place because it was less disruptive, cheaper, and easier to do so, and also because they still needed Stair 2 for emergency egress purposes, and the south face of Elevator 2 was an integral part of Stair 2, providing it with the structural integrity that it required, and so they just sort of abandoned the Elevator 2 part of things, in-place.

Here's the Jib Crane that sat over near the north side of the Camera Platform, itself, in detail view.

And here it is again, in plan view, showing the 4'-4" hook radius it had. I do not know what they originally used it for, but since there's no permanent "camera" or camera mount showing anywhere up on top of the Camera Platform, I can only presume the Jib was for lifting that stuff up here, and then taking it back down again, later on. This area is sitting up above everything else around it in a very exposed position, quite close to a departing Saturn V, and I would imagine they did not want to expose this particular photography gear to any of that, but in truth, I do not actually know.

Here's another elevation-view section cut of this area, on Apollo drawing A-313, and this one's cut along the structure on the north side of the elevator, looking south, giving you a pretty good look at the hoistway with the elevator cab inside of it down at the bottom, as well as showing you the platforms that hang off of its east side, which are visible in my panorama photograph. To the right of that section cut, we're getting another elevation-view section cut, which is an external elevation-view look at the east face of that which lives immediately north of the elevator, which is also visible in my panorama, which they're calling the "E.C.S. And I/C Pad Tower." The "I/C Pad Tower" is what we know of as the actual 9099 Building itself, which also includes the ECS (Environmental Control System, in case you've forgotten) part of things which lives directly on top of the 9099 Building.

And if that's not loopy enough for you, well ok, whatta ya say we play a little more "Spot the Difference" and go have a look at this same drawing, except that it's the version for Pad A. Here you go, all nice and marked up with the Elevator 2 Hoistway like the one I showed for Pad B just now. Notice the crazy-quilt pattern of changes on this pair of drawings, which now extends beyond the stuff included in the drawing and has spread, like a some kind of dread disease, to the actual drawing number itself! Dig around in there, looking for stuff. I'm sure you have loads of fun with it. And we're not done with this kind of stuff yet, either. It gets better. Stick around. Wait till you see what's coming.

For now, it's enough to know that from here on over, for everything north of elevator 2, things were significantly modified after they were originally constructed as depicted on our as-builts. We will delve into this first round of Apollo-era modifications a little bit later on, ok?

And of course, following that initial set of Apollo alterations, things were again modified, for the Space Shuttle.

This means our set of old Apollo as-built drawings is showing us a lot of stuff that no longer existed on Pad A by the time they started flying crewed missions with Apollo 8, or on Pad B by the time they started flying crewed missions with Apollo 10, and the changed stuff was then further changed by the time I came wandering along with my camera, taking pictures of things that I had no understanding of at the time.

We're working our way north, farther and farther away from the FSS, in our panorama photograph, and we're just about to lurch off into some really deep weeds.

It's just about to get hairy, so brace yourself for it, ok?

Maybe stop here, put this thing away for a while, and go get yourself a cold one. Or two. And then come back tomorrow some time, ok?

We're going in.

The 9099 Building.

And here it is again, cropped-in on some, taken from the original high-resolution scan (which is a whopping-big 307 megabyte .tif file), exported as a 22 megabyte jpg image, in the hopes that enough of the fine detail in this ogre will come through to permit me to sufficiently explain what, in the name of all holy hell, it is that we're looking at here, and yeah, that's pretty blurry because I overscanned the original photograph taken from the photo album, and yeah, it's tough on your eyes, but yeah, there's one hell of a lot going on here, and we're just going to have to do the best we can with it, ok?

So now...

Where the hell do I even begin with this thing...?

Maybe we'll back up a little, and tell you what it's supposed to do, first (keeping in mind that, as with just about everything else out here, it has no single purpose, and instead gets used in more than one way, for more than one reason, and also keeping in mind... history).

As originally designed and built, the whole Saturn V system consisted in a rocket that was assembled and completely checked-out, inside the VAB (which originally stood for Vertical Assembly Building, and that "Vertical" part tells us they put it together standing upright from the beginning, instead of putting it together laying down, on its side, and then lifting it into an upright position after that), and then, once all the hard work had been done assembling the rocket, it got rolled out to the launch pad on a Mobile Launcher, which had a fairly simple job (in concept, anyway) of merely being a thing that the rocket sat on top of, which could be rolled the requisite distance away from its assembly building to keep from blowing that assembly building to hell, should something catastrophic occur with the partially or fully fueled rocket as part of countdown dress-rehearsals or on launch day.

In those days, "something catastrophic" was an all-too-real possibility, and everyone who worked with this stuff had either seen things go badly wrong, on or very near the ground, with their own eyes (my own parents included), or had seen pictures and movies of this kind of thing, and were therefore, extremely cautious about the whole enterprise, and the larger the rocket, the more catastrophic things would be if they went wrong, and the Saturn V was by far, the largest rocket that the Americans who built and flew it had ever dealt with, which meant that they weren't taking any chances with it, and put the rocket's launch pad far far away from the rocket's assembly building.

So.

Big box, with a tall tower, carried on the back of a specialty vehicle, which they could place their rocket on top of and roll it far far away from where it had been assembled, in order to launch it.

Which means the box and the tower on top of it, had the job of doing final preparations to launch the rocket, but not much else, other than that.

And it kind of looked like this, as it departed its assembly building for the distant launch pad.

And once the whole thing was safely out on the pad, it had to be kept "alive" and the process of keeping it alive involved supplying it with all of the gas, liquid, solid (people are solids, aren't they?) and electrical hookups it might be needing at any step along the way, prior to its departure, at which point it was strictly on its own.

And so the launch pad was furnished with all of the gas, liquid, solid, and electrical hookups, which were required, and which were hooked up, and among all of that bewildering array of different things, for Saturn V, they divided the electrical part of things into two major divisions, which were power, and instrumentation/control.

And as originally designed and built, electrical power was fed into the stack and the box it sat on top of, from one place, and electrical instrumentation/control was fed likewise into the stack and the box it sat on top of, from another place, and that "another place" is our present nemesis, the good old 9099 Building.

The whole electrical end of things can be found in the Electrical Reference Handbook, Launch Equipment Branch, Electrical Support Equipment, LC-39 which is a 296 page document containing all kinds of cool stuff, and I recommend you skim through it for content, because you just might find some really interesting stuff in there and want to dig into it deeper, and this thing has plenty of depth to dig into.

Reading in our Handbook, we find that "9099" turns out to be a very specific subset of a group of "Electrical Reference Designation Numbers" which apply to electrical systems from one end of Launch Complex 39 to the other. From the VAB to the top of the LUT, and all points in between.

In this way, using their system of Electrical Reference Designation Numbers, they were able to keep track of a HUGE number of different electrical systems and components, down to the finest degree of detail that might ever be required.

You have to go almost all the way to the very end of the Handbook to find Figure 6-7, and in Figure 6-7 you're shown a simplified breakdown of the Reference Designation Numbers, including a level-by-level rendering of the Numbers as they apply to electrical systems on the LUT, and down toward the bottom of the list, we see that the block of Reference Designation Numbers running from 9000 to 9099 falls under the heading "Mobile Launcher Term. Dist." and I would presume that "Term. Dist." would mean Terminal Distributors, just like it does for the next three line items below it, one each for LCC (Launch Control Center) VAB (Vertical Assembly Building) PTCR (Pad Terminal Connection Room), and we are now closing in on what, exactly, "9099" is actually referring to when we talk about the 9099 Building.

The section of the handbook which contains Figure 6-7 down at its bottom, gets into some pretty good detail, and here's that whole section for you to give a look, and the information we're interested in, where they tell us what, exactly, "9099" is referring to, can be found at the bottom of this page, and we see that it refers to "PTCR-LUT Instr & Control Interface" which is the place where all of the instrumentation and control wiring (which is everything except power), for everything in and on the Mobile Launcher, including the Saturn V, gets hooked up.

So it's a significant thing.

Without a 9099 Interface, the entire Box, Tower, and Rocket, all goes brain dead and enters a profound coma through which no stimulus or communication can enter or leave, and of course, that's not a good thing, is it?

So ok. So 9099.

Ok.

Got all that?

Good.

Now you can go right ahead and ignore a lot of what you just read, because for Space Shuttle, everything got reconsidered, redesigned, and rebuilt, and a LOT of it was rebuilt significantly different from the way it was originally put together for Apollo.

With a FIXED Service Structure that had an equally-permanent ROTATING Service Structure physically attached to it like a Siamese twin (but they're fraternal twins, so they're different), an awful lot of what at one time for Apollo needed to be fed upwards into the Mobile Launcher through the Power Pedestal and the 9099 Interface, was now being fed upwards, straight up out of the body of the Pad, into the FSS (and we've already met some of this stuff for the electrical end of things), and from there it fed the FSS itself, and out into the swing-arms located on the FSS, and some of it jumped across to the MLP down at the 80' elevation of the FSS, and some of it went across to the RSS, and all the systems over there, and it became possible for them to hardwire all of that stuff directly, straight up out of the guts of the launch pad, and all of a sudden, the requirements for a significant number of things needing interfaces where they could be connected, and then disconnected to and from The Box suddenly disappeared.

But certainly not everything, and among that which continued with a need for a proper connect/disconnect interface to the MLP was electrical instrumentation and control, and it constitutes a sort of nervous system for keeping our rocket, and the box it lives on top of, alive, and alert, right up to the moment of departure.

And with the addition of an FSS on the Pad Deck, coupled with a reduced need for power to be fed directly into The Box, and The Tower that sat on top of it, they determined that they could just completely eliminate the need for a separate structure for one whole side of the electrical end of things, and the structure they eliminated was the Power Pedestal, and whatever power requirements as remained which required interfacing with the box (which is no small thing on its own, with or without a LUT sitting on top of it, and it's very definitely still going to be needing plenty of power, even without the LUT), were moved over to the FSS and dealt with in that manner.

Here's the original Apollo Power Pedestal here, with Apollo 4 sitting on the pad, prior to the first-ever launch of a Saturn V. Before anybody knew if any of this stuff was even going to work or not when they fired it all up for the first time. The Power Pedestal sits over on the west side of the Mobile Launcher (same side as the 9099 Building), right next to its southwest corner as it's sitting on the Pad, and it doesn't look like much with all that gargantuan Apollo hardware next to it, but it was a fairly substantial item in its own right.

Here's the Power Pedestal on the Apollo structural drawing, and you can see that it's four stories tall, and it's made out of the same kind of quite-sturdy tube-steel framing that all of that stuff over by Stair 2 and Elevator 2 is made out of, and perhaps you're noticing a bit of familial resemblance to that stuff too.

And just so you can get a better feel for it, here it is on the electrical drawing, and on this sheet, you can start to see how this thing bears more than just a passing resemblance to our 9099 Building in regards to its upper, business, end, and how that ties across and interfaces with the Mobile Launcher. In certain ways, it's like a sort of miniature 9099 Building on its own, kind of up on stilts, and it has similar interface configurations (but not as many of them), and if you go back and look at it on the big layout drawing of the whole Pad Deck, including where I pasted in the location of where the FSS actually wound up being constructed, you can can clearly see that this thing is sitting directly in the way of where the FSS was going to be sitting, which means that we can completely eliminate it, and very easily substitute a portion of the FSS for it, saving time and money by altering existing things as much as we can, for Space Shuttle. The place on the FSS where MLP Power wound up coming from is just out of view to the left on our photograph at the top of this page, down at elevation 80'-0" near the southeast corner of the FSS, and we're not going to get into it any further at this point, but at least this way you now know what's going on with the MLP Power end of things.

And now that we've very gently dipped our toe into this dark and mysterious water, perhaps at this point we can go back to the 9099 Building itself, and see what's going on with it as it's showing in my photograph at the top of this page.

Let's review.

Here's the 9099 Building once again, more or less by itself.

But this image is still too busy, too messy, and there's still way too much going on in it.

So we're going to close in on it some, but not all the way, ok?

So now we crop in a little more, but not all the way. Not all the way to the exclusion of some of the stuff that surrounds it. In this view, we're still seeing some of Elevator 2 on the left side of the 9099 Building, and some of the LOX Tower on its right side. So it's still a little messy, but since the stuff on either side of it is in fact an integral part of the whole set of steel structures over here, firmly integrated with, and connected to, the 9099 Building to its left, to its right, and on top of it too, we'll leave this "extra" stuff in there for now, ok?

And from here, we can finally hone in on some of the discrete parts of the 9099 Building that we need to find out about if we're ever going to get to the point where we actually understand our photograph of it.

And for our first visit to some of the discreet parts of the 9099 Building, we may as well go right to the heart of the matter, and take a look at the business end of things, and that would be the "Dolly Area" which is where the Dollys that can be rolled outward from their safe enclosure within the blast-protected confines of the 9099 Building are located.

There are four Dollys.

When they are extended, rolled forward, toward the MLP, from their stowed positions, they carry a LOT of electrical cables with them out close to the side of the MLP.

From there, somebody has to use short "patch" cables to manually connect every single one of these numerous cables, a lot of which extend in one form or another, away from the back side of the Dolly, 4 miles all the way back to the Launch Control Center at the VAB (and we'll be seeing those patch-cables pretty soon, ok?), on all four Dollys, to their matching connection points on the MLP.

MLP electrical instrumentation/control. Allofit.

Electrical instrumentation/control for the MLP (The Box) itself, and also for the free-standing Space Shuttle sitting on top of the box, after the RSS has been rotated back and away from it, when it's poised for launch.

And there's a LOT going on with this stuff.

An ASTOUNDING amount, in fact.

The area you just saw labeled on the photograph can be seen highlighted on the original Apollo drawing, and the part that's highlighted on the drawing has in no way been sensibly modified from its original Apollo configuration as you see it in the photograph. For just the Dolly Area, its all the same stuff, ok?

Here it is again on another Apollo drawing, this time in plan view, and I've highlighted the area at elevation 77'-11" which is where the Dollys live, and in this plan view you can see that this thing is a little tricky (and of course the drawing is none-too-comprehensible for people who aren't familiar with this kind of stuff, so I'm going to highlight where the Mobile Launcher will be sitting at this elevation when its parked over the Flame Trench, and add it in so you can get a somewhat better look at how everybody all works together in this area), and there's a piece of the siding-enclosed portion of things over on the north end of the Dolly Area that's not visible in the photograph because it's kind of stepped back, away from the MLP, but the unenclosed narrow finger-like flip-up platform that fronts this stepped-back area (the northernmost flip-up) is, itself, not stepped back, leaving it clearly visible in the photograph, and it's also, in the photograph, the only flip-up that's not in a lowered position, and instead is standing upright. Rowr!

Ok. I think you've got enough now, to allow you to make sense of the Apollo drawing which shows the Dollys in detail, inside of the 9099 Building, extending out toward the MLP/ML/LUT/Whateverthehellthey'recallingit, in "profile" view, from the side. Notice please, that in the part where I've highlighted things with color, our Flip-up Platforms are not shown. Not there. Or at least on this part of this drawing they're not there. But they're there, ok? Rely on it.

