The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B

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

Page 64: The OMBUU. Orbiter Mid-Body Umbilical Unit Lift, Plus Our First Foray Into the Guide Columns.

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The OMBUU.

Today, we're going to hang the OMBUU on the tower.

And I've been dreading the OMBUU, from the very beginning, but I've also been looking forward to it.

Which makes not a lick of sense, but ah well, so it must be.

In our photograph, left to right in front of the OMBUU, we see Howard Baxter, Wade Ivey, Hank Morgan, and, hands-on back turned to the camera, Rayburn Chiles, brother of Rink Chiles, who we've already met.

Wade Ivey, of course, owned Ivey Steel, and we have already been introduced to him.

Howard Baxter and Hank Morgan were overseers of the whole Pad, were employed by Boeing at the time, working directly under NASA, and were administering Boeing's "TT&V" contract. Beneath their administrative oversight, a contingent of blue-coveralled Boeing techs worked structural, mechanical, and electrical systems, hands-on, complete with their own engineering, safety, and quality control people, making sure it was all in good, properly-functional, properly-documented, working order.

Systems were essentially being bought-off twice by NASA. Once when any given work effort or contract was closed out, and a second time when TT&V signed off and validated it, following their own testing of the terminated (bought off) contracts and contract elements.

NASA wasn't fucking around.

NASA wanted the goddamned thing right, and if it took two separate engineering and operational oversight groups to do it, well then... that's what they did.

If there was a set of plans and specifications for something (and there was a set of plans and specifications for everything), then nothing in those plans and specifications was going to slip through the cracks and either get done wrong, in any kind of disagreement with the plans and specs, or not get done at all, and TTV loomed large in that landscape. (And yes, out on the Pad it was interchangeably referred to as both TTV and TT&V.)

Terminate Test, and Validate. It's not nearly enough to simply furnish and install stuff on a Launch Pad, and in addition to that, you also must test and validate everything that was furnished and installed, and that turns out to be a significant job, and it gets handled independently, by others, who come in behind you and make damn good and sure that your stuff is right, and not only right, per the plans and specifications, but also right per the requirements of fitting into the bewildering confusion of all the other systems that all have to come together and mesh smoothly with one another, in order to get the Space Shuttle off the ground, and into the air.

And TTV was that end of things.

Howard Baxter was the "Pad Daddy" and yes, that's exactly the term that people used in common conversation about him. That's who he was, and that's what he was.

Howard exercised total control over the place while we were there constructing it, and his word, was the word of law.

Hank Morgan worked for Howard, and he too was a force not to be trifled with, although so long as you were demonstrably doing your best to do the goddamned job per the (not infallible) Plans and Specifications in an honest and honorable manner, he was exceedingly low-key, easy-going, and understanding about it. And yes, he too, in addition to a significant contingent of other oversight people, had more than just a few choice words to say, regarding the "quality" of the engineering in those miserable goddamned PRC/BRPH 79K24048 drawings. Hank was a Good Man.

But don't cross him, ok? Don't be dishonest with him, ok? You will rue the day, should you foolishly try to put something over on him. I saw it happen a few times with my own eyes, and there were consequences. And as with so many other people I was fortunate enough to meet and get along with out on the Pad, Hank Morgan evidenced zero external manifestation of his world-class level of expertise in his discipline. The fucker was tack sharp, understood the whole place intimately and thoroughly, and missed nothing. My kind of people. They're not here to wave it around, or show it off, or prove something to somebody. They're here to just get the sonofabitch done. Correctly. Period.

Howard Baxter, on the other hand, was an intimidating sonofabitch, and brooked no bullshit nor waste of his time from anybody for any reason, but was also rock-solid, straight level and true, FAIR about things. I liked Howard a lot. How he may have felt about me, I do not know, but he at least put up with me to the extent of letting me do my job whenever he was around, instead of summarily running me out of the TT&V field trailer up on the pad deck, as I was witness to with certain other less-fortunate souls.

Howard and Hank, worked with a third guy named John Bell who was another crackerjack hand that I got along really well with too, but he had bad eyesight, and wore a pair of glasses with improbably-thick lenses that would give me a headache, simply looking back through them into his eyes. I never managed to take a photograph with John in it, unfortunately, so you will not get to see him in any of my images.

The three of them worked together in the TT&V field trailer which was located up on the Pad Deck, east of the Flame Trench, kind of over toward the south end of things up there, and I spent my fair share of time in that trailer with those guys, trying to make proper sense of things when issues would arise, and as a completely unrelated aside, I shall tell you a little story about the inside of that trailer.

Howard's desk was at the north end of it, and it faced southward, with a clear view of the whole interior of the trailer, which had no partition walls or cubicle crap, or anything else, except for Hank and John's desks in the middle and to the south, along with all the shelving, and tables, and binder-books, and technical documentation, and drawings, and... on and on and on... which you always saw in places like this.

On the north wall, over Howard's right shoulder as he sat in his chair at his desk, there was one of those pieces of artwork that you also find in places like this, where somebody, with a bit of free time, and a further bit of good artistic talent, rendered something germane about someone, and of course our "someone" was Howard, and it was a single 8½ x 11 sheet of paper, in portrait orientation, which had been divided into three rows of cartoon panels, depicting Howard, on the job.

And it was a fucking classic.

Howard, who was built like a fireplug, appears, well-rendered visually as a short but nonetheless-imposing guy, and has a confrontation with "A Bear In The Woods" which was an outsize apparition, much larger than Howard, and it comes at him in the most threatening manner possible, bedrooled fangs and all. I do not recall which job the Bear represented, but it was out on the Cape somewhere, maybe Pad A, I cannot recall, and it was a bastard, but they pulled it in successfully. And in our artwork, the Bear comes to a very bad end, and the last panel showed Howard holding a ridiculously large club, labeled as "Howard's Persuader," complete with a gigantic bent spike sticking through it, in one side and out the other, and he's standing over a very dead Bear, with a speech bubble saying, "I don't give a goddamn if you're some old Bear in the Woods," and my verbal description here is woefully inadequate, and the thing was impossibly well-done and hilarious, but it also served as a warning, and Howard liked it enough to put in on the wall over his shoulder, and everybody else liked it too, but it also put everybody on notice...

Don't fuck with Howard, ok?

Howard would kill you and eat you if you did.

That little cartoon was rendered so well, and was so apt, that it has stayed with me a lifetime, and to this day I occasionally find myself using the word persuade in similar fashion.

Funny how little things can embed themselves so very deeply into us, sometimes.

And since we're having so much fun in the TT&V field trailer, I can also tell you that this is where I learned how to correctly deal with telephones, which, back in those days out on the Pad, did not come with answering machines, were invariably black rotary-dial things which were hard-wired to a wall, and which also rang LOUDLY, and interminably, when somebody needed someone, and would stay on the line for lengthy periods of time, as the phone rang, and rang, and RANG, in hopes of somebody at last deciding to pick the fucking thing up, if for no other reason than to stop the goddamned NOISE.

And I was raised from earliest childhood in a home, in the 1950's and 1960's, where telephone calls were always treated as potential emergencies, and which were always answered, and my mother and my father would both drop whatever they were doing, no matter how important, if the phone rang, and go pick it up.

This was the culture of the time, and this is how everybody treated a ringing telephone.

Drop what you're doing, and pick up the goddamned phone. NOW!

So imagine my surprise one fine day, when I'm up there in the TT&V trailer with Howard and Hank and John, and no, I do not recall what I was doing there that day, but I do recall, clearly, that one of the fucked-up telephones started ringing, and nobody moved.

There it sat, on one of the desks, making the standard loud and annoying racket that a ringing telephone would make back in those days...

...and nobody so much as even looked up from their work to see which phone it even was!

And the fucking thing must have rung forty or fifty times before the poor slob on the other end, making the call, trying to reach somebody, finally had to give up in defeat, and the stupid ringing finally came to a halt.

And not a word was spoken by anyone there in the trailer (including me, of course) about it, and the work that was being done continued on serenely...

And as if hit by a thunderbolt, I suddenly realized, "You don't have to answer the phone when it rings!"

And from that day onward, I was a changed man, and from that day onward I might, or might not, pick up a ringing phone, and the ringing phone lost all power that it had reflexively held over me, for my entire life up to that point.

And I tell you this little Tale of the Telephone to try and bring you into a world long-gone, that will never return, to see what it was like, day-to-day with things, and with people, and how the things and the people interacted through unspoken laws and reflexes.

It was different back then.

And you can never enter that lost world, and you can never sensibly understand that lost world, but at least I can tell you about it. These were the lives that were lived, and these were the people who lived them.

Ok. Back to work.

Despite the absolutely life-maintainingly critical jobs it has to do, the OMBUU remains a surprisingly-obscure item in the greater scheme of things, when it comes to the Space Shuttle. We've already talked about it before, but we've never properly sunk our teeth into it, so now's the time. The OMBUU is actually pretty cool, although it's also a difficult motherfucker, too. Which is where the odd combination of anticipation and dread on my part comes from. Just so you know, ok?

Also, just the sound of the word has got something going on, too. OMBUU (pronounced "om-boo" with equal emphasis on both syllables, or maybe just a touch of extra emphasis on the "om" part), like maybe some Dharmic guy on Halloween or something. ॐ-boo. Kinda just rolls off your tongue with a sort of aura to it or something. Say it out loud, and listen to the sound of your voice when you say it: OMBUU. Yeah, that's the stuff. We like-um.

It lived on the face of the RSS, and provided an umbilical to connect with the Orbiter, just about midway along the length of the fuselage, above the Left Wing, like you see here in this drawing lifted from something called the Liquid Rocket Integration Study, produced back in 1988, when they were thinking about maybe making hydrolox or kerolox Liquid-Fueled strap-on boosters as an alternative option to the Solid Rocket Boosters used by the Space Shuttle. The OMBUU is rendered a little skinny, but otherwise this is a good illustration to see how it fits up against the Orbiter, conceptually. It also shows how you get to it across the weirdly zigzagged Access Catwalks coming across from the FSS, too.

Ok. Enough. What's going on here, anyway?

And we start out by letting you know the Orbiter has no solar panels, and from this initial premise, a whole bunch of different cause-and-effect stuff starts cascading down in our direction, and we gotta mind all of it.

Solar panels are pretty low energy-density, and despite the fact that they'll happily provide you with output energy for a long long time (so long as you're in the part of your orbit which places you between the sun and the earth where the sun can shine directly upon your solar panels) they're quite heavy when it comes to pounds-per-kilowatt of power production, and the Space Shuttle was never intended for particularly long-duration missions in the first place, so the "long long time" angle goes right out the window as any kind of potential benefit, with nothing at all to gain on that end of the equation in return for their pounds-per-kilowatt-output penalty.

And this all means solar panels (and the nice heavy batteries that go with 'em) as an electrical power supply for the Orbiter were never going to be any kind of cost-effective or energy-effective solution to the question of, "How do we keep the lights on while we're up there?"

And on top of that, you gotta unfurl solar panels, and then re-furl 'em before coming back home, and that adds an additional burden of waaay too many unpleasant ways for no end of extra things to go deeply wrong, which means there ain't gonna be no electrical power coming from that quarter, nohow, no way.

And of course, since the Orbiter must have electrical power (or otherwise it's in a catatonic coma, utterly unresponsive and uncontrollable in any way, shape, or form, and that's not going to be any fun for anybody), NASA skipped over solar panels as a solution to the problem, and arranged things so as all Orbiter electrical power came from on-board Fuel Cells. And they chose fuel cells because, pound-for-pound, they pack one hell of an energy-density wallop, and every pound saved on Orbiter weight translated directly to a pound gained in payload weight, and with the eye-wateringly-expensive cost per pound of payload to orbit they were dealing with back then... yeah, fuel cells. There was no other choice, really, so that's why they did it, ok?

And fuel cells are an entire discipline, complete unto themselves, very much worthy as a full-lifetime career choice, and no, I'm not gonna get into it. Fuel cells are electrical (well... the output is, anyway, but there's a hell of a lot of chemistry going on in there too) and as a structural guy I don't like electricity, and I'm not gonna be getting into it any more than I absolutely have to, ok? You go figure it out. You go learn all about fucked-up fuel cells if you want to. Not my job.

So, since we're already using a zillion gallons of Liquid Hydrogen and Liquid Oxygen to power our SSME's on the uphill climb to orbit, which means we've already built the facilities to deal with that stuff in bulk, whatta ya say we just go ahead and bleed a weency little bit of it off, and pump that into onboard storage dewars inside the Orbiter, and that way we can use it as a consumable for hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells, to make all the nice electricity we'll ever need while we're in orbit.

And yes, they went with hydrogen-oxygen Fuel Cells in the Orbiter, but no, instead of tapping into their pre-existing LOX/LH2 system, they decided to create a whole new, wholly-separate system instead, to handle the LOX and LH2 they were using for FCSS (Fuel Cell Servicing System) on the Orbiter. We'll get into some of the details of that end of things, farther down along this page, ok?

And here's another image, done by the National Park Service of all people, to go along with the ones included in the earlier reference to "We've already talked about it before," to let you see where those on-board storage dewars for Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen lived, down inside the belly of the Orbiter, along with the locations of the fuel cells they supplied hydrogen and oxygen to.

And of course it's not enough to simply admire the stupid picture, there's trickiness associated with it, naturally. I count five dewars each, for Liquid Oxygen, and five more each, for Liquid Hydrogen, for a total of ten, when I look at that National Park Drawing.

Such a simple question: "How many dewars are there, anyway?

And the answer turns out to be... dependent. Despite what the National Park Service with their uncommented drawing might be telling people to the contrary.

It depends.

Our National Park Service Drawing, despite being quite useful from a visualizing point of view, and pretty handy with that block diagram of how everybody kind of plays together in here supplying both electricity and water for systems on the Orbiter, turns out to be less than fully wonderful when we look at it closely enough.

To start with, it tells us there are five each, Liquid Hydrogen and Liquid Oxygen dewars, which supply three Fuel Cells.

And except for the fact that they've somehow bollixed up the tank numbering for the Liquid Hydrogen dewars, with "LH2 TANK NO. 1" listed twice and LH2 TANK NO. 2 listed not at all, it appears to be ok, but that's not the case, either.

And we stop right here, and give this thing a closer look, and although it strives to give the appearance of a proper engineering drawing, some kind of general arrangement engineering drawing, it is no such thing, and instead is only a (very well-done, but still...) sort of "show and tell" drawing, created by people who were never involved with the actual engineering of the Space Shuttle, and it suffers as a result, because the nice folks who rendered it were not quite as knowledgeable about their subject matter as we'd like them to be, and...

This is a "teachable moment" and a cautionary tale as well, and it stands as a sterling example for those of us who wish to properly research this stuff, insofar as it exists as a pitfall for the unwary, who might be drawn in by its very slick outward appearance and caused to uncritically accept it at face value, as a valid reference item, which it very much is not.

And NASA, and other people too (like the National Park Service in our present example), never seem to get enough of producing "show and tell" stuff disguised up as proper engineering drawings, and we've already seen faaar too many examples in this narrative of the goddamned engineering drawings managing to get it wrong, and once you've taken one more step away from the original stuff, you've also taken one more step up with the introduction of errors and occasional outright lies, and if you get into the habit of swallowing that kind of stuff whole...

Well then...

Now you become part of the problem, because you start repeating patent nonsense and bullshit as if it were true, and things start spiraling out of control pretty damn quick, and...

Kinda makes you start to wonder just how much bullshit this James MacLaren guy has managed to insinuate into his version of things...

...and...

...yeah.

So mind your step there, Lou, this place is a fucking minefield.

Ok, back to the "five each, Liquid Hydrogen and Liquid Oxygen dewars."

On that National Park Service drawing, no comment is given or implied as to anything at all which might cause us to want to question that total of five tanks each, for hydrogen and oxygen.

But when we head back to our engineering stuff...

We get a totally different story.

Our Space Shuttle News Reference document (which, as of the writing of these words on November 28, 2023, is freely available on the NASA Technical Reports Server at https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19810022734 , although it's curiously lacking in all of the usual collateral information that goes with stuff like this, and the entire download link page contains NOTHING beyond what you see below here) is a good place to start, even though it's not a proper engineering document.

\\\\\\\
NASA Logo

NTRS - NASA Technical Reports Server
As of October 27, 2023, NASA STI Services will no longer have an embargo for accepted manuscripts. For more information visit NTRS News.

Space Shuttle news reference
A detailed description of the space shuttle vehicle and associated subsystems is given. Space transportation system propulsion, power generation, environmental control and life support system and avionics are among the topics. Also, Orbiter crew accommodations and equipment, mission operations and support, and flight crew complement and crew training are addressed.

Document ID      19810022734
Document Type     Technical Memorandum (TM)
Date Acquired     September 4, 2013
Publication Date     January 1, 1981
Subject Category     Space Transportation
Report/Patent Number      NASA-TM-82290
Accession Number     81N31276
Distribution Limits     Public
Copyright     Work of the US Gov.     Public Use Permitted.
Available Downloads
Name      19810022734.pdf
Type      STI
Related Records     There are no records associated with this record.
No Preview Available
///////

We've been availing ourselves of this thing all along in various places, although it is not, as I just said, a proper engineering document. But it was put together in close collaboration with the actual engineering end of things, back in 1981 when the baseline level of quality for this stuff was quite a bit higher than what we're getting today (the culture and the budgeting for stuff like this has changed radically for the worse in the interim) and for the most part, it's a pretty damn good piece of material, and that's why we keep availing ourselves of it.