I have specifically faded out the "face on" elevation view of the 9099 Building, as well as the three separate plan views of it, in an attempt to avoid as much confusion as I can, at this early state of explaining this thing.

For now, it's far more than enough to just try and absorb this monstrosity bare-bones, without making things any worse than they already are.

But now we need to tiptoe just a bit farther into it, and we'll do that by showing you the drawing you just looked at, but this time with some of the faded-out area restored, in the form of a plan view of the elevation 77'-11" Dolly Area which I've added the flip-ups into (they're not there in the Pad B original) and the enclosed area labeled.

The ML/LUT/MLP (Don't you just love how they were constantly changing the names of stuff all the time?) sat on its Support Pedestals quite close to the 9099 Building, and it had to be that way, in order to minimize the gap between the two very substantial objects, so as the technicians could reach across the gap with the Patch Cables (which are heavy, even when they're short, and every little bit of additional space in between the 9099 Building and the MLP meant that every one of those Patch Cables was that much longer, and that much heavier, and that much more difficult and potentially dangerous to work with) with a reasonable expectation of even being able to get the work done at all.

Now I'm going to show you that same drawing without having anything faded out. Our Pad B version of the drawing has the two elevation views unpleasantly cramped in there side-by-side together, and that was forced on them by the changes that had to be done somewhere along the line, and the differences (we're still playing Spot the Difference, remember?) between the original Pad A (five feet lower than B, mind the elevations, ok?) version of the Drawing and the Pad B Drawing are significant, and we're going to find ourselves veering off into some pretty wild and woolly territory with that end of things, but not now, ok? But in preparation for what's coming, and since we're already here, and since we're already playing Spot the Difference, please notice how what, at Pad A was once the "LUT Instrumentation Interface Pedestal" has become, at Pad B, the "ECS & I/C Pad Tower" down there in the drawing title block. Hmm hmm hmm...

But please, not now, ok? Pretty please?

It gets hairy out there.

We've already got our hands full with what we're dealing with right now, thank you very much.

In addition to the Dollys themselves on the drawing, you're also seeing the cables connected to the MLP, and in the smaller plan view over on the right side of the drawing, the 77'-11" Landing Area, you're seeing the finger-like flip-up platforms that are located on both sides of all four Dollys (making for five flip-ups in total), flipped-up, in their "standing" retracted positions.

The flip-ups were mandatory, because without them, the techs who were hooking up the cables would have nothing to stand on, twenty-five feet above the concrete of the Pad Deck down there below them, and that's not gonna work, so... finger flip-ups, and it's "finger" flip-ups because despite the fact that this whole Launch Pad is beyond gigantic, there so much stuff all crammed in here cheek-by-jowl, that there's hardly any room for any of it! The amount of stuff in here, the amount of wildly-different stuff in here, crammed in like sardines in a can, simply beggars the imagination, and your brain completely fails to register any of that end of things. Until you start digging down into the the particulars of any given item or system, at which point your brain does register, and promptly bails out on you as a result, leaving you stranded, trying to figure this shit out, and...

...it's not easy, ok?

So hang in there, ok? Slow down. Give it time. Give it consideration. It'll come, but it won't come easy.

Zoom in on that drawing, nice and close, and give that whole Dolly mechanism shown in "profile" view up in the top left, the detailed looking-at which it is so eminently worthy of.

Quite the contraption, eh?

And now that we're this deep, why not? Why not go all the way to the bottom?

For a glimpse into the deep gloom down where some of the actual, individual, 9099 Designation Numbers can be found, furtively scurrying to and fro within the dark hidden recesses of their native habitat, a rare and unusual sight that few human eyes have ever beheld.

The cables come up vertically from inside the bowels of the Pad (through a concrete tunnel starting from inside of the Pad Terminal Connection Room, if you must know), into the base of the 9099 Building, feed straight up from there until they reach a pivoting "cable ladder" (that's what it's called on the drawings) which is attached on its front side to the back side of the Dolly part of the Dolly (does that even make any sense?) with a fairly-substantial hinged connecting link, at which point they drape themselves up and over the curved top end of that "cable ladder" and then further drape themselves down and into the back end of the actual little 'cart' part of the Dolly mechanism, and from there, kind of drape back up a little as they extend to the back side of the front face of the Dolly, where all the connectors for the patch-cables are located.

What a mess! Structural people give Electrical people some "looks" a lot of times, and this kind of stuff is one of the reasons why. You can call the installations that the electrical trades construct a lot of different things, but one of the things you can not call them, is elegant.

Nope. Can't do it.

Even when it's all lined up, neat and orderly, dress right dress, it's still a bunch of goddamned snakes that live inside the ugliest cage in the whole zoo.

So anyway, the forward-pivoting movement of the cable ladder, plus all that "drape" in the cables, gives them the extra length they're going to need in order for the Dolly to be rolled 5'-4" forward (it's on the drawing) to where it's now close enough to the side of the MLP to allow the electrical techs to go fetch their Big-Box-O-Cables, take all zillion and one patch-cables out of it, and then... careful now... connect each and every one of them, correctly, to the Dolly, and then again on their other ends, to the MLP.

Phew!

It ain't pretty, but it does at least work, and once it's all nice and put together, it's pretty robust, too.

Here's the result, looking north, from a position south of the southernmost Dolly/Interface, so you can see the whole schmutz.

And here they are here, connecting things to the MLP, just so you can kind of get an idea of what they're dealing with at the 9099 Interface.

But if we give everything the consideration it's due, even here, in The Heart of Darkness, we can understand all of this. In the photograph, we can see that the area where the Dollys (none of which are actually visible in the photograph) are stowed in their retracted positions is quite dark (excepting the lighter shades of all the junky stuff intervening in front of the darkness of course), and that's because the roll-up doors (which are called "Steel Curtains" or "Roll Up Steel Curtains" or even "Rolling Steel Curtains" on some of the Apollo drawings, using a nomenclature that fell out of use many decades ago) are all in their stowed, rolled-up, positions, and therefore are also not visible, and we find ourselves looking into the impenetrable lightless gloom of the interior of the 9099 Building instead.

And what, pray tell, is going on with all of that "junky stuff" in there? What is that stuff, anyway?

And we return to our Apollo drawing and discover...

Asbestos!

Everybody loves asbestos, right?

Right??

Well... maybe not so much, really.

But actually, back when Apollo was flying (or even just still getting built, or actually, even before that), everybody really did love asbestos.

They put it everywhere.

They even put it in cigarettes!!!

ArrrrrgggghhhhhhhiiiiiEEEEEEEEE!

God, I wish I was kidding, but I'm not.

I can just hear them talking to each other over at corporate. Up on the top floor of corporate, I might add.

"Say, whatta ya think we should put some asbestos in our cigarettes?"

"Wow, C.J., that's a great idea."

"Yeah... it is, isn't it? I mean... our tobacco's not really bad enough on its own, right? I mean... we can make it even worse, right? And the fools who smoke the stuff will think we're doing 'em a favor, by putting this great filter stuff, in the filters of their Kent Cigarettes, right? They're so easy to manipulate, right?"

"C.J., you're a genius. We'll get the production and marketing people on it right away. This one's going to be BIG, I can just tell."

And of course, the really frightening part is that these people were already aware of not only what tobacco was really doing, but they were also aware of what asbestos was doing.

And they suppressed every bit of it.

For as long as they humanly could.

And I can hear The Stupids telling each other, "Let's elect a guy who will run the country like a business. What a great idea! Business Guys really know how to get it done! Good thing we're so smart and know who the right people are, huh?"

Pshit.

Ok, where were we?

Oh yeah, out on the launch pad. Trying to figure out "junky stuff" that is somehow associated with asbestos.

This whole interface area, where some serious electrical cabling was getting manually connected and disconnected, outdoors I might add, on a regular and routine basis, constituted more than just a little bit of a potential fire hazard.

"Be careful hooking that cable up there, Lou."

KaPOW!

And of course, working in the other direction, a little protection for all these cables from external things might not be such a bad idea, either.

If seagull was to fly by overhead, and drop a lit cigarette (Seagulls aren't smart, right? You would expect a seagull to be smoking, right?) down onto the cables, that wouldn't do the flammable rubber insulation on those things any good, would it?

And once upon a time, asbestos, in fabric form, was just about the best thing you could get, for fireproofing stuff. Ignoring all that tedious mesothelioma mumbo jumbo, of course.

And so, in between each of the four Dollys, and on top of 'em too, they very sensibly decided to kind of maybe hold down that whole fire-hazard thing, and to do that, they installed Folding Asbestos Curtains.

Observe.

And it turns out that the "junky stuff" we're seeing in the Dolly Area is the scissors-gate frameworks which the Asbestos Curtains were hung upon.

We've already met scissors-gate stuff in the form of the doors on Elevator 2, which the Astronauts used for access to and from their Apollo Mobile Launcher, and quite nearby, over here on the 9099 Building, we get more of the same, except this time it's not a door, but instead is something that can be extended out and back, something that can be folded back when it's not in use, and when we'd like to get it out of the way of our Saturn V's exhaust plume so as we won't have to keep looking for it in the next county over, after every launch, and so they went with this stuff, and there it sits, pretty (or ugly) as you please.

As for the actual Asbestos Curtains themselves, I have no idea. Neatly-folded and placed inside of a purpose-built storage box somewhere in there, most likely. Or maybe they'd already gotten wise to the stuff and had the guys in the hazmat suits take 'em away and get rid of 'em. I do not know. But. Back when I took my photograph, the whole "Asbestos" thing had not quite, not to the point of getting proper action, anyway, kicked fully into gear.

The ironworkers were still using asbestos welding blankets, and the change to fiberglass welding blankets only started up just a very short while later, and I distinctly remember every single one of those people being very pissed off about it, because fiberglass welding blankets were a laughably inadequate replacement for the asbestos ones, for the purposes of containing welding slag, which would, and did go right through them often enough, damaging whatever it landed on, and nobody was happy with that, and it was a Big Deal, and more than just a few ironworkers stealthily squirreled their asbestos welding blankets away in hidden places, and attempted to use them when they could, but those things were a kind of very pale gray, near enough to white, and the fiberglass ones were a kind of orange color, and you could spot the difference from a mile away, and the Contracting Officer wasn't having it anymore, and...

And I'd be willing to bet real money that somewhere, right now, out in the outer wilds of still-rural Bithlo or maybe Chuluota someplace, there still sits, folded or thrown, or some combination thereof, along with a torch kit and a well-worn toolbelt and a few spud wrenches maybe, in an out of the way corner, asbestos welding blankets, and the old man who was the one who originally grabbed 'em, or maybe his son, or maybe his son, is not about to let go of the goddamned things, because for the purpose they were originally intended for, you can't beat 'em, and...

...to this very day.

Times were different back then, that's all.

People didn't look at things the same way, back then.

...and sometimes even now, too.

But in the end, the Safety People had their way, and asbestos fabric of all kinds disappeared almost everywhere from the face of the earth.

...but once upon a time, the stuff was all over the place.

Ok, enough of that.

What else is there?

Plenty. More than plenty. Too much, actually.

We're up here at elevation 77'-11" on the Apollo drawings and we've just gotten the whole Dolly Area sorted out, but there's another flip-up platform over there to the left of our five "finger" flip-up platforms, and we're going to need to know what this thing is for.

But of course that's not going to be troublesome enough by itself, and things immediately get tricky, yet again.

First off, here's the flip-up I'm referring to, and it's not part of Elevator 2, and it's not part of the Dolly Area, and...

...story time.

And in order to understand the history of this thing, which is what causes it to be the way it is, we're going to have to use the Pad A drawings of the Dolly Area. Pad A was started first, and is therefore the origin, and from there, things were carried over to Pad B in whole or in part, ok?

So we need to look at the same Apollo drawings we've already seen, but for Pad A, instead.

And we immediately notice that something's wrong in here...

Something's contradicting itself in the Dolly Area at elevation 72'-11" (A Pad, mind the five foot differential in elevations) on the drawings in here...

This can't be right.

On this electrical drawing (E-304)... in this area...

There is disagreement with this architectural drawing (A-311)... in this area.

Strong disagreement.

And before we go any further with things in here, let's at least get both drawings aligned North Up, as is standard in so many places, and to do that, we'll rotate the electrical drawing to bring it into line with the architectural drawing, and when we do that, it looks like this, and yeah, all the words and numbers are sideways now, but you can handle that, right? And with the layouts in agreement with 'north is up' we stand a much better chance of understanding what's going on, with the layout of the Dolly Area with regards to what is, and what is not, enclosed by the corrugated metal siding that, for all intents and purposes, defines the 9099 Building as a distinct entity.

Quick and dirty, here's the disagreement, shown using the detail from E-304, highlighted/labeled with the disagreeing areas from both drawings.

So ok. So who do we believe? Who's right?

And right now, right here, we've entered that part of my world where a LOT of time and effort was/gets expended, by highly-trained professionals, the top people in their fields, who cannot agree on this stuff when it comes up.

And I'm taking this little detour for the express purpose of showing you the blatant deviousness (consider that one for a minute, please) that can, when the planets align just so, wind up costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars, more even, sometimes a lot more, if you're not on top of this stuff. Every. Single. Minute. Every. Single. Day.

So ok, so we've pretty much seen all that E-304 has to say about things, so what might A-311 have to offer?

Put on your hard-hat deep-water diving suit, we're going down.

Now that you know what E-304 is actually telling you, here's E-304 again, but just that portion of it which shows up on drawing A-311 in the area that we're interested in, so you can get ready to kind of compare apples to apples, instead of... oh, I don't know... apples to spaceships?

And A-311 itself, same area, same orientation.

Blink back and forth, between them. I'm not Rembrandt. The size-scales are slightly different, and 'E' is offset just a little bit left of 'A', and on E-304 the "finger" flip-ups are shown retracted, not extended out toward the MLP, whereas on A-311 they're shown in flipped-down orientation, making 'em nice and long and easier-to-spot, and... yeah, blink back and forth between them again a few more times, just to make sure you can recognize all the players for who they really are, on both drawings, ok?

Got it?

Now here's A-311 one more time, with the more-significant clues to this murder-mystery highlighted, to draw your attention to them.

And finally, here's A-311 yet again, this time with the highlighted clues numbered, so I can walk you through them, and explain what they mean.

The clue numbers jump around on the drawing in a haphazard-looking way, but we're going to take them in numerical order, instead of location order, to make the explanations flow a little better, one after another.

Ok?

Ok.

Clue Number 1: Blue highlighting shows the precise exact area, between the precise exact correct pair of lines that define the interior surface and the exterior surface of the corrugated metal siding around the 9099 Building without having to draw a messy bunch of teeny tiny individual corrugations.