And we've already used it as a reference for our Fuel Cells, on Page 4-10 (sheet 96 of the .pdf file) back on Page 41 of this thing, and on that page there's a nice illustration, and that nice illustration only shows TWO each, Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen tanks, and... ok, something funny's going on here, and everybody's having trouble keeping their stories straight, and then, when we scroll down two more mere pages in our News Reference to yet another page we've already been referred to back on Page 41, we are suddenly confronted with another illustration, and this one has FOUR each, oxygen and hydrogen dewars, and all along, since this is a primarily electrical-power system, they've enjoyed telling us about the supply that our dewars can furnish in megajoules (perfectly common units of energy, but you never see 'em used for day-to-day living in your standard non-engineer life), and nobody seems to be too concerned about telling us what the hell's going on here, but in the text above this second illustration, they make mention of "Mission kits containing consumables for 3060 megajoules..." so... hmm... Mission Kits? Almost kinda reminds you of our old friend the Payload Bay Kit, about which we've already probably learned too much, across more multiple pages of this thing than I'm inclined to ferret out and list for you in total, but oh well.

And then we return to our already-seen pair of big drawings of the Orbiter, showing this stuff, and these drawings are proper engineering drawings, general arrangement drawings to be precise, and there at last, the whole story gets told.

And yeah, we've seen this one before too, in that same area back there on Page 41, and now we get to see it again, but this time I've highlighted things with the words that describe what's really going on with the dewars, as well as the dewars themselves, and we see that they could kind of drop more dewars in there if they wanted to, to provide electrical power for such "extended missions" as they might deem fit and proper to fly. The bare minimum was 2 tanks each, which gave them the redundancy they wanted, and these four tanks flew on all missions, and then above and beyond that, mission-dependent, they could drop in 1, 2, or 3 sets of LOX/LH2 pairs, as necessary. Lots of nice flexibility with a deal like that, and a lot of saved weight and potential maintenance/upkeep issues, too.

And now, finally we've gotten ourselves all the way to the bottom of what's going on with the cryo stuff that the OMBUU (Remember the OMBUU? This is supposed to be a page about hanging the OMBUU on the tower.) is there to service, and it turns out that it's even more complicated than we first imagined, and it comes in different flavors, depending on any given Mission Profile, and yeah, it would have been nice if all that other stuff, all the way back to, and including, our National Park Drawing, would have been so kind as to alert us to the complications with these dewars, but oh well, so it must be, and we've sorted it out on our own without any help from 'em anyway, so... fuckem.

Except that they still hold the power to greatly mislead those who did not, or could not, dig all the way down to the bottom of things.

And we'll close this little side-branch of our journey with a belly-view of the Orbiter (yep, been here, done this, too, and of course it's in that same area on Page 41), all nice and highlighted up, complete with tank numbers for the full set of dewars, including all three "Kits", and now at last we can get squared away with the mistakeS on the National Park Drawing.

Phew.

And as to what and how many, if any, of those dewars actually remain in any of the orbiters as they presently exist as Museum Pieces, I do not know. My gut feeling is that they would have removed all that stuff, along with the SSME's, since they're internal, and nobody's gonna actually see 'em in the Museum, but I do not know. Maybe somebody will find out and let me know, and I can tack that little nugget of information on to this thing one day.

And now that we've learned all of that, we've gotten a good start on understanding what our OMBUU is going to be needing to do for a living, with cryo, but that ain't all of it, either, and there's lots more other stuff too, but the cryo is what everybody thinks about when they think about the OMBUU.

In the interests of beating this one to death, here's another, large engineering general-arrangement drawing, showing the entirety of the Orbiter Electrical Power System, and it has its original as-downloaded color scheme for LOX and LH2, which is different from the one I used, and it's colored up a little weirdly with the Liquid Hydrogen tanks, with a distinctly unfinished look about it, and no I do not have the faintest idea why they did it that way, and the naming nomenclature isn't self-consistent either, and... questions. Wish I had answers, but alas I do not. Bring this one up full size (15,300 x 9,900 pixels), and just kind of wander around in there. Lotta cool stuff in there.

And as a side note on these large Orbiter component locator drawings, I originally found them on a JSC page, years ago, and had the presence of mind to download 'em, and save 'em, and it's a damn good thing I did, 'cause it appears as if somewhere along the line, somebody decided to remove 'em, and I am now unable to find them in their original full-size renderings anywhere, and... the cultural climate is cooling, and the cultural darkness continues to congeal and thicken, and who knows where this will wind up going by the time it's done, but wherever it goes, I've got a bad feeling about it.

And our OMBUU is going to be needing to connect with the Orbiter, as an umbilical, and this serves to give us a bit more understanding as to why it was more-often-than-not called the "OMBUU ARM" out on the Pad when we were building the place, even though it does not swing like an arm.

With rockets, there exists a need to provide consumables to the launch vehicle right on up to the time of engine ignition, or not all so very long before that time, and, often-as-not, this provision of consumables is done via the use of Swing Arms, and NASA in particular is well-known for doing it this way, and, as a matter of cultural memory at the Kennedy Space Center, people fell into the linguistic habit of calling anything which was bolted on to the exterior of a tower that stood on the Launch Pad next to the vehicle, that served with the functionality of an umbilical, an "ARM," whether it was or not.

And the OMBUU was not, but they called it an OMBUU Arm anyway, in recognition of the fact that it was an umbilical, and as with "curtain walls" and "torque tubes" and any number of other arcane terms we've already learned all about in this thing, that oddball nomenclature served a very useful, and even vital purpose, wherein it served well to warn people that...

...things were a little different with the so-named thing in question, and ok, let's stay on top of this shit, and maintain a proper situational awareness of where we are, and what's going on here, and...

All well and good, so it's an OMBUU Arm, even if it's flush-bolted to the face of the RSS, and it don't stick out like an "arm," and it also don't go swinging around back and forth like an "arm," either.

Ok? Got it? OMBUU Arm.

I suppose, if you must, you can imagine the OMBUU having the action of a proper Swing Arm, via the agency of the whole goddamned RSS swinging back and forth, which it most manifestly did, but nobody I ever met wanted to call it the RSS ARM, even so.

That said, the business of wanting to keep the goddamned OMBUU in functioning umbilical contact with the Orbiter for as long as possible, as close as possible to launch time, is one of the drivers that dictated when the RSS would be retracted, and taken to its demate position prior to launch. Cryo wants to boil off, no matter how good your dewars are, and boiling off is just another way of saying, "Throw it away, despite all the insane time and expense of getting it in there, that we went to in the first place." And they didn't like throwing their cryo away, so they very much preferred keeping cryo umbilicals attached for as long as possible, pre-flight.

Launch Umbilicals constitute, in and of themselves solely, a tremendously ramified and recondite discipline, and our OMBUU lives squarely in the middle of a strange and wonderful land which is populated by no end of fierce, devious, and subtle beasties that must all be properly dealt with lest...

...Bad Things befall you.

Images of the actual interface on the side of the Orbiter, where the OMBUU connects to it as an umbilical, are, for whatever reason, extraordinarily hard to come by. The ET GH2 Vent, and both of the TSM interfaces, are all over the place on the internet, but the OMBUU...

...not so much.

No idea why this might be, but it must assuredly is.

But.

Some diligent digging found results, anyway.

As of the writing of these words, NASASpaceFlight.com (which has become by far the best location for finding detailed technical information about the Space Shuttle and so very very much more) has a discussion thread Topic: Shuttle Q&A Part 5 which is extraordinarily-informative about no end of things regarding the Space Shuttle, and which is HIGHLY recommended reading in general, and on Page 187 of that Discussion Thread, forum member DaveS (that link requires signing up for a membership in nasaspaceflight.com so you can log in to view it) posted an image of the Orbiter Mid-body Umbilical Interface which the OMBUU connects to.

Hit the link for that image.

Give that thing a good close looking-at.

I cannot read all of what's stenciled on it, but amongst all of the blocked-off cover plates, pneumatics/fluids connectors, multi-pin electrical connectors, and a couple of coaxial cable connectors, I can read...

...in no particular order...

...SPACECRAFT, GSE (Ground Support Equipment), FILL, DRAIN, multiple HF's (presumably Hydrogen Fill, and there's five of 'em, which means there's one for each dewar), multiple HV's (presumably Hydrogen Vent, and again, five of 'em), several OF's (presumably Oxygen Fill, five again), several OV's (presumably Oxygen Vent, a set of five, one last time), GN2FILL, GO2FILL (which means all the other "O" fill and drain is for Liquid Oxygen only?), no end of Identification Numbers, and that's not the end of things by far.

The Coax and Multi-pin Electrical connectors seem to have no identification at all, but of course each one of them has its own list of Things It Deals With, and in addition to the big Spacecraft/GSE cover plate, we have another big cover plate with nothing on it at all except for what looks to be a serial/part-ID number in inscrutably-small stenciling, and there's also what looks to be four large Mating Guide Pin connectors out there on the periphery of things.

Lotta goddamned shit going on with that OMBUU!

And clearly it's re-configurable. It's customizable. Stuff can get added, subtracted, modified, whoknowswhat, based on an unknown multitude of individual mission/payload peculiarities and particularities.

Compare the photograph of the Orbiter Mid-Body Umbilical Interface you just saw with this drawing. It's different. But it's the same too, in a general sense, so... ok. And the precise particulars of this stuff, Orbiter to Orbiter, mission to mission, price of tea in China to price of tea in India... are well outside the bounds of this narrative and we'll give it a rest, here and now. As one of my biology professors, so very long ago, would say when I asked a question that went beyond the bounds of the course material (and maybe common sense, too), as he looked directly into my eyes, "That sounds like a great topic for a research paper." And no, I never wrote a research paper after he'd said that, so you will do the same, right?

And on the tower, over there on the RSS side of things, where the Carrier Plate for this stuff extends outward from the main body of the OMBUU on its Cat Rack (which is what those things were invariably called back then, but nowadays they seem to be called Cable Tracks or Cable Carriers), every different permutation is going to need to be already in place, ready to go, if needed, and when I start showing you the engineering drawings of this stuff, you'll see just exactly what that means.

So, the OMBUU is a Pretty Big Deal, eh?

Yeah, the OMBUU is a Pretty Big Deal.

It was fabricated off-site, under a completely different contract, with a completely different 79K Drawing Package (several of them, actually), and delivered to the Pad, where it was originally set down near the toe of the Pad Slope, a little east of the road that runs along the east side of the Crawlerway which takes you up to the top of the Pad. My memory is that Specialty Maintenance and Construction (SMCI), in Lakeland, FL, the same people who fabricated the OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers, were the ones who built the OMBUU, but that's an old man's memory, and I have no proper documentation to back that up, so perhaps it's right, and perhaps it's wrong, so treat that small grain of information with caution, ok?

The OMBUU sat there on cribbing near the toe of the Pad Slope for a pretty good while, before it was moved up to the top of the Pad, and when it was taken up the Pad Slope, it was carried on a common (strong as hell, but common-looking) lowboy flatbed semi-trailer, and that little journey, to my own unexperienced eyes, was alarming.

The OMBUU was picked up by a crane, and set down on the trailer, and it was heavy enough that it caused the flatbed trailer to flex side-to-side to a remarkable degree.

Once everybody was happy with it (their happy, not mine), the driver put the truck in gear, and began creeping up the Pad Slope at a slow walking pace.

On either side of the OMBUU, a couple of ironworkers held tag lines. Ivey had me as a "site representative" which is another way of saying I was completely useless, but contractual obligations dictated that somebody from the paperwork/management end of things needed to be there in the capacity of "representative", and taking me away from my desk in the field trailer constituted the minimal loss in actual productive work that Ivey could manage, so... "Tag, you're it."

And as the little procession headed upslope, I'm out in front, walking backwards for the most part, watching, but of course I could play no actual role in things, and with my level of continuing inexperience in hands-on ironworking, it was a good thing that they kept me out of the way.

And the goddamned OMBUU was flexing the hell out of that flatbed, rocking side to side like a goddamned boat in heavy seas, and the (200 pounds, give or take) ironworkers were battling it on their respective tag lines, and I became alarmed.

But of course I was the Village Idiot, had no idea what I was actually seeing, could not have done a damn thing about anything anyway, so I kept my big mouth shut and soldiered on, out there ahead of things, out there where nothing could fall on me if things went badly wrong.

And of course the Union Ironworkers knew exactly what they were doing, and they knew exactly how much the OMBUU would be rocking side-to-side on the way upslope, and they knew that, appearances to the contrary, the weight of those two humans on their tag lines would be adequate to corral the OMBUU as it sashayed along toward its destination, and in the end, everything went according to plan, and nothing at all "happened" and my alarm receded, and I had become that small grain of experience better with what I was doing, and where I was doing it, but...

...for a while there I was convinced the damn thing was gonna be going over the side, and that memory remains clear and sharp to this very day.

So ok, so before it disappears into the sky and gets hung on the tower, let's get a good look at the OMBUU.


Yeah.

As I mentioned in the "alt" text for the first photo on this page, the OMBUU is a ferociously-complex piece of equipment.

You've been given a brief overview of what it is, and what it does for a living, so now we can kind of look at it a little closer, now that we stand at least half a chance of understanding what in the name of all holy fuck that is, that we're looking at here.

The side of the OMBUU we saw face-on in our first image, the Column Line 3 (These are OMBUU Column Lines, and they're NOT RSS Column Lines, and they're very different, so watch out, ok?) side, is now facing away from us over on the right side of this image, and we're now looking at it at from an angle, and in this frame, on the left side of things in this photograph, you're looking at the Line 1 side of the OMBUU, which faces the left side of the Orbiter's Fuselage, where the Umbilical Interface is, and on the right side, you're seeing the Line B side of the OMBUU, which is the side that faces outward, away from the RSS, toward the leading-edge Strake of the Orbiter's Left Wing, which it is quite close to, when the RSS is mated.

And yes indeed, the letter designations for the OMBUU Column Lines follow the same directional sense as the RSS Column Lines, with 'A' farther away from the Orbiter in the mated position, and 'B' closer to it, but the number designations are reversed, with OMBUU Line 1 farther away from the Hinge Column, and OMBUU Line 3 closer to it. Mark my words, this will get you at some point. Rely on it.

May as well stop right here, and take this opportunity to get you properly oriented with where the OMBUU sits on the RSS, letting you see why it looks the way it does.

And as has happened before in this narrative, it turns out that the Electrical drawings wind up giving us the best look at things by including a bunch of additional visual information, above and beyond what's really necessary for the Electrical Trades to come in and do their work, building the tower.

We'll start with 79K24048, sheet E-453 which is ostensibly for the Electronic Security System on the RSS at Elevations 155'-0" and 165'-0", but the Plan View for 165'-0" inadvertently includes a really good view of why the OMBUU has that funny clipped-corner which we're looking directly at in the photograph above, at the intersection of OMBUU Column Lines B and 1 (which are not marked on the drawing, but we'll get there too, soon enough). The outline of both the OMBUU and Orbiter are a little over-simplified and less than fully-accurate, but they're good enough, so that's why we're using this drawing.

As with the weirdness we've already encountered with the Side Seal Panels, the Floor Steel at 135'-7" and 198'-7½", and the RCS Room Door, anything on the left side of the Orbiter, which is anywhere near the Orbiter on that side, and which is also out past RSS Column Line B, is going to be a problem during mate/demate operations, because it's going to hit the Orbiter, unless we place it far enough away. The human mind does not like this one, and we need to constantly remind ourselves of the hidden dangers with stuff that's left of the Orbiter and past Line B, lest we go smashing into it when we rotate our RSS. Every. Single. Time. And that OMBUU Column Line B-1 corner over there is just a little too close for comfort, so they trimmed it off, and kept it out of harm's way.

Here's a plan view of the OMBUU at its mid-deck elevation of 172'-3" on 79K24048 Electrical sheet E-460 with Column Lines labeled for both the OMBUU and the RSS, to let you see how they work together with the OMBUU bolted on to the face of the RSS. Please note that this given elevation, 172'-3", on this Electrical sheet, disagrees with the elevation given elsewhere in 79K24048, which consistently shows it at 172'-2¾" on the Structural sheets, and this whole area here, mid-face on the RSS, where the OMBUU lives, is riddled with no end of inconsistencies, both internal to 79K24048, and external, between 79K24048 and what we used to build the RSS, our old friend 79K14110, and I have yet to fully understand what's going on here (although the internal inconsistencies are easy enough to understand as just another manifestation of the horrid fucked-up-ness of 79K24048), and I'm not done digging into this one, and all I'm doing right now is warning you, that there's some funny business going on around here, in the area of the OMBUU.

And here, on 79K24048 sheet E-462, we can see that each level of the OMBUU had a different "floor plan", and having all of them visible next to each other on the same drawing really seems to help with gaining a proper "feel" for that end of things, too. But of course all of the shown elevations on this drawing are whack, and they're not even self-consistently whack, and instead each one is uniquely and individually whack in a different way, by a different amount, and... jesus fuck, but is this stuff ever a bitch to have to deal with.

Note the funny angled cutout that mates with the existing OMBUU Access Catwalk on the RSS at Elevation 163'-9". Also note individually-whack 79K24048 discrepancy for the elevation shown as 163'-10", even though we built that damned catwalk per 79K14110 S-36 at 163'-9" (But of course it can't possibly be that simple, and, as we shall see later on, there exists the chance that the Access Catwalk was actually installed, by Wilhoit who was using Sheffield's steel to do so, at 163'-9⅜", and how many goddamned different elevation numbers are there for this fucked-up catwalk anyway? So stay tuned, ok?)