This is where drawing A-311 is telling us to put the damn siding, and it don't give a shit what E-304 might have to say about things to the contrary. "Make it like the drawing shows!" And if I had gotten a single dollar for every time I heard that one in times of drawing conflict and disagreement, I would be a very well-to-do man right now. But they weren't handing out dollars with it, and in fact, they were trying to steal dollars with it, but I digress.

Clue Number 2: "PIPE RAIL" (which is common nomenclature on these Apollo drawings for "handrail") with a little arrow curling over to a slightly-different set of lines from the ones that define the metal siding, being very careful to keep the tip of its arrowhead from touching the outboard line, and instead having it touch the next line in, and that line, and the next one past it, both extend northward all the way until they butt into the little square that defines one of our 6x6 tube-steels that make up the main structural framing for this nightmare, this one being the southwest corner column for the siding-enclosed portion of the 9099 Building, and why in the world would anybody ever put handrail over on the edge of a platform that was already covered in metal siding? And the answer is, "Well, duh, nobody does that. They're putting that handrail over there at the edge of the platform to keep your dumb ass from falling off of it to your death or severe injury because there's no siding over there, no matter what E-304 might have to say to the contrary."

Clue Number 3: "E.C.S. DUCT ABOVE" with another curling arrow that takes us down to an area in a set of three horizontal lines, in between the top two of them, which extend a pretty good ways to the left and to the right, and way over on the left, beyond the far western perimeter of things, you can see (it's poorly-rendered, but you can see it) one of those sort of half-a-yin-yang-symbols that defines a pipe, or a tube, or a duct, and it's pretty clear they're telling us that there's a fairly hefty duct running across this area "above" the generalized elevation of 72'-11" which this detail is showing us, and way over on the far right you can see "℄ E.C.S. D" (I had to cut the drawing off somewhere, and in so doing, I clipped the rest of "UCT" that follows that "D" over at the edge), and that is more than enough to confirm that there's an Environmental Control System duct (nice dehumidified air, maybe filtered, maybe chilled some, could be any of several different things for the improvement of the "environment" wherever it is that this duct is taking it to) here, and A-311, being an architectural drawing, would very definitely be showing us, or pointing us in the direction of, whatever special construction might be required where a thing like this was going straight through some metal siding, except that there's not any metal siding, and that means there's not going to be any reference, direct or implied, to any considerations of having a duct running through it. Also, E-304 isn't showing us anything right here, and that's kind of suspicious, hmm?

Clue Number 4: "76'-11" with a curled arrow taking us to the deckplates on a flip-up platform I've shaded in green, which appears nowhere on E-304, but turns out to be the very flip-up that we started this whole little jaunt out with, in the first place. Which I was careful to flag, on the photograph, as having a hinge-line noticeably above the rest of the platform decking and flip-ups that make up this area. And we've just been told by A-311 that the Pad A elevation of this flip-up is exactly 4 feet above its surroundings which are shown as 72'-11" everywhere else, which matches the photograph perfectly. Once again, this flip-up is nowhere to be seen on E-304 despite it being located, in plan view, mere inches away from the southernmost "finger" flip-up, and for the purposes of what we're doing here, E-304's credibility is fading fast.

Clue Number 5: "M.S." with not one, but two curved arrows taking us to our blue-shaded siding on the south side of the 9099 Building, in a very different location than what's shown on E-304, and that little "M.S." on A-311 is the most damming clue of them all, because it stands for... wait for it... Metal Siding.

So fuhgeddaboudit E-304, it's not gonna happen, but just to put a couple of more nails in the coffin, I give you Clues Number 6 and 7, which are detail callouts numbers 372 and 371 taking us to a different Pad A drawing, A-311B, and on that drawing, we're given a schematicized (having cut out and removed any unnecessary information about repeating components or over-long runs of any single component, and this is common practice, and it's to allow even more information to be packed into an even smaller area on a drawing) plan view of this exact same area, and on this plan view not only are they showing us individual corrugations in the siding, but they're also specifying a nice narrow little 2'-0" wide Door Opening (abbreviated D.O. on the drawing) for Door 384 which is spec'd out on A-311 that gives us access to the inside area where the Dollys live, and this door is located over on the southwest corner of things, instead of the (wholly-fictitious) door that E-304 insists is over on the southeast side of things, giving us access to the same general area, but doing it through some equally-fictitious metal siding which simply is not there.

And by the time they got to Pad B, they had at least been able to incorporate changes to the point where "Plan - Landing Elev. 77'-11" on Pad B drawing E-304 (which by then had been renamed down in the title block, too) no longer showed the siding-enclosed area around the Dollys incorrectly (but have no fear, there's plenty more that they had not managed to pick up and correct by this stage of the game).

And that's how that gets done, and that's how the murderer is brought to justice by diligent, persistent, accurate detective work, and that's also how they got to the goddamned MOON and back with this stuff.

And as a marvelously-beneficial side-effect of all this, those stalwarts among you who have persisted, and have followed this trail to its very end, have also just taken a fairly high-level course in how to read engineering drawings, and there is a certain group of you, for whom this stuff was not only understandable, but it was also fun, like being able to solve a really difficult, and really cool, puzzle, and for all of you girls and boys, you can DO this, and not only can you do this, you will, if you pursue it all the way into proper school and beyond, you will make the astounding discovery that, not only is this stuff fun, but that they also pay very well for it, and what winds up happening is that you clap your hands in glee as you discover that you get paid good money for having FUN!

As the the why of any of foregoing... a full half century and more, has passed since the actual work of creating Apollo was done, and the principals are nowhere to be found... we cannot ask them about it anymore, and we find ourselves alone in a deep gloom, squinting futilely into the thickening mists that surround us, pondering the imponderable.

But we can make a few informed guesses, perhaps.

The whole thing was done at a dead run. The whole thing was done at breakneck speed.

The times were different back then.

Astoundingly, unbelievably, incomprehensibly different.

Two Great Powers were locked in a global embrace, each seeking the undoing of the other, each armed to a point where neither could act, fearing the all-too-real threat of a fire which would rain down from the heavens without warning... that would... obliterate...

...everything...

...and everyone.

And a proxy war was embarked upon, and money, and talent, and energy, and human lives were poured into it in ways that the people living today simply cannot imagine.

And they all worked furiously on this thing.

And to save time, months... weeks... days... hours, it was all done as a "fast track" project, wherein great blocks of the overall endeavor were hewn off and embarked upon in the complete absence of sensible direction and input from any of the other great blocks of the overall endeavor, which had also been hewn off and undertaken as completely independent projects that would, it was hoped, all fit together and all work seamlessly together, ...one day.

Launch Pads were designed... concrete was poured... steel was cut, and welded, and assembled...

Before the finished, complete, as-it-was-actually-built rocket that would fly from it, reached its own final agreed-upon design and was then fabricated.

And during a fast-track project, things change.

They designed unknown and unknowable never-before-imagined things, and they did the best they could, attempting to render the unknowable into cold hard steel, but it's an impossible task, and they knew that, and they proceeded at breakneck pace anyway, because they had no choice, and along the way, they learned things, and the things they learned forced unexpected and further unimagined changes upon them, and they they suffered, and worked, and blazed away at it anyway, knowing that there were going to be...

...places

...and things...

The vessel the astronauts would ride in. The rocket that propelled that vessel. The box the rocket sat atop for assembly and launch. The Pad the box sat on top of on launch day. And everything else... too...

None of it was finish-designed...

And all of it was started anyway...

They had no time...

There was no forgiveness...

...anywhere.

And along the way, initial design decisions were bent, twisted, altered, to reflect the immutable dictates of the real world in which they were embedded...

And each alteration here...

Ineluctably cascaded and forced corresponding alterations... there.

And the 9099 Building is an electrical thing.

And the electrical block containing the 9099 Building which had been hewn off was, at breakneck speed, undertaken... and designed.

And somewhere, at sometime, there were decisions made, which had the result of our Electrical drawing for Pad A, E-304, assuming the form in which we encounter it today, with an area enclosed by metal siding... as-shown.

But elsewhere...

Other decisions were being made...

And at some point... things diverged, and it was determined that an ECS Duct had to be located where we find it on the Architectural drawings... and it further had to have an open space to be run through... and it further had to have a curiously-built flip-up platform at an odd elevation underneath it for servicing, next to where it connected to the Mobile Launcher... and as things raced forward at breakneck speed... the uses for which the incorrect detail on E-304 was originally made had all been discharged and completed without incident and without ever getting around to correcting that detail... and time and money to chase down and rectify the discrepancy after the fact were never found... and here we are today... considering it all.

More than that, we shall never know.

But we can make good use of it all.

We learn that Great Projects (and small ones too) are as much verb as they are noun, and we learn that things change as they go forward, and they leave small bits of their former selves scattered here and there like inscrutable pottery shards at an archaeological dig, and we learn that no one will ever be able to account for it all, and if in the end... the Great Project succeeds, then...

...we can live with it.

And it constitutes part of the hidden prices we pay for things.

And we live with it because, even with the hidden prices included, it still turns out to be cheapest, fastest, easiest, and best to do it that way.

But...

We will continue nonetheless to rage against those who left the loose ends dangling...

Every time it turns out that it is our time, and our money, that is priming the pump by getting spent tying the loose ends back up, in the furtherance of the overall project.

And this is the way it is.

And this is the way it shall ever be.

So let us now go back and consider our "curiously-built" flip-up platform.

Here it is on Pad B architectural drawing A-313A.

And in order to continue staying fully-appraised of things as they go along, here it is on the corresponding Pad A drawing, A-311D (and right in here we can see where the changes were accumulating to the point where they were now forced to start adding and subtracting things to the point where, in order to be able to continue keeping sensible track of everything, the drawing numbers were having to be changed, too), where we can see that except for the drawing number change, the title block change, and the pad elevations differential, it's the same drawing, the same platform, in both versions, for both Pads.

All well and good, but that highlighting on the drawings doesn't really give us enough information, so now that we know what we're looking at, I'll mark it up some more to give it enough clarity to let us then address the what and the why of things, and that way we'll have ourselves an understanding of what's really going on over here with this thing.

But before we do that, let us return to the plan view on our Pad B drawing, A-311, where our flip-up is originally called out, and see if that might offer any useful information, too.

And in fact it does, and it allows us to positively identify that "other" flip-up down there, which is confusingly shown as being directly beneath (it's not, it's just a little bit farther away) our ECS Duct Access Flip-up, which is depicted in elevation view on Detail 385 on Pad B drawing A-313A, and until we managed to properly identify it, that thing was more than just a little bit disorienting.

And now, armed with all of that, we return to the Pad B architectural drawing, A-313A, once again, and this time we're going to be getting to the bottom of things.

And now, at last, we get to see just how jolly this little ECS Duct Access Flip-up Platform really was.

And I can assure you, without ever having met a single one of them, that everybody, and I do mean everybody, absolutely hated this thing.

Without the slightest doubt, something came along and forced them to run that miserable ECS Duct down along the side of the Mobile Launcher, after everything else had all been neatly thought of, organized, and taken care of.

And then, for reasons that we'll never in our lives learn, this thing came along, and there was no escaping it.

ECS air is funny stuff. It doesn't get a lot of respect.

It's just air, after all, right?

And ok, it's pretty nice air, all conditioned up and de-humidified for us, but... air?

Air is everywhere.

Who needs special air?

How bad can things get to cause them to demand special air?

And at this exact moment as I write these words, the Boeing Corporation might be able to tell you who needs special air, and maybe even why they might need it.

Because right now, it's looking very much like their Starliner Space Capsule, which they'd very much like to fly into space successfully, and get paid for it, is going to be languishing down here on the ground in its special hanger out on the Kennedy Space Center, for a good long while yet... because of a lack of special air.

And the August heat in Florida, with humidity levels that are not to be believed until you yourself get smothered by it, appears to have gotten them, and that brutal-beyond-belief humidity seems to have gotten in to the valving on their hypergolic-fueled Reaction Control Thrusters, and in some as-yet unknown way it came into contact with the Nitrogen Tetroxide which lives in there, and the sky-high H2O levels in the air (humidity is made exclusively out of H2O) reacted with the N2O4 as per the dictates of sophomore chemistry, and it got turned into nitrous acid and nitric acid, and that particular witch's brew attacked some of the metal components of the valves...

And here we are, looking at perhaps another half year's worth of delay and expense, or more, getting things sorted out, and the bill for all that could easily reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and...

All for a lack of special air.

And of course the worst part of this whole affair is that everybody already knew all about that kind of stuff, and it was a totally preventable problem, but some goddamned moneyguy asshole somewhere with enough clout to make it stick, deemed it unfit, that the time and expense required to pipe a little special air in there around those valves and prevent such unpleasantness, would be coming out of his budget...

And of course the Boeing Corporation, as an engineering entity, has completely disappeared from the face of the Earth, and has suffered an unholy transformation into some kind of Moneyguy Outfit, and I'm sure that the ghost of William E. Boeing is not happy with any of this...

And goddamned special air!

So back in the early 1960's when it became inescapable that yet another ECS Duct was going to have to be included into the system, and it was going to have to have sufficient capacity as to cause it to be a fairly-substantial 14" Ø duct, and it was going to have to be run down the side of the Mobile Launcher and hooked up to its supply over on the 9099 Building somewhere...

...well then, they all just gritted their teeth and got down to work on the miserable damn thing, and that was that.

And moneyguy was very specifically not invited to the party, and the party was a vastly more enjoyable and successful affair as a direct result of moneyguy's absence.

And once they determined that this thing was going to be added, the immediate next question became: Where?

And that gets pretty tightly constrained right off the bat by where all the nice special ECS air is coming from, and we'll get into that in more detail than you'll want, I'm sure, here in a little bit, but for now, we're constrained to the immediate vicinity of the 9099 Building, so ok, fair enough.

"Can we add it to the existing crowd of ECS Ducts that go up and across to the ML deck in this area?"

"No we can not add it to that crowd, because A.) that crowd has already used up all of its functional working envelope, and B.) we're going in to a somewhat different location a little lower down on the side of the ML that's not going to be up on top of it, deck level, so no we can not put it with all the rest of that stuff that comes pouring off of the ML Deck like a waterfall of limp spaghetti, and don't even think about running it through the goddamned LOX Tower over there, either."

"Ok, fair enough, so it has to go over to the side somewhere, south of the "waterfall", and where can we possibly run something over there? The 9099 Building is in the way, and Elevator 2 is in the way, and Stair 2 has no place to put the damn thing, so... in that little crevice between the 9099 Building and Elevator 2?"

"Yep. That's where you're going to put it."

"Shit."

"Oh well, there's nothing we can do about it, so how about you sit yourself down at your drafting table, pick up your nice pencil, and get to work?"

"Fair enough. The sooner I get finished, the sooner I'll never have to think about this thing anymore for the rest of my life"

So it ran right between the Dolly Area of the 9099 Interface, and Elevator 2, and that would have constituted a serious issue, except for the fact that they were at least able to run it far enough up above the Pad B decking at elevation 77'-11" that it didn't become a head knocker, or an outright barricade, and it wound up centered at elevation 85'-6" which allows for free-moving pedestrian traffic beneath it up there.