Also note the small "awning" at Elevation 181'-11" (or maybe 181'-11⅜") which you get an excellent look at on the right-hand side of the OMBUU, up at its top, in the photo at the top of this page, sticking out farther toward the main body of the RSS. This thing is a landing on the OMBUU Roof for the ladder that comes down from the Access Catwalk to the Vehicle Access Platform at Elevation 191'-0" on RSS Side 4.

Our "awning" is at the bottom end of a pair of very roundabout and indirect Emergency Egress Ladders shown here on 79K24048 sheet S-144 (note the utter horseshit location given down there in the Title Block of this thing), which provide a route down from (or up to) the Access Catwalk to the Left SRB Access Platform up on the RSS Roof shown on 79K24048 sheet S-185, with an intermediate landing on the Access Catwalk to the Left Vehicle Access Platform at Elevation 191'-0" which comes over from the top of Stair 5 which you see labeled on 79K14110 sheet A-20, and it lets you get to the OMBUU Roof, and from thence down the OMBUU Interior Stairs, and then across to the FSS along the RSS OMBUU Access Catwalk, without having to go all the way down to Elevation 135'-7" on the RSS to do it using Stair 5 exclusively.

Or, if you don't like that then you can climb upward, all the way to the RSS Roof, run across to Stair Tower 4, seen here on 79K14110 sheet A-45, over on the other side, and head down that to RSS El. 135'-7" and then hotfoot it out across to Column Line 7, and then take Stair Tower 3 to the ground, and get the hell out of there before the BFRC gets a chance to turn the lining of your lungs into a bloody foam. Yes, that's a very contrapted way to get the hell off the tower, but if there's a BFRC (Big Fucking Red Cloud - Nitrogen Tetroxide) in the air down there near the bottom of Stair 5 on the RSS, then being able to cut across to the FSS by using the Access Catwalk to the OMBUU, or escape to Stair Tower 3 without having to enter the BFRC beneath you on the RSS, is a Good Thing, no matter how contrapted it is.

And now, since you are presumed to have more than enough of a proper feel for the OMBUU itself, here's that incredibly-artistic pictorial-view vicinity drawing, 79K14110 sheet V-4, that RS&H did, gratuitously, without the least requirement for having to do so, done at no additional charge, with the OMBUU on the tower, highlighted and labeled for you, to let you see the overall sense of where it will be going over the course of this Lift.

And what the hell, why not? Here it is again on 79K14110 V-4 with a brain-dead cut and paste to let you see it where it's shown in the photograph above (without the crane that's lifting it, 'cause I'm no artist, but at least you get to see where it is in the larger scheme of things, anyway), gliding over the concrete of the Pad Deck, flying low, on its way up.

And it is flying low.

Very low.

The control exercised over things by the crane operator in this image is, at one and the same time, astoundingly precise, and completely unnoticeable.

Ho hum, there's people walking along beside this thing which has been picked up off the ground just a wee little bit, and one of them is even hands-on with it, almost looking like he's pushing it along like you'd maybe push a car that was out of gear, on level pavement.

Nope.

Nothing of the sort.

Lifts.

Lifts are radical.

I've talked about the "Concert Violinist" skill level of Crane Operators before, (Hit that link, and go back there and read that shit, so as you stand half a chance of understanding this stuff, ok?) and I'm going to add to that just a little bit, here, while we're lifting our OMBUU, ok?

The OMBUU isn't that big. Rough outline, 13 feet by 23 feet, 25 feet tall or so. Not quite "house size", but it's not missing by too much, and it's heavy, being constructed from structural steel, beams, columns, deckplates, and it's filled up with one hell of a lot of gear... and it's very much a non-trivial object.

And you see it here...

...floating.

Just above the ground.

Wafting along at an easy walking pace, headed north across the Pad Deck, like a dandelion seed on a feather-light puff of air.

And it has a height above the ground it floats over, and that height is dictated by how far up, or down, the Crane Operator has lifted or lowered his boom, and also by how much line he has paid out or taken up from the Hoist Drum inside of the crane's cab. Boom up, boom down. Hoist up, hoist down.

And it has a direction of travel across the ground it floats over, too. And the direction of travel is dictated, once again, by how far up, or down, the Crane Operator has lifted or lowered his boom, and also by how far left or right he has swung that boom to one side or the other. Boom up, boom down. Boom right, boom left.

And everything affects everything else, and if you're looking to send something traveling...

...flying low...

...in a straight line...

...you're going to be working the boom...

...and the hoist...

...one more or less counteracting the other...

...simultaneously...

...and it gets fucking hairy...

...and it gets fucking hairy right now...

...and the whole place is crawling with...

...soft...

...squishy...

...PEOPLE.

And in our photograph, farthest left, in a red shirt, a Union Ironworker is hands-on with the OMBUU. I think his name was Joe, and we'll encounter him again, more than once, and I have no recall of his last name, alas. And with his hands on the OMBUU, he's steadying it, feeling it, keeping it oriented as it wafts along like a dandelion seed wafting along just above the blades of grass in a goddamned meadow somewhere.

Center, Rink Chiles is on top of that shit.

And to the right is the Pipefitters' general foreman, clipboard in hand, who worked for Sauer Mechanical, who was the prime contractor for the job that was specified by the 79K24048 drawing package, and I cannot remember his name either, but he was a good man, no-nonsense, even-tempered, and a straight-shooter. I can hear his voice, which was clear and strong, but also had a slight softness around its edges, clearly, in my mind's ear, right now. And he's on top of that shit, too.

The OMBUU, once it was hung on the tower, became the exclusive domain of the pipefitters and the electricians. It was all pipes and tubing, wires and conduits, with Mystery Control Boxes and Panels for all of it, and us structural types had no reason to remain involved with it, which means there's a lot that I don't know about it. Ah well.

Above the OMBUU the four-legged lifting sling which carries it is mostly visible, three of the four legs visible, with the fourth one in near-perfect alignment with the one in the center, which is blocking it from view. Above, the shackles and crane hook which carries the sling are also obscured, themselves in near-perfect alignment with the light fixture at Column Line B-1, which blocks them from view, too.

At the bottom of the sling legs, the two nearest of the four adjustment turnbuckles are clearly seen, and the OMBUU is kept level for the lift by this means, ensuring that once it arrives at its destination on the tower, it will not require any undue adjustments in its orientation, plumb, square, and true, to allow for bolt-up to the connection plates it will mate with on the face of the RSS.

I just got finished saying that there was a lot that I did not know about the OMBUU, mechanically and electrically, but I've got a set of drawings here, so let's see if we can learn anything else about it by looking at the drawings.

I mentioned earlier that they went with a whole separate installation for handling LOX and LH2 for the Orbiter Fuel Cells, so let's take a look at that, now, before we go any further with this lift.

For the Orbiter's engines, for the "MPS" (Main Propulsion System), and also for the never-flown Centaur, they ran their cryo from the giant dewars out near the Pad Perimeter Fence, cross-country, up onto the Pad, and from there, either into the MLP or back around behind the 9099 Building and up into the FSS and from there to the Centaur Platform/Porch.

But with the FCSS cryo, none of that was used, and instead, they simply ran Tanker Trucks up to the base of the FSS, and hooked directly into new cryo plumbing from there.

LH2 Tanker Trucks would park at the base of the FSS on Side 2 (south side) and LOX Tanker Trucks would park on Side 4 (north side) and tap into the system to supply it, having zero interaction with the main cryo stuff for MPS and Centaur. Two whole separate countries. And exactly why it was done this way, I never learned. Clearly, they had a reason, but I do not know what that reason was for breaking out FCSS cryo into its own little isolated realm.

FCSS LH2 plumbing on the FSS general arrangement is shown on 79K24048 M-128.

FCSS LOX plumbing on the FSS general arrangement is shown on 79K24048 M-129.

Note the dewars up there at elevation 160'-0". This is where they stored their FCSS cryo.

Elevation 160'-0" on the FSS was a busy motherfucker. As the work on both towers proceeded, while I was working for Ivey Steel, as time went by, our once-pristine FSS (and the RSS, too), became more and more encrusted with a bewildering (and annoying, 'cause it was always getting in the way when you were trying to do pretty much anything) array of plumbing and cabling. Yeah, that's what the whole thing was for, in the first place, and we knew that of course, but this stuff was still a big, and ever-expanding, pain in the ass.

And you want to understand the OMBUU, and to understand the OMBUU you need to understand what it was a part of, what it was embedded within, and it was embedded within a system that, among other things, handled high-purity Liquid Hydrogen and Liquid Oxygen, and throughout this thing we've encountered both of them before, but we've never been able to really look at them, because they both went up off the Pad Deck and into the MLP, and at that point we lost them (I've been on/in the MLP, but I've never worked there), and in losing them we lost the ability to really see how this stuff was dealt with, but this time...

...with the OMBUU...

We get to see what's going on with this stuff at a pretty good level of detail, in one particular location/system, to kind of let you know how cryo propellants were dealt with in general.

79K24048 sheet M-168 shows us downtown LOX-n-LH2 Land, and we're going to detour away from the OMBUU for a bit, to see how they actually handled their insanely-cold and insanely-explosive rocket propellants.

Does that goddamned drawing even make any sense at all?

And the answer comes back, "Yes, yes it makes sense, but you gotta learn how to read it, and you cannot any more read it in isolation than you can read most of the structural drawings in isolation."

And as a structural guy, this stuff is all gibberish to me, so I have had to sit down and teach myself how to read it, and identify stuff, and follow stuff around on it, and yeah, my understanding is just about what you'd think it might be without benefit of prior experience, but I think I finally got the gist of it, but really...

...I'd rather be surfing than doing this stuff.

So here it is a second time, 79K24048 sheet M-168 but this time it's highlighted to show you the basics of where the Hydrogen and Oxygen go up here on FSS Elevation 160'-0" where they supply the OMBUU, which supplies the Orbiter, with the stuff they use for power reactants, and drinking water, and even oxygen to breathe when they're in orbit, utterly isolated and alone, slamming along through the airless void at five miles per second.

And that's just the actual Hydrogen and Oxygen end of things, and there's one hell of a lot more stuff, that has to be there to simply work the goddamned LH2 and LOX, to get it to and from wherever they need to get it to and from, and good golly Miss Molly, is there ever a lot of crap going on up there with this thing. Yeeks!

We're not gonna learn this system.

I'm not a Cryo Guy.

Never was, never will be.

So when I show you cryo stuff, be aware that I'm marveling at it just as much as you are, from a "Holy shit, what is all that stuff?" point of view.

So here's three more drawings, which include some of the ancillary stuff they have to have to operate their system. Keep an eye out for things that tell you the pressure, and what's flowing through this or that line, or tube, or pipe, or whatever (I wonder what they do if the 4,000 psi Hydrogen gets loose?), and yeah, there's plenty there.

And if they didn't need it, it most assuredly as fuck would not be there, 'cause it's one whale of a lot of extra time and expense and upkeep, to have to include all this shit...

...whatever the fuck it does.

79K24048 sheet M-173, FSS GH2 Servicing Console Instl.

79K24048 sheet M-174, FCSS-GO2 Servicing Console Instl/Detls.

79K24048 sheet M-175, FSS-FCSS GHe/GN2 Servicing Console Instl & Details.

And those three drawings are merely examples and represent the merest tip of a much larger iceberg that includes too much more to believe.

Another way to approach this size and extent of things is to look at just a single sheet of the Line Tabulation stuff which appears at the front of the Mechanical Drawing Package part of 79K24048.

With both Mechanical and Electrical, you get page after page after page of this kind of stuff, wherein tables which list every single one of the zillions of discrete elements that make this stuff up are listed.

Here's 79K24048 sheet M-6A, highlighted to let you see not only the highlighted Hydrogen stuff that you can find on M-168 which shows us the two dewars at El. 160'-0" on the FSS, (and everything except the vent line up to FSS Elevation 300'-0" can be found on it), by its line item number, but loads of other stuff too, a lot of which is outré in the extreme, and no, I have no fucking idea whatsoever what they hell it is they're doing over there on the RSS with fucking Krypton of all weird-ass stuff, but it's there.

So ok. So I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

And I'm going to be clicking my heels together three times and saying "There's no place like home," and I'm hoping these fucked up Ruby Slippers work, and get me the hell out of here, but until that happens, we've still got ourselves an OMBUU to deal with, so...

Onward...

And out and away from the FSS we go with our LH2 and LOX, across Crossover Number 4, and then the series of pipe supports hanging beneath the OMBUU Access Catwalk on the RSS, and finally beneath the belly of the OMBUU, and up and inside of it from below, and you get to see the LH2 and LOX piping runs from the FSS to the OMBUU on 79K24048 sheet M-219, (which is laughably mislabeled in the title block, because it's fucked-up PRC/BRPH 79K24048 engineering of course) and never forget that there's one hell of a lot of other stuff, above and beyond the basic fill and drain for LOX and LH2, coming into the OMBUU from not only the FSS, but also the RSS, and... it gets pretty fucking hairy in there when you're walking around inside of that goddamned OMBUU.

So ok, so now we know how the cryo gets over there and back from the big storage dewars on the FSS, and when we look at M-219, over there where the OMBUU is sitting inside of a heavy dashed line, there's a note telling us to go to Detail A on M-313 to see what's going on with the OMBUU inside that heavy dashed line, in the context of all this plumbing coming into it up from underneath the access catwalk.

And we saunter on over to 79K24048 sheet M-313 to see what happens inside the OMBUU when those cryo lines get inside of it...

...and the whole place promptly goes batshit-crazy, and no I'm not going to pursue this one so much as a single millimeter farther, not even to the point of sticking with our color-code highlighting scheme for LOX and LH2, 'cause once we get in there...

...everything explodes, and no, I do not want to know what an H₂ Accumulator does, and I never wanted to accumulate any H₂ in the first place, and that's why all you get on M-313 is just the bare yellow highlighting for the four cryo lines we're familiar with, coming across from the FSS...

...and that's it, that's all you're gonna be getting out of me with this one.

But I'm a nice guy, and since I'm such a nice guy, I'm gonna let you admire a few more of these drawings, without comment, just so you can at least say that you saw this stuff, even though you did not understand any of it, even as you were staring directly at it.

79K24048 sheet M-314, OMBUU FCSS High Pressure Complex Pneumatic Installation.

79K24048 sheet M-315, OMBUU FCSS High Pressure Complex Sections And Views.

79K24048 sheet M-316, OMBUU FCSS High Pressure Complex Sections And Views.

79K24048 sheet M-317, OMBUU FCSS High Pressure Complex Sections And Views.

79K24048 sheet M-318, OMBUU FCSS High Pressure Complex Sections And Views.

79K24048 sheet M-321, OMBUU 172-2¾” Plan View And Panel Instl Details.

79K24048 sheet M-323, OMBUU 181'-11⅜” Plan View.

79K24048 sheet M-324, OMBUU ECLSS Facility Pneumatics Installation.

79K24048 sheet M-324A, FCSS Hazardous Warning System Pneumatic Installation.

There. Did you get all that?

Good. Glad to hear it.

And now can we get back to hanging this miserable goddamned OMBUU on the tower?

Yes. Yes we can.


Ok then, let's go.

Please note that the OMBUU is now being lifted by a different crane than the one you saw it attached to in the previous images as it was being relocated northward across the Pad Deck.

Underneath it, you can see where the blocks of cribbing wood were moved to, so it could be temporarily set down, to allow the ironworkers to unhook it from the yellow crane (pretty sure that was a 90 Ton P&H), which you now see boomed around out of the way, and then attach the lifting hook from the big Manitowoc, of which you can see a very little bit of its boom, in the upper right margin of the image. Compare the crane hook, which you can see in the pear shaped lifting link, in the first image at the top of this page, with the hook you see in that link in the image above, and you can immediately tell they are different, and the hook on the Manitowoc is noticeably heavier. So we pick up our OMBUU, move it a little ways, set it down, and then pick it up again with a different crane, ok?

Working with two cranes affords the ability to do things like this, and is much quicker and cost/time-effective than it would have been to do the entire lift with the Manitowoc, which would have had to be relocated from where it is sitting on the Pad Deck now, in proper position to take the OMBUU straight up, to its destination on the face of the RSS. It did not have enough reach to pick up the OMBUU (which is heavy, remember?) from where it had originally been placed up on the Pad Deck, over near the Truck Drives, beneath the RSS near Column Line 7, for pre-lift outfitting and systems installations. Two cranes were being used anyway, so why not put the P&H to use for a bit, to keep from tying up the Manitowoc, having to relocate it to make the whole lift by itself. Crane rental time is expensive, and minutes saved are dollars saved, and this is how it gets done.

We've learned from our engineering drawings that the OMBUU had quite the array of expensive vacuum-jacketed plumbing coming in beneath it, and that's why it had to be set up as high on its cribbing as it was.

And in this image, the pipefitters general foreman is giving that plumbing a laser-like gaze.

He's worked construction long enough, and he's been around ironworkers long enough, to know that they will take matters into their own hands, and will do so in an instant, and if something is in their way...

And so he's right there, making damn good and sure nothing untoward happens to his stuff, which he is responsible for, and which he's damn good and well going to make sure comes to no bad end at the hands of someone else.

Out on the jobsite, the dynamic between craft labor trades never ceased to just fascinate the hell out of me.

There were sharp lines.

And stuff across one of those lines...

...stuff that belonged to someone else...

...was at all times, in all situations...

...considered fair game.

And if their guy wasn't there to defend and protect it...

Well then...

Ok.

So everybody made sure to have their guy right there with it whenever one of the other crafts might be getting ready to...

...interact with it.

...in a way that its owners might not wish to see happen.

And this explains my own presence, taking a lot of these photographs.

Ivey knew that I was the Village Idiot, but the pipefitters and the electricians didn't.

And it turned out to be enough, that simply having my worthless ass standing there, simply being seen there, was enough.