And of course all this happened at Pad A first, and was carried over to Pad B, which is what we're looking at in the photograph at the top of this page, remember.

"Ok, that's nice, now how are the Pad Techs supposed to get to the damn thing to insert the 90-degree-bend flexible spool piece when it comes time to hook it all up out there?"

"Oh boy, another folding platform!"

"Oh boy, another folding platform."

And right there, right at that exact spot, right there is where the fun really begins.

And the thing turned out the way the thing turned out, because they had no alternative, and among other considerations for the design, fabrication, and installation of this thing, they had to simultaneously... deal with a cutout on the end of the platform to clear a vertical I-beam stiffener on the ML, and we're gonna need to add a funny-looking L-shaped seat plate on the ML going around that vertical stiffener to support the far end of this thing when it's folded down, and mind the handrail interference with the platform folded back hitting the pair of tube-steel support columns it hangs from, and mind the clearance envelope for both handrail and platform itself with the southernmost Dolly-access "finger" flip-up platform when it gets raised, and mind those hidden gaps in there between tube-steel columns and not only the platform itself but the surrounding area too and be damn good and sure every last one of those gaps is guarded with pipe-rail and/or safety chains, and mind the radius of rotation of the platform end as it comes up in an arc and requires clearance to keep it from hitting the damn duct, and mind the radius of rotation for the handrail on the south side of the platform for the exact same reason which means we're going to have to put a weird step-back bend in the terminal post and upper rail of that handrail and hopefully nobody goes through the resulting gap on the south side of the platform, beneath the duct and over the side, and no you may not put a stair in there to let the techs access this thing in the first place and get themselves the required four feet up above the Pad A decking there at 72'-11" 'cause it'll block access to Elevator 2, and instead you're going to have to weld a flat bar across those vertical tube-steels 2'-0" above the deck, at the midpoint between deck level and platform level, and yes, 2'-0" is a particularly lousy and not-quite-fully-safe dimension for what amounts to a ladder rung, and the hinge-side terminal vertical handrail posts are going to have to be set a little farther away from the west edge of the platform hinge decking area than we'd really like, but when the platform's chained back in its raised position they have to be able to clear that horizontal tube-steel that's holding the whole schmutz together back there, and so we're gonna need still more safety chain in there...

...and the way this (and more... and much more) all turned out is clearly shown on the drawings... but...

Let us consider the actual use of this flip-up. Let us consider the actual day-to-day workings of this thing. In the heat. In the cold. In the wind. In the rain. In any combination of those things you might find yourself schedule-bound, working in.

And in today's exciting episode of "Joe Tech Goes to Work at Pad A," we find Joe in his boss's office, receiving today's work order, and we can hear Joe groaning when he reads, "Install ECS Duct 90-degree connecting spool piece, West Side Mobile Launcher, 9099 Interface Area, folding platform elevation 76'-11."

"Oh no, not that thing again!"

Yes Joe, that thing again.

And Joe trudges out across the Pad Deck in the miserable no-good crap-ass thirty-four-degree freezing-cold blowing-gale spitting-rain February weather with his tools and gets in Elevator 2 and takes it up to the 9099 Interface Level, gets out, considers what's there before him, considers getting right back in the elevator, returning to the Pad Deck, and going home without even bothering to tell anybody that he quit, thinks better of it, and heads over toward that pair of vertical tube-steels that defines the opening which you get to this stupid damn platform through, reaches up and across with his toolbag hoping not to lose it over the side as he does so and sets it down on the heel of the folding platform, and then, cursing that goddamned duct that's everlastingly trying to get him, puts a boot on the "ladder rung" sitting at that devil-chosen two-foot elevation above the deck he's standing on, leans way forward and left into a particularly-awkward posture, puts his hands around those stupid too-wide-to-grip-properly vertical tube-steels, gives himself a little pull and lean, far enough to lean even farther forward and get a few fingertips around that hateful too-far-away-to-reach handrail post ("Jesus, what sadistic monster designed this thing, anyway?") over there on the left side, pulls himself a bit more, and now the boot that had remained on the decking below comes up, and all his weight is on the "ladder rung" now, and with a quick motion secures his grip on that slippery-wet left-side handrail post, trying hard not to let the sharper-than-you-might-imagine flange edge on the duct stub that's crowding him down from above and to the right, get him, and heaves himself up and as far left as that goddamned handrail and safety chain on the left side will let him, and he's banged his right knee on the edge of the platform, again, and now his left sleeve's snagged on the safety chain, again, and the goddamned flange on the duct has gotten him, again, and he shoves himself fully up and forward and out on to the platform and considers removing his rain gear and jacket and shirt and undershirt to see whether or not the goddamned duct flange managed to cut him this time, instead of merely bruising him across and below his right shoulder blade, but it's too cold and it's raining harder now, and if there's blood there's blood and the hell with it, and now we're finally up here and... god DAMN it!

And that's how that works. In the real world.

Let's get the hell out of here, whatta ya say?

I do not like this place.

But where we're going next isn't going to be any walk in the park either, because we're going to be doing more ECS Duct stuff, and the ECS Duct stuff sits directly on top of the 9099 Building, and it was significantly modified from its originally-built Apollo configuration which we're seeing on our Pad A (and Pad B too, but of course, just to dice it up a little, those are different) as-builts, into the configuration we see in most of our reference photographs with a Saturn V in them (which, of course, were almost exclusively all taken over on Pad A), and from there it was altered again, into its Space Shuttle configuration, which is what you're seeing in my Pad B photograph up at the top of this page, and...

Oh boy, here we go again!

To the ECS Platform. Immediately behind which, not visible in the photograph, and extending all the way down to the Pad Deck behind the 9099 Building, and physically grafted on to the 9099 Building in identical fashion as Elevator 2 is grafted on to it, is the ECS Tower, which, as if we haven't already had to deal with enough curve-balls being thrown at us, is shown incorrectly on our original Apollo as-builts.

The ECS "Tower" is mostly empty space, and calling it a "tower" misleads greatly, because, really, it's just a big, very-open, very-empty tube-steel frame that stands away from the back of the 9099 Building, 7'-7¼" behind it, and the top of that frame connects with all the stuff that sits directly on top of the 9099 Building, and from there over, all the way to the MLP, is in no way a different tower than the 9099 Building itself, which sits there underneath it, holding it all up.

And we've already been here before. We've already seen this thing. From VERY close up, in fact.

We first passed this way back on Page 14, and we were so close to the back of the ECS Tower that we couldn't even see it.

Here's the photograph we've already seen, which contains it.

And here are the ECS Ducts themselves, highlighted, on a cropped version of that same photograph, which, again, we've already encountered, back on Page 14, as they existed back in late 1980 or early 1981, when they were still being modified for the Space Shuttle Program.

So wish me luck, and before we delve into what's shown in the photographs, and what's shown in 79K10338, we're going to need, once again, to understand the history of this thing, and to do that, we are once again going to be returning to the Apollo drawings (but, once again, be careful here, because the Apollo as-builts show things differently in the area of the ECS Tower), to see how they built this whole thing in the first place.

In the beginning...

There was a Saturn V, sitting on top of a Mobile Launcher, with a Launch Umbilical Tower standing full-height (and then some), right next to it, and on the LUT there were swing-arms.

And the swing-arms had multiple jobs to do, and this is not the document you want to be reading if you'd like to delve deeper into that subject, so we're going to skim this material, and just let you know that one of the jobs of the swing-arms was to furnish ECS Air to various places on the Saturn V, in similar fashion as where Boeing should have been furnishing ECS Air to various places around the RCS Thruster Valving inside of their woefully moneyguy-snakebit Starliner Space (We hope. Someday? Maybe?) Capsule.

Here's a simplified view of the layout and numbering system for the 9 swing arms, taken from the Apollo 10 (which flew from Pad B) Technical Information Summary. If you decide to read the whole .pdf document, you'll come away from it with a greatly-enhanced understanding of Apollo flight hardware, but it's neither light reading, nor easy reading, so... ok.

And the Environmental Control System air came from down in the ECS Room where it originated (being conditioned for temperature and humidity with a supply of Chilled Water coming off of the Cooling Towers which were located exterior to the Pad itself, over on the west side of things, of course), and I can think of no time better than right now to introduce you to the surprisingly-complex structure inside of the Pad, over on the west side, where all of the ECS and Electrical stuff destined to be routed up to the Pad Deck and both towers came from. This is an electrical drawing for Firex of all weird things, but it has the very best exploded view of this part of the insides of the pad beneath the concrete surface of the Pad Deck west of the Flame Trench, of any drawing I've come across yet, so I'm going to use it even though we're not talking about Firex Water, and most likely never will, because... Structural Guy don't know diddly-squat about Firex Water above and beyond the basic facts that it was everywhere, and its piping was oftentimes painted fire-engine red, and the Sprinklerfitter trade that worked all things Firex was a breed apart, and even the Pipefitters didn't really understand those guys either, and... the whole world of Fire Suppression is quite the fussy and arcane place, and the rules and regulations which hold sway in that world (and your world too, if any of this crap enters it) are manifold, elaborate, and rigid beyond the ken of most mere mortals.

And for the ECS Air to get to the swing-arms on the LUT (and elsewhere on the ML too), it had to be taken in ducts from its origin in the ECS Room, through the ECS Tunnel inside of the Pad, which ran horizontally for a while, and then took a turn straight-up, vertical, to the place over there a little north and west of the 9099 Building, where it came up vertically as a whole grouping of ducts, out of the innards of the Pad, through a steel cover plate, and up into the ECS Tower, which then carried the ducts up to an elevation a little bit below the top of the Mobile Launcher (more on this in a bit), and from there it all bent back over in an eastbound horizontal run, connected with the ducts coming down from above on the LUT via the use of flexible spool-pieces (which we've already learned about), and then manifested itself as one of those things that is as obvious as the nose on your face in every image of the west side of a Saturn V sitting on the Pad that you've ever seen, but which, for some reason, nobody ever asks about, and says, "What's all that stuff?"

Thusly.

And right here is where things really diverged, from their original Apollo configuration, which had a LOT of separate ECS Ducts (10 of them) running up the side of the LUT, getting reconfigured into their modified Space Shuttle form and layout which required a LOT less of them, because, without a LUT sitting on top of the Box, ECS Air no longer wanted to connect with a bunch of stuff coming down off of a (nonexistent) LUT, and instead some of it was now going to be routed into the side of the Box, and some of it was going to be routed completely away from the Box, over to the FSS, and then up from there, and all the no-longer-necessary Apollo ECS Ducts were simply done away with and removed.

And while we're at it here, ECS Ducting is always painted a nice bright white, and stands out visually as a direct result of that, because it carries chilled air, and we do not want the blazing Florida Sun to warm it up along the way, so in addition to insulating the ducts, we also give it the most reflective exterior color we can, and that most reflective color is, by necessity, white. Just so you know, ok?

And after all of that preamble, the main point is that I want to get you properly familiarized and grounded with this ECS stuff, and I also want to show you just how badly our as-builts have it wrong as regards the way Project Apollo things actually turned out, after this particular set of drawings was finalized, and to warn you to be careful when looking at these drawings.

Notice the crossover stair headed south from the upper reaches of the ECS Tower. In the drawing, it's sloping upward over to the uppermost landing on Elevator 2.

Now take a look at our photograph again, and give that stair (which is the one and only means of personnel access to all that stuff that's up there confusingly plastered all over the place to the top of the 9099 Building) another close look, and...

Coming southbound off of the ECS Platform, our little Access Stair is heading higher on the drawing, but on the photograph, it's headed lower. And in the photograph it's going to the second Elevator 2 landing down from the top, at elevation 89'-7", instead of the uppermost landing, at elevation 99'-6", up there just beneath the Camera Platform that defines the very top of Elevator 2.

And then, looking at the photograph even closer, it suddenly becomes obvious that on the as-built drawing, the whole top of the ECS Tower, ducts, stair, platform framing, flip-ups, and all, is shown a little bit higher than it's supposed to be.

Somewhere along the line, at some point where I have yet to get a definitive answer on, sometime after the very first flight of a Saturn V, after Apollo 4 flew from Pad A, the whole top of the ECS Tower got cut and rebuilt at a slightly lower elevation, Access Stair and all, and this happened after the sets of as-builts we're presently using for both Pads had already been printed and signed-off on.

My guess is that in its original configuration/location/elevation, the one shown on all of our Project Apollo as-built drawings, it was just a trifle too high. This original too-high location put the stair, the platform, and all the ducts coming horizontally across toward the ML from the top of the ECS Tower more or less even with the top deckplates of the Box, and this stuff took a direct hit from the exhaust plume generated by those five monster F-1 engines on the Saturn V at liftoff, splashing off horizontally to the side when it hit the deckplates on the Box, tearing the living hell out of everything it encountered which was not built battleship-strong, and ECS Ducts (and maybe the stair and some other stuff, too) are not known for their battleship strength, and they may have found themselves with a bunch of ragged scraps of ducting and the duct supports that had been holding it together up there at the top of the ECS Tower, following the liftoff of Apollo 4, and somebody said, "Ok, that's enough of that, let's move this thing out of the line of direct fire, and let it hide down there just beneath the level of the top of the Box, just a wee little bit, so as we won't have to rebuild all this stuff after every launch, including cleaning the entire system of FOD debris and contamination with who-knows-what, all the way back to the insides of the goddamned ECS Room, followed by an end-to-end test and validation procedure when we're done rebuilding it," and that probably sounded pretty good to the folks who would be needing this thing, in verified working order, for the next launch, and the launches after that, and so they decapitated the ECS Tower and rebuilt it, just a wee bit lower, just out of harm's way.

But every last bit of what you just read is wild-ass guesswork, and can not be trusted in the slightest. So mind the bullshit factor here, ok?

We may never know why they did it, but we certainly know they did it, so let's move on with things on just those grounds alone and leave the baseless speculation out of it from here on, ok?

Let's do some comparison of things, to see what I'm talking about here.

And to understand the comparisons, we need to have something we can look at which will show us the changes that were implemented.

The whole top of the ECS Tower got taken apart and put back together, and the top of the ECS Tower extends from the far back of things, farthest away from the Mobile Launcher, all the way over to where the flip-up platforms on it are in actual contact with the ML, and that's kind of hard to pick up in just one glance.

Fortunately, the far structural framing line, away from the ML, turns out to have a particularly distinctive look to it, and the modifications to the Tower altered that particularly distinctive look in a way that you can spot in an instant, once you're on to it. Additionally, modifications over on that side of things are in plain sight, when viewed in photographs that were taken from the west, looking east toward the pad, so they should be easy enough to see.

So ok. So we have drawings, and we have photographs, and the drawings have dates, and the photographs can also be dated based on launch dates, and it just so happens that NASA has a number of photographs that are looking in the right place, identified with the Apollo mission number for the image that we're being shown. So we wind up with photographs of a specifically identified Saturn V sitting on Pad A, which would have no longer been sitting there, after the launch date.

So ok, so let's do this.

Let's go back to Pad A, using original Apollo photographs, and our original Apollo Pad A drawings (mind the elevations, ok?), and get to the bottom of this, and remember, all of it was carried over, and included into, the Pad B drawings, too.

First the drawing.

And here's Pad A structural drawing S-364 showing us the ECS Tower (but they're calling it a "Pipe Support", which is more than just a little bit odd), and over on the left side of the drawing we're seeing the back of the ECS Tower, and in particular we're seeing four equally-spaced bays, each one the same height, 10'-0", and those bays are braced with very distinctive-looking "chevron" diagonal bracing that ties to a center column, and all of the chevrons are pointing "down" and it should be easy enough to see in any photographs looking toward the Pad from the west.

So.

Here's an image of Apollo 4, first Saturn V to fly, first launch off of the Pad, rolling out, still just a bit short of its final position on top of the Pad. Apollo 4 was rolled out to the Pad on August 26, 1967, and flew on November 9, 1967, so our photograph must therefore fall somewhere between those two dates.

I'll crop in on it, so you can see the back of the ECS Tower a little easier.

Note the Chevron Bracing.

Now let's look at Apollo 8, which rolled to the Pad on October 9, 1968, and was launched on December 28, 1968, which places what we're seeing in the photograph to a time between those two dates.

And the cropped-in view shows us clearly that the ECS Tower was cut apart, a segment of the existing framing was removed, and then it was welded back together, and additional framing was welded to the top of that.

And now that you're aware of the distinctive visual aspect of the chevron bracing along the back of the ECS Tower, we can give our photograph from Page 14 another look, with new and improved eyes, and locate ourselves with the requisite precision to permit full understanding of what we're seeing, and where it's located. I've tried to clean it up some, but it's still very much not the best, but at least now you know exactly where it's located, and those chevrons, which are certainly not displayed to their best advantage from this viewpoint, and the lighting on them is not the best either, can be seen well enough, so we'll do ok, getting by with what we've been given to work with.

I have not found datable images or documentation for the period between the launch of Apollo 4 on Nov. 9, 1967, and the rollout of Apollo 8 on Oct. 9, 1968, which pair of dates include the rollout and launch of Apollo 6, so I am unable to better pin down the period of time in which the modifications to the ECS Tower occurred. Should I come upon additional, datable, information, I will update this section of things to suit. But until then... all we have is all we have.

So that's how that works.

Now that you know the story on that crossover stair, and the rest of the top of the ECS Tower, we can head north from there in our photograph, and it's mostly business as usual on our reworked ECS Tower from here on, with three counterweighted flip-up platforms north of the stair (which will be used to work the spool-pieces for the ducts that go into the side of the MLP over there), and about the only thing of real interest with these guys is their undersides, and we can clearly see that the structural framing underneath them is different on all three.

Why?

And all we're ever going to get for an answer is our outdated Apollo as-built, which shows them in some previous incarnation where the center one had a notch taken out of it, and the northern one had a corner clipped, but as things wound up, all three got fully-covered in deckplate instead of the grating that's shown on the drawing, all three are nice and rectangular, with no differences between them excepting the framework beneath the checkerplate, which of course stayed the same (extra time and money to rework that part of them would have been a complete waste, so they did not bother with it).

But what originally drove the peculiarities of their individual designs? What required they be notched and clipped in the first place?

I do not know.

Perhaps the alterations to the top of the ECS Tower somehow caused these flip-ups to lay down in a place which no longer dictated the notch and the clipped corner?

I do not know that either.

But this time at least, the fact that the as-builts failed to reflect the changes turns out to be in our favor, and without that we could never understand the curious differences in this trio of flip-ups.

Funny how stuff like that works sometimes.

Ok. We need to get out of here. We've been doing "The 9099 Building" too long. Waaay too long.

But there's a couple of small tidbits yet, left to go.

The Blast Shield over the 9099 Interface itself is something we really haven't looked at in detail yet, and it's an interesting-enough object to be worth devoting a little time to.

And of course, since everything else associated with the 9099 Building is a contraption, we can very reasonably expect this thing to be a contraption, too.

And our expectations are accurate ones. Yea and verily, it is... a contraption.

An actual rigamaroo, in fact.

And it laid down like you're seeing in the photograph, and it flipped-up, out of the way, when they needed to move the MLP on or off of its Mount Mechanisms on the Pad Deck, and it had a ridiculous-looking hand-operated winch-and-sling affair to raise it or lower it, and nice locking-stays to keep it put when it was lowered, and it locked firmly in place when it was raised, too, and somebody had to get out there on the "awning" that extended out just a little bit away from the face of the 9099 Building which it was attached to with hinges, to crank the winch handle and work the pins and such-all in the locking stuff, and for our somebody to do that, they had to use a ladder that was kind of stuffed up in there to get down and back up again from the "awning" part of things, and you might notice that there is a short piece of handrail over there on the end of things, which would work perfectly fine with the Blast Shield in it's "Up" position, but when it was in its "Down" position a sizable area over on the ends of things was suddenly unguarded, except for the locking-stay, which does not really constitute a full and complete guard on that opening, and mind your step there Lou, lest you... take a fall, and...

...rigamaroo.

And those of you a little more keen of eye might be wondering why the Blast Shield doesn't seem to cover the entire length of the Dolly Area, and it seems to be leaving things on the north side kind of wide-open and exposed to some pretty rough weather on Launch Day, and yes, that's exactly what you're seeing there, except that they didn't need to extend the Blast Shield any father north than they did, because our trio of flip-ups up above it would do just fine for protecting things from the Launch Day "weather" when they were locked in their Down positions, so the whole system worked...

...but rigamaroo.

Which is what happens, sometimes, when engineers are not given enough adult supervision.

And that concludes our visit to the "9099 Building" for today, and we'll leave you with a look at one of our Union Ironworkers from Local 808, hidden in deep shadow, hunched over on his float, suspended by nothing more than a little bit of rope and plywood above an open drop that may not look all so very far, but is in fact of lethal height, pursuing his trade.

His world is not your world, and he has seen things, and done things, and experienced things that are unimaginable to a normal person engaged in normal day-to-day activities.

He is proud of his work, and he is proud of who he is, and you will never see him, even when he is sitting right there above you in plain sight, and he is not only ok with that, he prefers it that way, and all around him stands the results of his work, and he is more than happy to let the work do the speaking.

Ok, after all that, let's do something simple, how 'bout?

Let's do the "Downspout" for the MLP "Rain Gutters."

As we have seen with our Baseball Stadium composite image, the MLP is a fairly large object. And it's flat on top. And in Florida, it rains like hell, sometimes, even oftentimes.

So when all that water comes torrenting down from the heavens, it's going to be hitting all that surface area on the MLP Deck (just about a half acre, slightly larger, but not by much, but still plenty big enough anyway, right?), and it's going to be accumulating, and it's going to be accumulating rapidly, and it's going to go somewhere, and unless we take command of things here and now, it's probably going to go somewhere we don't want it to, so they put water catchment gutters around the perimeter of the MLP, with downspouts near each corner of the MLP, and that's all well and good, but since the MLP stops twenty some-odd feet above the pad deck, we're going to have to extend our "downspouts" on down into the Pad water drainage system with pipes that run from the lower edge of the MLP, down.

And when you do that, you get an MLP Downspout.

Needless to say, this stuff all comes into play whenever they run any of the Washdown, or Firex water systems, too, although when they run the Sound Suppression Water system, that thing just completely overpowers any kind of puny gutter or downspout you might have in place, and it just goes everywhere, and the poor gutters and downspouts don't stand a chance with it. So they have their uses, but they have their limits, too.

It all gets depicted on original Apollo Program drawing 75M05121 sheet 8, Launcher Umbilical Tower Elevation No. 4, and they give us the official names for everything, and the "Rain Gutter" on the Mobile Launcher is actually the "Deck Gutter", the "Downspout" on the ML is actually the "Downspout" (which is nice, right?), and the "Downspout" sticking up from the surface of the Pad Deck is actually the "Discharge Pipe", so now you can go around and tell everybody the "official" Apollo Program names for all of it, and they will of course regard you as a Wonderful Person for doing so.

And when the MLP is parked on the pad, it looks like this (over on the southwest corner of the MLP, next to Mount Mechanism Number 6).

And since we're talking about the MLP, we may as well also talk about the MLP Mount Mechanisms, and I would suppose that this is a good time to address them, as seen in the cropped version of our photograph at the top of this page. Please note, that in the uncropped version of the photograph at the top of the page, we are seeing portions of an additional pair of Mount Mechanisms, but in the interests of keeping things clear and simple (yeah, right), for now we'll just stick with the cropped version of the photograph that we've been seeing so much of, and which we are by now quite familiar with.

And oh boy, here we go again, because the MLP Mount Mechanisms are a whole world unto themselves.

Their job was simplicity itself: Hold up the Big Box that the Saturn V, and later, the Space Shuttle, was sitting on top of.

That's it, sum and total.

But of course the devil is in the details, and the precise requirements for doing that deviously-deceptive simple-looking job were amazingly different between Saturn V and Space Shuttle, and the Mount Mechanisms were originally designed and constructed to the Saturn V requirements, quite a bit of which no longer applied for the Space Shuttle, but since the Shuttle's requirements turned out to be less, quite a bit less radical than Saturn V, they simply left them as-is, with such minor tweaks as were required for Space Shuttle, and the additional built-in capabilities, which were no longer being used by the Space Shuttle, simply stayed put, right where they were, and it was just fine and dandy all the way around.

And that is quite the mouthful, so what the hell is going on here, anyway?

They're just posts, sitting on the ground, holding something up.

So how hard can it be, anyway?

Turns out it's waaay above your pay grade, and it's waaay above my pay grade, too.

We start with Saturn V, which is what these things were originally built for, and we immediately discover that things are not as they might appear, even when you're looking directly at them.

Ok, they're posts for godsakes. Let's keep this simple, ok?

They're holding some stuff up. What did the stuff weigh?

How much did the original Saturn V box, just the Mobile Launcher, without the rocket on top of it, weigh?

And we use original sources in this thing, as much as I'm able to find and include them in this thing, and for the weight of the Mobile Launcher, let's use one of NASA's own press kits, which was issued on November 2, 1967, shortly before the launch of the first-ever Saturn V on November 9, 1967, which was designated Apollo 4, and which was uncrewed, but which was an "all-up" test of the whole system, and on Page 34, that press kit tells us how much the Mobile Launcher weighs.

Note: We're using a document released before they ever flew the first flight vehicle for the first time. Following release of this document, things changed, as always they must, and the numbers changed too. Not a lot but they changed. And when we revisit this ground later on in these photo-essays, I'm liable to be using different documents, with different numbers, so... file that one away for future reference, ok?

But for now, 12 Million Pounds.

Just the box with the tower on top of it, ok?

Fine.

What's a fully-fueled Saturn V weigh?

And on Page 6, our Apollo 4 press kit tells us how much a fully-fueled Saturn V weighs.

6.2 million pounds.

Just the rocket, ok?

So.

Total weight: 18.2 Million pounds.

And that 18.2 million pounds sat on top of 6 pedestals.

So, give or take, each one needs to be able to handle 3 million pounds of dead weight sitting on top of it.

Which seems simple enough, except that I lied to you about "dead" weight.

It was no such thing.

It was live weight, and it did NOT stay put.

And not only did the weight itself not stay put, did not remain at the same value, it also moved around.

And it's not enough that it moves in the first place, oh no that's not enough at all, it also moves around in several different ways.

And right there is where things get hairy, and where things exceed our pay grades, and where we need to hand this one off to competent people, who's job it is, to know, precisely, what the hell's going on with this thing, and how to account for it such that the pedestals can do their job without tearing themselves to pieces, or, god forbid, tearing the box and the rocket on top of it to pieces.

6 pedestals. Numbered, creatively enough, 1 through 6. From north to south, starting on the east side of the Flame Trench and finishing on the west side of the Flame Trench.

And we immediately notice that they're not all the same, and that some of them have some sort of "outrigger" (those "outriggers" have a proper name, and that name is "Strut," and that's what we learned to call 'em back on Page 18 when we first met them, and all I'm doing now is simply reminding you of that), and one of them, Mount Mechanism Number 2, has a pair of Struts, which makes it a Type I, and in our photograph we get a pretty good look at one of those Struts, on MLP Mount Mechanism Number 5, which only has one Strut, making it a Type II, so...

...now what?

Live load, that's what.

And rather than attempt to explain the complexities of how this stuff works myself, I'm going to step out of the way and let Harry A. Balke take over and give you the straight scoop on it.

Whoa!

Did you get all that?

Pretty radical, eh?

Lotta goddamned shit going on with the Mount Mechanisms, most of which I had never suspected in the slightest, and in particular, the business of the "Extensible Columns" which are there to "minimize the rebound effect" which Harry glancingly mentions in the Introduction to his document, but gives no further attention to, presuming you are qualified to figure this stuff out on your own, and which are not, strictly speaking, part of the Mount Mechanisms at all, but which, when you start considering things...

But we're not qualified, and sometimes we need a little help with it...

So it's Launch Day.

And the fully-fueled Saturn V is bearing down on the box that supports it, and the Mount Mechanisms and the Extensible Columns that are supporting the box, with it's 6.2 million pounds of weight, which, of course (even though I never imagined such a thing until I started researching this stuff), is causing the box to flex downward in its center, noticeably, and twist a little, at each Mount Mechanism support point, as it does so, when it's bearing that weight.

Then, they light the motors.

And of course it takes a few seconds for the motors to ramp up to full power, and at full power they're developing 7.5 million pounds of thrust, which is 1.3 million pounds greater than the weight of the rocket (duh, how else is it going to get pushed into the sky if the upward thrust of the motors does not exceed the downward weight of the rocket?), which means, that just before they release the Holddown Arms, the living Saturn V is attempting, with great force, with 1.3 million pounds of force, to pull the damn box and tower up into the air with it!

And now, the poor box is no longer bearing the weight of the rocket.

And in fact, it's getting yanked on, in the opposite direction, with 1.3 million pounds of force.

And you can bet your ass that it's now flexing, and it's now twisting at it's Mount Mechanism support points, in the opposite direction!

And then BANG, they release the Holddown Arms, and all of a sudden the box and the Mount Mechanisms are no longer getting yanked on with 1.3 million pounds of upward force, and instead are near-instantaneously returned to a state of merely supporting their own weight, because the rocket is GONE, and...

KaPOW!

And of course immediately following that, the box is going to reverberate and oscillate and twitch around thermally, and just sort of twang back and forth for a little while, even as it's getting beat to hell by 7.5 million pounds worth of insanely-hot exhaust plume coming down from above as the rocket departs...

And I had never so much as imagined such a thing...

And then the next time you look at a video of that monster coming up off the Pad...

...you are now able to consider things...

Whoa!