Enough to keep the other trades from getting any ideas about things to further their own agenda...

..that might be detrimental to our own.

And in this way the dance is danced, and for the most part, nobody's toes get stepped on, and the system works...

..but you can feel the hidden forces at play, delicately (for the most part, anyway) testing each other as they go along, looking for weak spots, looking for openings, looking for... any chance, any opportunity, to expand and reinforce their own positions in ways that give them advantage in doing their jobs... for less time, for less money, however those advantages might be seized in a stroke, or absorbed gradually over time, directly or indirectly. And it never stopped.

Of other note in our photograph above, is the noticeably-lighter-gray stuff attached to the Column Line B Face of the OMBUU, down low, from Line 1, all the way across to Line 3.

That stuff is not part of the OMBUU, and instead is part of the growing Orbiter Weather Protection stuff, and also some of the ET Access Platforms Guide Columns stuff (quite a lot of which grew, and overlapped, and eventually merged into dual-purpose encrustations that slowly began covering large tracts of the face of the RSS), which we will be encountering, more, and more, and more, as this story continues to unfold. But right now, we're just seeing the thin leading edge of the wedge which would soon-enough be hammered deeply into the bones of the RSS.

I'm going to beat the living hell out of you with this stuff later on, but not just yet. Not right now. But it's coming. Rely on it.

For now, excepting the OMS Pods Heated Purge Covers which we dealt with back on Page 60, the main bulk of OWP is still lurking out there in the unseeable future ahead of us somewhere, and so is the ET Access Platforms Guide Columns System.

But they're coming, ok?

And some of it attached directly to the OMBUU (as you can well see), and so we went ahead and bolted that stuff on, while the OMBUU was still on the ground, and much easier to work on, to smooth our very twisted and very rocky pathway ahead through The Wilderness of OWP and the Guide Columns, which we would be entering, soon enough.

Ok. Next image, please.


And as with the GOX Arm Strongback Lift we saw on the Page before last, the growing scale of things, as the lift begins to start chewing up vertical real estate, causes me to have to step back, farther and farther away from things with my fixed-zoom camera, in order to keep it all in-frame. Additionally, unlike the previous 3 photographs, I've rolled the camera over to capture the frame in landscape orientation, in order to show the overall scene, with the group of assembled onlookers included, standing there on the Crawlerway, west of the Flame Trench.

Lifts are dangerous and for the most part, people are kept well clear of things, but on this occasion Howard Baxter (who remains over near the curved rails that will carry the RSS when it rotates where we saw him in the first image at the top of this page, along with Hank Morgan) and a few bosses from the entities that worked from the field trailers down by the parking lot to the west of the Pad, relented, just a bit.

In the near foreground, left to right, I can identify the following individuals.

Far left, Howard Baxter in his red shirt nearly obscures Hank Morgan, the both of them in front of the lower right corner of the yellow P&H crane that was used to get the OMBUU to a place where the big red Manitowoc had the requisite reach to lift it into place on the face of the RSS.

Center of frame, at the very end of a stretch of bare concrete between the Crawlerway Grid Panels, Bob Queen (yellow hardhat, dark striped shirt) stands next to someone I cannot identify wearing a yellow hardhat and white shirt with black pants. Bob worked for Ivey, in administration, and I interacted with him, but not a lot. He was always involved on other stuff, external to my world.

Right of those two, standing on the right-hand Grid Panel, left to right, a woman who's name eludes me, white hard hat, light blue pants, stands next to Jack Petty (white hardhat, dark narrower-striped shirt). She sat in the very front end of Sauer Mechanical's field trailer, and was who would receive you when you entered the place, on whatever business you might be involved with. She was a decent sort, easy to get along with, and knew her shit.

Jack was an ex Union Ironworker from Local 808, and at the time was the Structural Field Representative for BRPH (Briel Rhame Poynter and Hauser, Architects and Engineers), and despite being tied to PRC via the monstrosity which was 79K24048, BRPH was a pretty goddamned good outfit to work with. Jack was a hard-ass, but with a puckish sense of humor and a twinkle in his eye. During my tenure with Ivey, Jack and I formed a close bond, and became both good friends and an efficient working-pair, resolving the myriad issues which periodically bedeviled us as the work progressed toward completing Pad B. You will be seeing and hearing much more of Jack, in subsequent frames and recountings.

To the right of Jack, two more women stand. Left, in white hardhat and a dark gray longsleeve shirt, is someone else who's name eludes me, but who also worked for Sauer Mechanical, in the accounting end of things... I *think*, and she was really good to work with. Her mindset was of solutions, not problems. One of the better members of the team over there at Sauer. Her husband also worked for Sauer, and of course I cannot give you his name either, and he was a Good Man, too. But her own story (and his too, entangled with hers as he was), ended tragically. At some point, after the work at B Pad was done, and I was down the road at Complex 41, it was related to me by someone, perhaps even my boss, Dick Walls, that at some point she was driving, and came along the immediate results of a violent car crash on the side of the road that had knocked down a telephone pole. There were injured people in the car, and she stopped and got out to help them. And when her foot touched the ground, she completed a circuit with the downed power line and was electrocuted and died instantly on the spot, while her husband was still in the car and could only watch helplessly.

Neither one of these people deserved that fate.

There are too many other people out there who do, and yet the gods did not choose them that day, and took her instead.

I still miss her, and sometimes wonder how things turned out for her husband, too.

Please do not let your own life pass you by, ok? Please live your life. While time yet remains to do so.

To the right of her, dark pants, yellow shirt, white hardhat, Tammy Ivey stands, just a bit apart. And Tammy... was... Tammy. Wade Ivey's daughter. The Owner's Daughter. She was still pretty young at the time, and had clearly not yet found her true aim or purpose in life, whatever it might have finally become. I'm pretty confident that it did not involve the construction industry, but I have no proper idea as to what actually became of her. None whatsoever. Perhaps she's building nuclear reactors now. Who knows? The Fates weave and cut their fabric in unknowable ways and ask no one's permission nor forgiveness as they do so.

And ahead of those people I just mentioned, there are others, mostly obscured, but that blue hardhat standing noticeably above all the rest, partially obscured, just beyond Jack Petty's own white hardhat, might belong to Dick Walls.

Dick Walls was tall.

In the distance, our gang of Union Ironworkers continues to wrangle the OMBUU as it begins to drift upward, with two of them, both dressed in red shirts, hauling away on the tag lines which were attached to each Line B corner of it.

And to their right, blue jeans, white shirt, white hardhat, Wade Ivey is right there with them, in motion, staying with it.

Wade Ivey was Ivey Steel.


Everyone is satisfied with the handling of the OMBUU, and now the lift has begun in earnest as the crane operator has boomed left, placing it directly above the crawlerway, and is now coming up on his load line, drawing it higher and higher above the Pad Deck.

As this occurred, I continued to step back, keeping things in-frame, and more and more of the RSS is coming into view up at the top of the photograph.

Left of center, between the uppermost "stack of dinner plates" on the Hinge Column and the white surface of the Payload Changeout Room Insulated Metal Paneling, Union Ironworkers can be seen standing on the Access Catwalk at 163'-9", ready to go to work bolting the OMBUU to the tower once it arrives.

Left of them, at the extreme terminal end of the catwalk, where it meets the vertical pipe which is the RSS Main Framing at Column Line C-3, a rectangular shape is visible. This is one of the Connection Plates that the OMBUU will be attached to on the RSS, and the crane operator is aiming for it, and will be placing the corresponding Connection Plate at the Bottom Level of the OMBUU, line A-3, flush against it, to a tolerance where the bolt holes in both Connection Plates will be lined up accurately enough to permit the ironworkers to insert bolts through the matched pairs of holes, put a washer on the threaded end of the bolt, and then follow that by running a nut down the threads, finger-tight, until it can be properly torqued down using a spud-wrench or perhaps an impact wrench.

Should the OMBUU, for any reason (and there are far more reasons than you will ever be able to imagine) shift position while someone is hands-on with the bolt, washer, nut, spud wrench, or drift pin in there, individual fingers, or even the whole hand can suddenly be lost, as things go from being separated by just an inch or three, to hard metal-on-metal contact in the blink of an eye.

Not all ironworkers have a complete set of ten fingers.

Consider that, if you will. Let that soak in, if you will.

Connecting is an extremely high-energy proposition, and it's your hands that are in there, between the surfaces that are being connected, and once in a great while...

...things go wrong.

Beneath the OMBUU Access Catwalk, scaffolding is visible, and the pipefitters and electricians will work off of this temporary support, installing the bewildering array of plumbing and cabling which comes across to the OMBUU from FSS Elevation 160'-0" running along supports which are attached to the underside of the catwalk.