Fucking WHOA!

So then you look at a drawing of one of the Mount Mechanisms (this one's actually a Type V, found inside the VAB, and it corresponds to one of our Type II's, with a single Strut, out on the Pad Deck, and I'm going to use it, because it's the only proper drawing of a whole-one of these things there is, and I want you to see how it all works together with its included spherical bearings (which we learned all about, back on Page 18), with new eyes, and you start to get an idea of just how much was really going on with it.

...and...

Yeah.

Let's look at the business endS of these things once again, ok? You've already been here before, back on Page 18, but now that I've introduced the reasons for the bearings, maybe you'll be able to appreciate the requirements for such devilishly-complex stuff that, to all outward appearances, is simply holding something up, and no more than that, and how hard can it be, anyway?

Here's our Type II Mount Mechanism, with a single Strut, shown on original Apollo drawing 75M05120, sheet 71, nice and simple, nice and easy to understand the outward appearances of things, and this drawing also shows us the different Types, I, II, and III, to be found up on the Pad Deck, their respective identifying numbers and even where all of this stuff lives in relationship to the LUT which it's holding up.

All well and good.

And we'll dip our toe into the shallowest end of the pool first, and let you see a simplified rendering of the innards of the Spherical Bearing down on the bottom of the Strut, as depicted on drawing 79K04400, sheet M-128, and although this rendering is fairly simple, it shows us pretty clearly that the Spherical Bearing was designed and built to handle both compressive loads, and tensile loads, and it's that "Bearing Collar" that prevents things from being pulled apart if and when the Strut sees any tension, and now that you know what that thing is, and what it looks like, bolted on to the bottom end of the Strut down where the Bearing Hemisphere (which is what deals with compression loads) is located, you'll be able to recognize the Bearing Collars wherever else you might be encountering them.

Also, before we move on to what's on the top and bottom of the Mount Mechanism Column, notice how both halves of the Bearing Assembly, the blue half and the aqua half, are threaded into hollow pipes with some quite-heavy Acme Threads, which show as a sort of serrated line in there, separating the hollowness of the pipe, from the Bearing Component which is screwed into it. And this whole set of threads permits the Bearing Components to be rotated, thus moving the Bearing Surfaces in or out along the length of the Strut, which in turn gives exceedingly fine-grained adjustment for the overall dimensions of the Strut, guaranteeing that the goddamned thing will fit, no matter what else might be going on with the rest of the Mount Mechanism and the foundations it's sitting on, elsewhere.

Pretty clever, if you ask me.

Ok. That's your intro, using the bottom end of the Strut to do it.

Next, we'll do the bottom end of the Column, as shown on Apollo Program drawing 75M05120 sheet 73. And yes, the quality of some of these 75M05121 drawings is near-garbage, but it's all I've got, so that means it's all you've got, too.

And there's more bells and whistles, but the overall sense of the thing is the same as with the Strut. Bearing Yoke, interacting with the Bearing Hemisphere and the Bearing Collar, all nice and screwed together and fine-tuned with those heavy Acme Threads, plus the addition of the lugs which tie the Column Centering Jacks to it, which is another fine-adjustment item, this time to lock things in their correct vertical positions, so as the Column won't decide to slowly lean over to the side somehow after it's been properly centered, when the Mobile Launcher isn't sitting on top of it.

And now that you've demonstrated your competence with this stuff down on the bottom of it, let's go up to the top of it, and see how you do up there.

And here's all that on drawing 75M05120 sheet 72, which gives us an elevation view of a Type II (single Strut) plus a plan view of a Type I (two Struts), so as we can build either one of them from this single drawing (engineering drawings do stuff like that a lot, to save on work and drafting-table time, and it can confuse the hell out of you if you're not familiar with it), and you get a really good look (on a really crappy-quality drawing) at the heavy clevis-and-pin connections where the top of the Strut(s) meets the top of the Column. Heavy iron, all the way around, and none of this stuff is going anywhere they do not fully intend it to go, in advance.

So that's how that all works, and that's how they designed and built it back in the early 1960's for Project Apollo, and the humongous Saturn V they used to go take a stroll on the Moon, and then come back home, afterwards.

For the Space Shuttle, none of that just-before-liftoff uplift on the Box was ever any kind of a serious issue, because when they ramped up the SSME's to full power, prior to lighting the SRB's, which came up to full thrust near-instantaneously, the total thrust, the total upward force generated by those SSME's was way less than the total weight of the entire Space Shuttle Stack, and when T minus Zero came, and they lit the solids and the Shuttle departed, there was much less differential in the forces applied to the MLP, which was more than capable of dealing with it on its own, up to and including the contingency issue of an on-Pad abort, with an on-Pad engine shutdown prior to liftoff, which is what drove the requirement for the Extensible Columns for Saturn V, and the MLP needed no further help from any Extensible Columns like the Saturn V did, and so those Extensible Columns had already been removed from where they lived down inside of the Pad before I ever first set foot upon the place. We'll get to the Extensible Columns later on in this thing, ok?

And now we come to the LOX Tower as we continue our walkabout up on the Pad Deck.

Which, after all the fun and excitement we've been having with some of this stuff lately, might seem a bit boring, but it's crucial, it's in the picture, and so we're going to give it a look, ok?

And even if the LOX Tower may or may not be particularly "exciting", Liquid Oxygen (which is what LOX stands for) itself can be VERY exciting, and in the quantities with which it was handled out at the pad...

....uh... yeah.

Big LOX Excitement.

Complete with temperatures that start out at somewhere just a trifle "warmer" than 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, which has the power to promptly freeze any unfortunate part of you that gets properly immersed in the stuff to the point where it will shatter, exactly like a dropped piece of glassware will shatter, if you drop it or hit it (but don't worry, even if your unhappy extremity, or even all of you, doesn't get dropped and shattered, it's still very much gone, and you can forget all about ever making use of it again, or even having it at all, from then on), with the wonderful potential for that initial very-low temperature to rise abruptly into the thousands of degrees (Fahrenheit, Celsius, Kelvin, what difference does it really make once you've gotten yourself into the kilodegrees temperature range, anyway?), complete with detonation shockwaves for flattening anything nearby that somehow doesn't manage to become completely consumed in an extraordinarily-violent exothermic chemical reaction, and the list of things that will enter the chemical reaction and become consumed is quite a bit broader and more extensive than what you're used to thinking about as "flammable" in day-to-day life, and...

Just not when I'm around, ok?

Leave me out of it.

We've been bouncing around a lot, so let's stop, step back, and reorient ourselves with where we are, and where the stuff we're looking at is, up on the Pad Deck.

Like so, but keep in mind that the drawing is showing us the whole shebang, whereas our (cropped) photograph is not, and in the cropped photograph most of the North Piping Bridge is out of frame, right, and everything east of that is also out of frame, so try to remember that, ok?

And perhaps now you might have a somewhat better feel for things as regards the actual visibility of the LOX Tower in our photograph, and it's not well-located for getting a proper look at, and various parts of it are behind (things we've already talked about) the 9099 Building and ECS Platform, the "Rain Gutter", MLP Mount Mechanism 4, as well as the North Piping Bridge, (which we have not yet talked about).

So there's a big snarl of junk sitting in front of different parts of the LOX Tower, in different places, over there, and the LOX Tower itself is quite the snarl of junk too, so...

Here it is highlighted in our cropped photograph (and keep in mind, once again, I'm no Rembrandt, and the cutout for the highlighting is more than just a little rough in places, so do not take this image too seriously), to give you some kind of an idea of where and what it is in there that we're interested in. Be advised, however, that we're going to be doing a lot of talking about the piping which this thing carried, and when I took my photograph, none of that piping had yet been fabricated or installed. Not there at all, ok?

And, yeah, it's a complete mess back there, with or without any additional piping thrown into the mix.

LOX (and LH2 also, when we get to it here in a little bit), is a completely separate thing, out on the Pad. It is a quite-complex system, in and of itself. From the great Dewar it is stored in, through the cross-country above-ground vacuum-jacketed piping it is taken to the Pad through, across the Pad Deck in its protective trench covered with some quite-heavy steel-bar grating, and from there up into the LOX Tower, across into the MLP, and finally, into the launch vehicle, it inhabits its own distinct world, and despite being part of the Pad, it is pretty much treated as if it constitutes a complete, and separate, facility on its own.

For good and sufficient reason, I might add.

3,400,000 liters of liquefied oxygen is not the sort of thing one trifles with, and it has a wide array of differing powers to fuck you up, along with substantial tracts of the facility surrounding you, too.

LOX does not like being handled, and you lose a surprising amount of it, just schlepping it around from here to there. It's pretty active stuff, and that's with no consideration for how REactive it is, on top of that.

The violence inherent within 3,400,000 liters of LOX is one of the things that drove the overall size and outline of the Pad.

LOX is, after all, rocket propellant, and rocket propellant is not known for its relaxed attitude toward people and the things that people surround themselves with.

Rocket propellant, by design, packs the largest wallop into the least space, and least weight, humanly possible, and... 3,400,000 liters of it is sitting there in this gigantic steel tank...


                     ...very much alive...


Your whole house, very easily, with plenty of room to spare all around in a suitably-shaped basin, could be caused to float in that much liquid oxygen.

Except that it wouldn't, and instead, what it would do, would wind up creating a light, and a sound, and a cloud, that would be arrestingly noticeable for dozens and dozens of miles around, because the liquid oxygen likes your house very much, in the most intimate way possible, and it will combine chemically with the whole house and everything in it and on it and around it, ferociously, in the twinkling of an eye, causing things within it to burn, and burn violently, that you would never in your life imagine could be set fire to at all.

They knew perfectly well what it could do, and they didn't want it anywhere near...

...anything...

...and so they wisely placed it at a significant distance, should, god forbid, things somehow go badly wrong with it.

They placed it a full quarter-mile away from the Pad itself.

It even had it's own set of traffic lights, out on the Pad Perimeter Road, to keep people away from it, when they were working with it.

They really really did not want this thing to get anybody.

Or anything, either, or at least as far as they were physically able to do so.

It is treated with utmost respect.

And for this reason, there was a strong line of demarcation between the generalized affairs of the Pad, and The Affairs of LOX (and LH2 also).

Which further means that I'm missing a lot of stuff, regards The Affairs of LOX.

Our structural steel role in The Affairs of LOX was a small one, and stopped dead well before it got to the point where the actual interface, the actual connection point between flowing LOX and the MLP which it was fed into, and from thence into the Saturn V, or (after I had shown up out there) the Space Shuttle.

So I'll give you what I can about the LOX System at the Pad, just so as you have some idea about it, but in truth, this is going to be some pretty weak tea, ok?

Basically, LOX (and LH2 also, of course) was taken up to the Pad Deck through a system of vacuum-jacketed lines (to try and keep it from warming up and boiling away into thin air and disappearing, never to return, as a result) into the Mobile Launcher, in the original Apollo configuration of things.

The LOX Tower was an integral part of things, and was where the connection was made, between the permanently-installed portion of things on the ground, and the mobile portion of things on the Mobile Launcher.

This connection is one of the things I have no drawings for, and was serious business, and it had its own very-specialized equipment to do its job, safely and efficiently.

As originally built for Apollo, on the Mobile Launcher, the LOX lines ran horizontally along the back of it for a bit, and fed upward into the LUT along its back side, and from there, farther up into those places on the Saturn V and the Apollo Command and Service Modules where it was needed, through the swing-arms on the LUT.

I have found that trying to locate sufficiently-detailed drawings and/or images of this area is a difficult task, and I'm going to use the best I've been able to find, to show you how the cryo piping was run up the back of the ML, for the Saturn V, but I'm not real happy with it, and hopefully, later on, I'll be able to replace it, or maybe just add to it, with better material.

And it looked like this back there.

And then, when Space Shuttle came along, the whole thing was reworked.

There was no LUT towering above the back side of the ML, for LOX Piping to be fed upwards into, and instead of that, there were now a pair of Tail Service Masts, near the front side of the MLP, and the LOX TSM was fed by piping that was now run along the side of the MLP toward the TSM from where it was connected to at the LOX Tower, and so the LOX Tower had to get reworked, too.

And also, just because "of course they did" it turns out that the TSM's on the MLP are reversed from their respective cryo fluid fill and drain supply points. Maybe one day I'll learn why, but for now, it's enough for you to know that LOX came in over on the left side of things, from the LOX Tower, and wound up over on the RIGHT side of things, in the LOX TSM. And the same was true for LH2, winding up over on the LEFT side of things. Gah.

And actually, it's even more complicated than that, because not all of the LOX for the Space Shuttle was handled through the LOX TSM, and from thence into the Orbiter and the External Tank, and instead, some of it was fed into the Space Shuttle through a completely different system, located in a completely different place, and wound up inside the Orbiter via the OMBUU, but we're getting a little ahead of ourselves, and for the moment, we're going to leave the OMBUU (Orbiter Mid Body Umbilical Unit) out of it, and just stick with what we're dealing with in our photograph of the Lox Tower. We'll be returning to other considerations about the OMBUU pretty soon, though, so be ready for it, ok?

So now that we know what's going on with the LOX Tower, let's take a quick look at it on the drawings to see how they made it, but, as I mentioned at the very beginning of this part of things dealing with the LOX Tower, it's pretty boring, when you get right down to it. All of the cool stuff associated with the connection, where the LOX Piping is joined together from Pad to MLP, is not to be found on the drawings I have. Sigh. Needless to say, if I ever manage to lay hands on a proper set of LOX drawings, that will be included here posthaste, but for now, all we get is the steel framework which all the really cool stuff was supported by.

And they took their existing Apollo LOX Tower, which was designed and built to give them access to a connection for LOX Piping that would run along the back of the Saturn ML, and modify it so the connection access would now agree with the lower elevation of things on the Shuttle MLP, and to do that they had to cut most (but not every last bit) of the top of the LOX Tower off, throw a bunch of it away (which had been rendered useless by the modification), and then reattach the parts of it that were still useful, and in so doing try to save themselves a little bit of time and money by not having to throw away the whole LOX Tower, and build themselves a new one, from scratch.

And part of all that was driven by the relocation of the LOX Piping connection to a new, lower, elevation on the MLP, but another part of it was driven by the need to merge the reworked LOX Tower with the existing ECS Tower (which itself got heavily modified), and also merge it with the brand new North Piping Bridge, which is where we're going next, so sit tight, I'll get us there, but one thing at a time, ok?

And for the purposes of LOX only (jeez but does this stuff ever get complicated), the whole deal was driven by this thing, and had it turned out that they would have been unable to reuse it, then they very definitely would have taken the whole LOX Tower to the ground, and started new, from the anchor bolts up.

And there are drawings for every single level and sublevel of the reworked LOX Tower, complete with stairs and landings and grating and handrail, and all the rest of it, but...

It's just a sort of low tower with a hole running up through it that the LOX Piping coming from its pipe trench in the Pad Deck could be run through vertically, with a (pretty strong) platform up where the LOX Piping bends back over to the horizontal, where it's going to meet the connection, and whatever it is that they actually use to connect and disconnect that piping sits on top of that "pretty strong" platform, and...

...that's it. That's all there is to it.

And I'm not inclined to bore you further with a bunch of plain-vanilla structural drawings of a bunch of wide-flange beams and columns all bolted to each other, even if they are a little bit different-looking.

Let's get outta here, ok?

I'll leave you with the only photograph I've ever been able to find, which shows the actual connection point, and, oddly enough, you've already seen it, back when you were plumbing the depths of the Dolly Area at the 9099 Interface, but at the time, your interests were elsewhere and I'm pretty sure you did not even notice it.

So here it is again, labeled.

Very well then, onward! To the North Piping Bridge! Our quest remains unfinished!

Nobody ever called it "The North Pipe Bridge" and nobody ever called it "The North Bridge" and nobody ever called it "The Piping Bridge" or "The Pipe Bridge" and there was no "South" Piping Bridge, nor any Piping or Pipe Bridge at any other point around the compass either, or for that matter any Pipe or Piping bridge irrespective of any other prepended qualifier terms either, and yet... always, every single time, "The North Piping Bridge," and you may make of that little cultural wrinkle in the fabric of spacetime, what you may. And no, nobody ever tried to make an acronym out of it, by referring to it as the "NPB", either. I do not know. That's just how everybody spoke. So of course, as the new guy, that's how I learned to speak, too.

The North Piping Bridge was originally constructed to take High Pressure Gas up and across the Flame Trench, (even though it sure as hell looks like it's there to carry Liquid Hydrogen across the Flame Trench from where they store it in the Big Dewar out near the Pad Perimeter on the east side), and the High Pressure Gas (the particulars of which I do not know, although I'm sure there's plenty of GN2 and all the other Usual Suspects in there, too) that it carried, came straight up, in similar manner as things coming straight up into the MLP Utilities Interface Platform, through the Pad Deck from out of the High Pressure Gas Area over there on the east side of the Pad.

But lets pretend that it was for LH2 (which wound up actually happening, but... not yet), so as we can gain a little perspective on things.

The North Piping Bridge did not exist at all for Apollo, and that's because, for Apollo, and the Saturns they flew upon, liquid hydrogen (And I'm not going to belabor the psychotically volatile characteristics of liquid hydrogen here, ok? Go back and read what I just wrote about liquid oxygen. And dial the psychosis up a couple of notches too, while you're at it maybe.) which was stored far far away on the eastern margin of the Pad, remained on the eastern side of the Pad, and was never needed nor wanted anywhere near the western side of the Pad where the LOX was located.

Which is all well and good, and who wants to be bringing a nightmare combination of things like liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen any closer together in day-to-day use than they absolutely have to, anyway?

And the answer to that of course was "nobody" and that's the way it was done...

...until the Space Shuttle came along.

And for the Space Shuttle, they stepped things up a little, and one of the things they stepped up was the business of handling liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, together, and of course they couln't just go at it in any kind of straightforward manner, so they threw us a nice curve ball when they did so, just to see if we're really paying attention to this stuff.

And the curve ball consists in the fact that our pair of rocket propellants wound up being needed not only as propellant, but they also became necessary as an included consumable provision to be kept inside the orbiting Space Shuttle, long after all the propellant had been gobbled up, as the Space Shuttle happily coasted along at five miles per second against the airless black sky you find when you get yourself up above the ground far enough.

Which meant they needed liquid hydrogen inside the orbiting Orbiter because it was used for the full duration of every Shuttle mission as one of the reactants (along with liquid oxygen, natch) in the onboard Fuel Cells, which produced all of the on-board electricity, and some of the drinking water, of all weird things, without which...

...not good. Not good at all.

So.

Since we'd very much like to be able to bring it back down, after we're done with it in orbit, and it would be nice for the crew to have another sip of that very pure water they got to drink up there, we're going to need to store liquid hydrogen on board, and use it as a consumable, to keep electrically-powered things going, and the tanks it was stored in were located beneath the open space of the Payload Bay, inside the belly of the Orbiter, and rather than run a bunch more plumbing around inside there from the area where the TSM's furnished liquid hydrogen as propellant stored in the External Tank for the Shuttle's Main Engines, increasing weight and just generally complicating matters, they decided instead to make themselves an OMBUU (of which there will be a plentiful supply of photographic imagery of all kinds, from near and far, and which we will very definitely be seeing, but not until I finish this Part 1 of things, which details my time with Sheffield Steel, and then get going on Part 2, which details my time with Ivey Steel), hanging off the face of the RSS (Remember the RSS? It's been a while, hasn't it?) and use it to furnish LOX and LH2 directly through an umbilical on the left side of the Orbiter, which was located above the wing and below the hinge line on the Payload Bay Doors.

And to make all that work, they had to run a line of liquid hydrogen across, from the FSS into the RSS, and to make that happen, you would think that the the new liquid hydrogen plumbing to supply the OMBUU would have to cross the Flame Trench from the east side (where the gigantic zillion-gallon dewar that held all of the Liquid Hydrogen for the SSME's was located) across the North Piping Bridge to the west side, in order to get it over on the side of things where the RSS with its attached OMBUU is located...

...but that's not what happened.

You would think (that word again) that they would very reasonably lift that new liquid hydrogen plumbing a healthy distance up above the bottom of the Flame Trench right along with the High Pressure Gas Lines, way up there on top of the North Piping Bridge, and merrily pump away, sending it across and up into the OMBUU...

But that's not what they did, and despite all appearances to the contrary, the original purpose of the North Piping Bridge had nothing to do with Hydrogen (although that's gonna change too, in the future, but when it was built there was no Hydrogen plumbing of any kind running across it) and the OMBUU gets its LH2 and it's LOX from a completely different plumbing system that is wholly located over on the west side of the Flame Trench, and it terminates on the Pad Deck, down at the base of the FSS, of all weird places.

Jump forward in this narrative and go look at Page 64 if you wanna learn about the OMBUU, but I strongly recommend against it right now. It's another heavy slog, just like this page is, and it also presumes that you've read and understood everything in the pages between there and here, and... there's a lot of very chewy stuff to masticate between there and here, just so you know, ok?

Phew!

And yeah, this is a pretty lousy image of the North Piping Bridge, except that it's not.

Yes indeed, it's more than just a little covered up by no end of intervening crap, but it's also an excellent rendering of the size of this thing, and it's also a really good image of how it fits in between and is integrally connected to the LOX Tower (which we've already talked about) and the LH2 Tower (which is what we're going to be talking about after we're done with the North Piping Bridge). It's also, oddly enough a pretty good image for showing you just how much different stuff is up on the Pad Deck over here, and for now the fact that the North Piping Bridge is obscured by the a couple of SSW Risers with their work platforms, a couple of MLP Mount Mechanisms with their work platforms, the High Pressure Gas Tower (which is different High Pressure Gas, for the MLP, and is not associated with the North Piping Bridge at all), and the East Stair Tower, is of no real consequence because the business ends of it, the ends where it connects with the LOX and LH2 Towers are actually well-displayed.

Here it is on one of the vicinity drawings, to give you an idea of where it fit in the overall scheme of things at the Pad (79K10338, no RSS).

The North Piping Bridge is a fairly substantial object made from a pair of support towers which are three stories high, carrying the bridge truss itself which is 134'-9" long by 8'-5⅜" deep, with a catwalk running along its north margin, and a row of 3'-9" vertical posts along its south margin that the High-pressure Gas Lines are supported by, thus placing that plumbing 85 feet, give or take, above the bottom of the Flame Trench, keeping it out of harm's way on launch day.

The main longitudinal members of the cambered truss were constructed using A441 steel instead of the much more common A36 steel used pretty much everywhere else, using WT structural shapes instead of the normal wide flange shapes, and WT's were used as intermediate members too, and the whole truss was just a little bit odd in that regards, and I never learned why they did it that way, but I'm guessing it had more than just a little bit to do with this thing's exposure to direct exhaust plume impingement from the SRB's and the SSME's as the Shuttle lifted off, but I could be completely off-base with that one.

The North Piping Bridge was furnished and installed along with the FSS, under the 79K10338 drawing package, shortly before I showed up on the pad for follow-on work (building the RSS) that was covered under drawing package 79K14110, and I had not been there very long at all when ongoing negotiations with NASA regarding the North Piping Bridge came to a conclusion, and which taught me just how rough the game is played in places like this.

Sheffield Steel, for whom I was working, and who was the steel fabricator for the RSS, had also been the steel fabricator for the North Piping Bridge, which was already sitting up on the north end of the Pad Deck, spanning the flame trench, when I first arrived, and my boss, Dick Walls, had overseen its construction and delivery, followed by its erection by the Union Ironworkers employed by Wilhoit, who was the steel erector.

Ok, fine.

What of it?

Well, the North Piping Bridge had been assembled complete, all one hundred thirty four feet and nine inches of it, in the Sheffield Steel fabrication shop on the shores of the beautiful St. Johns River in Palatka, Florida, and barged down to KSC to the turn basin out by the Press Site, and from there was placed on a special rig and rolled on out to the pad.

Ok, fine. So far, so good.

Except that when it arrived and it was erected on the Pad, it was discovered that the Support Tower on one end did not quite exactly, perfectly, match the one on the other end.

The bridge truss was ever so slightly twisted, such that there was about an inch and a half of north/south locational mismatch between the bearing plates on the bottom of the Support Tower legs at either end of it, and this was noted, and Wilhoit proceed with erecting it (Cecil and Red Milliken were not the kind of people to let minor inconveniences keep them from moving forward with things), and no additional issues were encountered.

NASA promptly red-tagged the standing North Piping Bridge with an IPD (In Process Discrepancy), and things weren't going anywhere further with it until matters had been resolved to the satisfaction of the customer. NASA.

Pshit.

According to the AISC Manual of Steel Construction the North Piping Bridge was out of tolerance, and that was that.

But in truth, and in particular, for the purposes to which our bridge was going to be put, and the loads that it would see, it was perfectly fine.

We requested a deviation waiver, and NASA put their engineering people on it, and when they finally came back with an answer, my boss became so angry I thought he might have a stroke, then and there.

NASA fucked us, and they fucked us pretty hard.

Their structural guys ran the calcs and when they did, they found the same thing that we already knew (our own people having run the calcs, too). The mere force of torquing down the nuts on the anchor bolts that hold the Support Towers for the North Piping Bridge to the pad deck would be more than enough to straighten out the slight twist in it, and would not leave enough residual stress in the damn thing afterwards to even measure.

The damn thing was perfectly fine, as built, and they knew it.

And so, being the pleasant gentlemen that they were, NASA put their cost guys on it and worked up the cost for removing it from the pad, barging it all the way back to our fab shop in Palatka, cutting it apart, rewelding it (and it's not for us to figure out where that twist is coming from exactly, that's your job, but you will submit your technical assessment of things to us for final approval before proceeding any further with it), repainting it, barging it back down to the Cape, and then hauling it back up to the pad and erecting it, a second time.

If memory serves, that number turned out to be lower than I thought it would be, but it was still two-hundred some-odd thousand dollars.

A significant chunk of change, and this was back in the early 1980's, when two-hundred grand went a lot farther than it does today.

And then, since they were such pleasant gentlemen, NASA made us an offer: You can keep the North Piping Bridge, right here, as is, with no modifications whatsoever, since it's perfectly adequate for the job it will be doing as everybody involved already well knows, and since no harm will come to any of our support systems for the Space Shuttle, we will generously allow you to keep it here, as-is, in exchange for having you reimburse us with a small financial credit to ourselves, against the cost of your contract with us to fabricate and deliver the goddamned thing.

Their proposed financial credit amounted to about ten thousand dollars less than the total two-hundred thousand plus dollars that it would cost to remove it, rework it, and bring it back.

Take it or leave it, there shall be no further discussion in the matter.

And that dear children, was my first experience with how certain things were done out on the Cape by certain entities, and how some of the people out there will try to hurt you, for no sensible reason at all.

And so I learned that once you've properly identified some one, or some thing, as a snake, and you find that you are now dealing with a snake, you must take on snaky ways yourself, bring the full force of your mental and physical energy to bear upon the issue, and learn to beat the miserable sonofabitches at their own game so badly as to cause them to seriously question ever fucking with you again. This turned out to be one of the most valuable lessons I've ever learned in my life, and when it comes to people who mistake honesty and kindness for weakness, or who mistake honesty and kindness for stupidity, or perhaps submissiveness, or who are just maladjusted and have some sort of uncontrollable inner need to fuck you over, I will cheerfully invoke the altered set of rules upon that snake of a person or agency for the situation at hand, and pursue things to the greatest degree possible. Along the way, through the decades, I have seen more than just a few very surprised faces as a result. And more than just a few very angry faces, too. Ah well, so it must be.

Regarding our "misfabricated" North Piping Bridge itself... it's still there.

To this very day.

It's still standing, straightened-up inch and a half twist and all.

The modifications for the Space Shuttle Program out on Pad B lasted just about thirty years, and for all of those thirty some-odd years, all of our steel stayed put, as-fabricated, as-erected, and everything and everybody was fine.

But the Shuttle Program eventually came to an end, and NASA chose Pad B as their launch site for the SLS Program which followed the Space Shuttle, and which has as its goal, the return of people to the moon, and which uses a completely different Launch Vehicle, and the business of servicing that launch vehicle required that everything which we had furnished and installed up on top of the Pad, that once serviced the Space Shuttle, be removed.

And so it was done.

But not every single last bit of it.

Some of it remained.

And one of the things that remained was... you guessed it... the North Piping Bridge.

It's still there! Right now! Even as I type these words.

As with so many other Children of the Space Program, I have remained in the area.

And when I take a drive to go surfing up at Playalinda Beach on the Canaveral National Seashore, I drive right past Pad B.

And through my window, looking south, I can clearly see the North Piping Bridge.

Here it is here, in this photograph I took on my most recent visit up there prior to writing these words, November 13, 2021.

And every time I see it, I cannot help but think of that two hundred thousand dollars contract credit which NASA extorted from us when I worked at Sheffield Steel.

In return for which we received...

...nothing.

Nothing at all.

Disregarding all of the hate and discontent associated (as usual) with money, the North Piping Bridge itself was a pretty cool place to go, and I went there often enough, sometimes on proper business, but other times, just because I could, returning to the west side of the Pad on my way back to the Sheffield field trailer from whatever I might have been doing over on the east side, by taking the long way around, up and over the North Piping Bridge.

And it was another one of those places where you would encounter very little traffic, very few people, and you'd have the whole thing to yourself, and you hoof it up the stairs on the LH2 tower, and head out across the span, and of course you stop along the way, maybe exactly over one of the vertical faces of the Flame Trench, looking down at the edge-on precipice from above, maybe out in the center of the span somewhere, nearly ten stories above the Apollo-blackened fire bricks which line the floor of the Flame Trench, and you could look back and across at the RSS and the FSS from a pretty unique point of view, and on summer mornings the wind might be dead calm, and a very palpable silence would envelop you, and maybe turn around toward the north and consider the wilderness that extended beyond the horizon arrayed all around that expansive vista there before you, or either one of the great Dewars where the LH2 and LOX was stored out by the Perimeter Road, and just kind of stop, only for a minute or three, and you'd run the palm of your hand across the lingering cool of the handrail pipe there next to you, and consider things, and in so doing you would somehow become refreshed, and your outlook would be lifted, and then you'd resume your journey across to the other side and take the stairs on the LOX Tower down to the Pad Deck, or maybe keep walking and turn the corner where the LOX Tower blends in with the ECS Tower and then continue along the catwalk back there behind the 9099 Building, all the way to the FSS, looking down, looking around, maybe spotting something along the way and giving it a bit of its own time, or not, and eventually taking the stair up into the back side of the FSS at elevation 100'-0" and from there back to the Real World that awaited you elsewhere, and...

...yeah, despite the unseeable darker elements of it, shimmering faintly in the air as soundless spirits just beyond the limits of sensible perception, the North Piping Bridge was ok with me.

You can't let some asshole, or some organized group of assholes, take away your appreciation for the joy, the beauty, the symmetry, and the wonder of things, despite their very best efforts to do just that. It's a control game. And the goal of the game is one of domination, to further their interests at the expense of your own. And no, I've never been one for handing over control to cheats and liars and thieves and incompetents. And when the fight is over, be it short-term or be it long-term, and they've all been properly thrashed and pushed completely out of the sphere of my life, my good mood returns in full force and effect, unaltered to the slightest degree. My good mood always has been, and always will be, the only thing I'll ever have that's worth keeping, and I've done well, and have kept it intact, for the full length of my life. But I have, and I will... fight for it.

And from here, continuing along in our photograph, to the right of the North Piping Bridge, we get to the LH2 Tower.

And by this point things are really starting to get pretty ugly, and confused, and hard to make sense of, and for the LH2 Tower, the spindly angled lines and rectangles of the High Pressure Gas tower sitting directly in front of it, blocking a substantial amount of it from our view, are in a particularly bad place, so...

We'll just have to do the best we can with it, ok?

In similar manner as with the LOX Tower on the other end of the North Piping Bridge, the LH2 Tower stands at the terminal end of a run of cryo piping which originates out at the Pad's margin where the great Dewar which holds the liquid hydrogen sits.

The cross-country cryo line angles in toward the Pad from the north, and finishes its journey across the Pad Deck in a pipe trench, which is also angled to the general north/south east/west alignment of everything else up there.

But, unlike the LOX Tower, which is north/south square with everything around it, the LH2 Tower retained the angled aspect of the cryo line and butts against the North Piping Bridge at that same angle.

I do not know why.

I do not know why the LOX Tower was north/south square and the LH2 Tower was not.

And as with the LOX Tower, the LH2 Tower had to be modified from its original Apollo configuration to bring it in line with the changed requirements for the Space Shuttle.

The LH2 line which fed the Shuttle's LH2 TSM ran along the side of the MLP, exactly the same way the LOX line did, except that it was on the opposite side of the MLP, over on the east side of the MLP when it was parked up on the Pad.

And of course, a connection had to be made, between the immobile end of things on the Pad Deck and the mobile end of things on the MLP, and... yeah, same deal as with LOX. Same deal exactly.

And again, I'm not going to bore you with a bunch of drawings showing you a bunch of standard-issue beams and columns, depicting the fine details of how the LH2 Tower was modified.

Same deal exactly, as with the LOX Tower. Plain-vanilla, a couple of platform levels with a hole for the piping to run vertically to up near the top of the tower, with the particulars of things revolving around whatever specialized equipment that they used to make the connection.

And really, about the only difference is that LH2 is even more psychotically-explosive than LOX, so be careful there, Lou, that thing's live.

And from the LH2 Tower, we head more or less in a straight line aimed at the camera, and turn our attentions to the High Pressure Gas Tower.

Which is almost impossible to make sense of in the photograph. The LH2 Tower, the North Piping Bridge, an SSW Riser, not one but two MLP Mount Mechanisms, and even a light fixture on the East Stair Tower are all in the thick of things and doing a fine job of keeping you from making heads nor tails of it. Use your imagination. I dunno.

About the only help I can give you with it is that that back side of it, the side where you go up through a caged ladder (no stair on this thing) to get to the top of it and go to work, is slanted at an angle, leaning in toward where the MLP sits, except that the MLP was not there when I took this photograph.

And the outward appearances of the High Pressure Gas Tower could, at best, charitably, be described as "humble", but in fact, really, to be honest, it was ratty.

Another holdover from Apollo that sat out in the salt-air, unloved, unwanted, for a decade too long.

But don't let this thing's humble appearances fool you.

It packed one hell of a wallop in the form of multiple 6,000 psi lines, including gaseous helium (2 of 'em!), nitrogen, and hydrogen, among other fun stuff.

And it fed all of that into the MLP, where it got used all over the place, for too many systems, and too many reasons, for a structural guy like me to ever have a hope of coming to full and complete terms with.

The connections for small-diameter more or less ambient-temperature (as opposed to stuff that might be found hanging around down there someplace south of 400 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit) pipe and tubes are much less difficult to work with (but you'd best be on your toes, anyway, lest something unpleasant befall you), and for that reason, the High Pressure Gas Tower had nothing at all by way of the interestingness that adhered to the LOX and LH2 Towers.

The techs climb up there and do their work, more or less bare-handed, and nothing more needs to be said, nor done, about it.

Make the connection, move to a safer place well clear of things, turn the handle on the valve for whichever flavor of high-pressure gas it is that you might be interested in today while you keep an eye on it to make sure nothing untoward happens, and...

...that's it.

Which is why this thing is so nondescript.

A little bit of light framing, a caged ladder, bit of grating and handrail, and we're good to go.

And because it wasn't any kind of attractive, in any kind of way, I walked around and underneath it, occasionally leaned against it, and just generally went about my affairs up there without ever giving it any further attention.

I hardly ever bothered with getting up on top of it.

And it was certainly not anything you could call exciting up there. Or interesting, either.

The caged ladder was a pain in the ass. Never liked the damn things. Too constraining for proper nimbleness getting up and down them, and if you're not careful, you'll bang an elbow on 'em, or scrape the back of your hand, or the clipboard stuffed down the waistband of your blue jeans behind you will snag on the cage, or...

...feh.

So even before we've taken our first step up off the concrete with the High Pressure Gas Tower, we find that it's already putting out a significant "This thing is more trouble getting up on top of than it's worth," vibe.

And the word "up" might be a misnomer, too.

Compared to everything else all around it, it's kinda low and dumpy.

And there's all that junkum metal and pipes sticking every whichaway up there, and yes, you probably will tear the sleeve of your shirt on it while you're doing...

...what?

Except for one time when I went up there with my camera when I was working for Ivey Steel, and managed to get myself a pair of really good panorama shots that themselves can be combined into one very large overview of things.

But that came later, and we're not going to be visiting it right now, and we'll save it for Part 2, ok?

And now, at long last, we reach the final stop on our walkabout around the north half of the Pad Deck.

The East Stair Tower.

Which was originally built, back in Apollo days, as a compliment to the West Stair Tower, and to let you see the similarities between them, here they both are, highlighted on our photograph, and when I labeled the West tower, I gave it a bit more information in the label, but by this point you no longer need that kind of extra help with it, and so the label for the East Stair Tower is simplified, accordingly.

And they're similar, but they're also different, too.

The East Stair Tower was originally constructed for Apollo, and, as with other Apollo-era nomenclature, it had a name which I never crossed paths with, even once, while I was out on the Pad, and its Apollo name was "Stair 1" but we're going to stick with "East Stair Tower" for what follows, in deference to the language that was spoken up on the Pad during my tenure, as well as an effort to eliminate any confusion that might arise with the "Stair 1" which we've already met, up on the RSS.

And as with Apollo "Stair 2", which butted up against "Elevator 2" over on the west side of the Flame Trench, Apollo "Stair 1" butted up against "Elevator 1" over on the east side of the Flame Trench. But of course there's going to be confusion anyway, because you may or may not have noticed that the drawing I just linked to is for Pad A, and not for Pad B.

Why?

Oh boy, here we go, yet again.

On the A Pad drawing, which you've just seen, I've yellow-highlighted "Stair & Elevator#1 See Sht. S-356" just to make absolutely sure that we know what we're talking about here, and that we have positively identified what it is that we're interested in.

Ok, fine. What about it?

Well then, have a look at the same drawing except that it's the Pad B version.

The sly dogs. The sly dirty dogs!

Without a word of explanation, anywhere, they just kind of decided to rename Stair 1, dropping all reference to anything stairish about it, and start calling it the "Engine Servicing Platform" and if we did not have a Pad A drawing to fall back on here, a lot of you (and me too) might be scratching our heads, trying to figure out just exactly what this thing really is.

Lovely. Just fucking lovely.

And in the Department of Additional Nails and Coffin Lids, both versions of our drawing, both Pad A and Pad B, have a little callout right next to our object of interest, telling us to go have a look at drawing S-356 for this thing, whatever its true identity might really be, and of course when we head on over to S-356 (Pad B version, take note), we find ourselves looking at the primary structural framing for a very plain-vanilla combined stair and elevator tower, complete with flip-up platforms, which in no significant sense is any different at all from what we learned all about, over on the west side of the Flame Trench, with Stair & Elevator #2.

There had to be a reason, but I'm sure I'll never know why they decided to drop all reference to the word "stair" with this change in things when they went from the Pad A version to the Pad B version. And I suppose, in the Department of Silver Linings, this alteration in nomenclature gives us some pretty good reason to believe that the primary purpose of this combined stair/elevator tower over on the east side of things was for gaining access and doing work on those great damn big (and equally complicated) F-1 engines sitting down there at the bottom of the Saturn V once it had been rolled out to the Pad.

Perhaps. It's all surmise on my part, at this point.

But with or without any surmising, the whole affair is quite sneaky, sneaky, sneaky, and stands as yet another sterling example (as if we need any more than we've already been subjected to) of how a lot of this stuff is out to get you.

So anyway, Elevator 1 was yet another item that I never so much as suspected the existence of in all my days out there, it having been cleanly removed prior to my arrival, and on top of that, also never having been suspected by myself, in addition to having been heavily modified, the East Stair Tower had been moved, and where it was sitting as you see it in the photograph, and where I dealt with it blissfully unaware for five full years as the most solid object imaginable, is not where it was originally built.

And why, you might wonder, would they want to go to all that time and trouble to pick something up that's bigger and heavier than your house, build new foundations for it, and relocate it?

And the answer to that is given, now that we know where it was originally located, south of the centerline of the Saturn V launch vehicle, we can see by looking at the Pad Deck, as modified to accommodate a Rotating Service Structure which had to span the MLP in order to service the Space Shuttle sitting on top of it, and that Rotating Service Structure was supported by the towering heavy iron of Column Line 7, resting on top of a couple of Truck Drives, which rolled on a set of curving steel rails, and those rails required a substantial foundation to carry their multi-million pound burden, and all of that taken together forced them to not only move the East Stair Tower out of the way, but to also demolish and remove the elevator which had been integrally joined with it on its south side, for which there simply was no longer anyplace at all to put it.

So. The mystery is thereby solved.

And on top of all that, in this exact same area, the existing RP-1 Tower (also long gone before I ever showed up and also completely unsuspected by myself as having ever existed in the first place), which handled the plumbing interface necessary to tank up that gigantic S-IC with the very high-grade RP-1 kerosene it burned, also had to go, but it would have gone anyway, with or without getting mowed down by an East Stair Tower which itself was jumping out of the way to keep from getting mowed down by the RSS, because the Space Shuttle was strictly an LH2-fueled vehicle, and no kerosene of any kind was ever used out at the Pad following the end of Project Apollo.

And the long-gone RP-1 Tower, in similar fashion to the innards of the Lox Tower and LH2 Tower, and the steel structure for the Pneumatics Tower, is a thing I have no proper drawings for. Stuff like this is oftentimes handled by completely separate engineering and cost groups, and falls under its own narrowly-defined set of drawings and specifications, and for the time being, I am without, which means you are without, too.

But it's not entirely hopeless, and we'll start you out with a small low-fidelity drawing that shows us where the RP-1 Tower used to live.

As with the LH2 Tower, the plumbing for the RP-1 Tower was carried across the open rough-weather expanse of the Pad Deck, on its way to its final destination where the connections could be made, safely enclosed within stout trenches, just like it is with the LOX plumbing over on the other side.

So here's the best we can do for the time being, in the form of an Apollo drawing for the RP-1 Tower, and the LH2 Tower too, which accurately lays out their anchor bolt locations, as well as the trenching that carries the lines that carry the fluids to the ML, complete with details telling us about the quite-heavy 6" galvanized steel-bar grating that covers them in traffic areas (which traffic might consist of very heavy equipment sometimes) up there on the flat and level areas of the Pad Deck.

And here's the Shuttle drawing that tells you how to make the interfering portions of the RP-1 Trench disappear, along with the field of view and viewpoint location for what you're seeing near the East Stair Tower and the remains of the RP-1 Trench in image 043. This drawing is actually quite helpful insofar as it gives a pretty good look at how the new foundations for the RSS (in the Mate position) encroached on the previous location for the East Stair Tower and shoved it over to the side, and as it got shoved, it shoved the RP-1 Tower in turn, which, instead of being moved, was wiped off the face of the earth instead. And in similar fashion as Sherlock Holmes listening for a dog that didn't bark, and taking note of its significance, we're looking for a tower (and part of a grating-covered trench) that's not there, inferring what had to happen to make things look like what we're seeing.

And just to close the RP-1 Tower and Trench part of things off neatly, here's image 043, cropped to include just the East Stair Tower and everything visible to the right of that, with the last vestiges of the RP-1 Trench labeled.

And there is no RP-1 Tower. It's gone.

So what we wind up with in the end, attempting to understand what we're seeing, might not be very much, but it's all we're ever going to get.

And of course to simply look at the East Stair Tower, to just kind of give that tube-steel frame with a stair inside of it a cursory eyeballing, you'd never guess any of the foregoing.

And you're up on the Pad Deck, and you're busy with the day's affairs, and you're standing right there, right next to the East Stair Tower, and you take a second or three to consider the dull gray tube-steel column you're almost leaning against, and you rap your knuckles against it, as does everyone, now and then, just to hear that satisfying steel "tonk tonk" sound it makes when you do, and all around you the whole place is whispering to you, telling you about itself, its past, its ways, its reasons, but you are unable to hear any of it, turn your attention away from it, and go back to whatever mundane thing it was that brought you up here in the first place.

And I find myself at other times, in other places, straining to hear the whispers...

...but they are faint

...and life all around is so very very loud.

MacLaren's Images and Stories Pad B Stories - Table of Contents

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