Once the OMBUU has been successfully attached to the face of the RSS, things have only just begun. There remains a tremendous amount of work to do, getting it fully plumbed and wired, and finish-outfitted for its job furnishing consumables to the Orbiter via the Mid-Body Umbilical Interface, but at that point we were done with it and had essentially nothing to do with it after we hung it on the tower above and beyond connecting the emergency egress ladder down from 191'-0" to its roof and attaching a bunch of the odious Guide Columns and OWP crap to it, but all of that work was external to the OMBUU, and within its ridiculously-cramped confines we did not go.


And now I've walked back a little closer to things and have also stepped off of the Crawlerway, closer to the RSS, as the OMBUU continues its slow drift into the sky.

Howard Baxter stands, lower right corner of the frame, with a small group of TT&V people.

All of the ironworkers involved with the lift have departed the Pad Deck with the exception of the pair who will remain on the tag lines, keeping things properly aligned.

In the distance, almost unnoticeable, Wade Ivey has climbed up on the crane and is standing on the running board right next to the operator. Wade is missing nothing as this lift unfolds.

From my new vantage point, we're looking at the OMBUU from below, and you can now see the lighter shades of the vacuum-jacketed lines which cross underneath it at an angle, fairly well. Also well-shown is the "awning" we saw in the first frame of this series of photographs, this time from the opposite direction and below of course.

In the distance, behind and above the crane's cab, the North Piping Bridge is well shown. Compare the look of it to other images which contain it, on earlier pages of this narrative. Now, in addition to the High-pressure Gas Lines, you can see that the installation of the Centaur LH2 Lines has yet again altered its previous looks, from a time before the High-pressure Gas Lines showed up as seen on Page 13, and after they had been installed, as seen on Page 23.

At the far right side of the frame, just above Howard Baxter's hardhat, you can see where new SSW Piping has been hung on the East Side Flame Deflector. This is a poor image of it, but there was a significant set of modifications to the SSW System, and they ran a large, mobile and removable pipe, up the north end of the SFD's, and there was a whole bunch of structural stuff involved with it, and it included trimming a couple of feet off of the SFD at its north end and refinishing the cut edge, and I got to play around with a little bit of Fondu Fyre at this time (it's nasty gunky concrete-y stuff, but the name is just too precious and outré to let pass by, and the job it does is radical). I'm pretty sure I did not get any proper photographs of that work while it was in-progress, alas.

On Page 62, in the second photograph down from the top, and the third photograph down from the top, the same Side Flame Deflector Can be seen, and there is a float hanging off of it, and a very faint line can be seen running upwards from the float, where the work on removing the Fondu Fyre prior to trimming the north end of that Deflector had just begun.

I need to delve into the details of the Water Screen For SRB Ignition, the first drawing of which is the General Plan, shown on 79K24048 sheet S-300, and I need to talk about Fondu Fyre (and Martyte also, which we used at the Titan III/IV ITL) some more too, but I'm not going to do so, right now. Too much. Too much extra, added on to something that's already far too much, on its own. So no, we're not going to do it right now, ok?


And the OMBUU has now reached its final elevation, and I've stepped back, further yet, to keep it all in frame, and everybody is making ready for the crane operator to boom right, and bring it in.

That would be my rusty faded-yellow VW Beetle over there next to an even rustier white pickup truck, bottom left corner of the photograph. I've got a feeling that was one of Sauer Mechanical's trucks, but I cannot say for sure.

Somebody's government-issue car is also visible, directly below the red Manitowoc's cab. No telling who's it was. Those things were all over the place, and they all looked the same, so it's impossible to tell who may have driven it up there. But if it's up on the Pad Deck, right in the middle of a work area, then whoever it was had a little clout, and nobody came along to run them off, so... who knows? NASA themselves, on occasion, would show up in the form of people you would never otherwise see. People from the higher echelons.

NASA had a group that self-identified as "DE-CAT" and that stood for the Design Engineering people who oversaw Construction, Activation, and Tests. And there were other groups, too. Big ones. But we're not gonna get into it. No goddamned way we're gonna get into it. But NASA is vast beyond imagining, and at any point, any one of them, as individuals, or by twos and threes, or as proper groups, could suddenly show up at the Pad on business which you do not have a need to know. And therefore, of course, you will never know.

And Pad B was only one item under their purviews, among very many other items. NASA's a big place, and they do an astounding amount of wildly-different things, most of which, at any kind of level of proper detail, nobody's ever heard of.

Pad B was pretty high profile, but there's so very very much more.

And as part of their jobs, DE-CAT had to manage things not only from an engineering point of view ("Let's make sure the bridge doesn't collapse when we let the first car drive across it, ok?"), but also from a scheduling and financial point of view, and that very much wasn't all of it, but enough already, MacLaren, give it a rest, ok?

KSC-SPEC-G-0002B tells us how they did their own in-house cost estimates for construction in general.

And KSC-SPEC-G-0003 tells us how they did their own in-house cost estimates for GSE (Ground Support Equipment, which is the stuff you find all over the place out on the Pads that you've got to have, or otherwise no launch for you, Mister Space Program Guy.)

And lemme tell you, this shit gets hairy. Tremendous amounts of time and energy get expended on this stuff. Beyond imagining. Truly.

And the history of construction in general, and construction contractors in particular, tells us that doing this work in-house, completely duplicating what the people who are furnishing and installing your stuff are doing, is mandatory, or otherwise they will rob you blind, with greed-fueled horseshit estimates and greed-fueled horseshit cost-proposals.

If only it were not so.

If only people could be counted on to do the right thing.

But alas, they cannot.

People, following their own individual Path of Least Energy, will stop at nothing, given the proper set of circumstances to do so.

People will kill you, for money.

Happens all the time.

Therefore, anything less dire than murder outright, is also, by definition, something that people will do to you, given the proper set of circumstances to do so.

It's a fucking jungle out there.

People are no fucking good.

And, interestingly enough, that one cuts in both directions, and I've had to deal personally with evil motherfuckers on the other side of the house, who knew to the penny what something was going to cost and yet still dug their heels in mightily, attempting to give us less than half of what it cost us, to do the goddamned job, and do it correctly.

Disregarding the proclivities of certain individuals and organizations, a tiny peephole into the inner workings of DE-CAT has cracked open, through which we get to see inside.

One of my anonymous benefactors has given me permission to use her/his words, so you can see, just the tiniest little bit, some of what was going on elsewhere, behind closed doors, while we were out there on the Pad Deck, beatin' and bangin' on stuff.

Behold, "Lunch with Pete."


\\\\\\\

Yes ...Pete Minderman was the Chief of Design Engineering (DE). As I recall, "Lunch with Pete" was a periodic status review of all the ongoing projects. Monthly?

All the NASA leads attended. Some, like Bernie Jeffocoat, invited their non-NASA support to attend. One of those non-NASA types was me. The standard support was like: "Yes, Sir. Yes, Sir, three bags full."

It was a large conference room in the HQ Building. Packed. Third floor at the center office. Now just a memory.

I myself did not receive any of the "lunch" part. Yes, Mr. Minderman would bring his lunch bag. And eat. But the project review was pretty close to an "inquisition" in front of all your friends and relatives so I only brought supporting documents and a notepad to write down my action items.

I do not recall whether this was lunch or another project review but we had a "magic" moment:

The 39B team was presenting status with the latest contract with Sauer. Change order 1 was issued to the contractor with a gov cost estimate of about roughly $50,000. The Sauer proposal was about $500,000. The estimate was prepared by PRC who were typically extremely frugal? I remember looking at some of those PRC estimates at the LETF and suggesting that we issue the change to PRC. Let us all watch them do it for that $ amount. Anyway, the 39B team presented moan and woe with very low cost estimates and very high proposals and the Contracting Officers wringing their hands.

Next up to bat was the LETF Launch Accessories Contract. We had a lot of schedule pressure and even more changes than 39B. The change orders and cost estimates were prepared by the various NASA system designers. Our group had offered to help with the cost estimates since we would be doing the proposal technical evaluations anyway. But our offer was declined. The result was that the engineers were under great pressure to get the engineering out and keep the project moving. So they just eyeballed the cost estimates with high lump sums. I remember some "estimates" were nothing but one lump sum.

So when we presented the summary status it went like this:

Sum of all estimates = Large number
Sum of all proposals = maybe half of the sum of the estimates
Sum of negotiated changes = maybe 80% of the proposals.

Hey, the Contracting Officer knew there was fat in the proposals. And it was fun to "negotiate"!

The room was silent and someone bravely asked if we had the numbers mixed up.

When we confirmed that those were "actuals" the room exploded.

///////


Different world. Whole different planet.

And from the Pad Deck, it was utterly invisible.

And unknowable, too.

But this is a story about constructing the damn thing, so I shall not linger here, having Lunch With Pete, any longer. I do not like Pete. Nor do I like his compatriots. Nor do I like his Lunch, either.

Elsewhere in the image above, my having changed my vantage point with the camera yet again, reveals the Water Screen for SRB Ignition stuff over on the West Side Flame Deflector, same deal exactly as what's on the East one, but opposite hand of course.

Get a look at the face of the FSS, Side 1, while we're here, too.

I'm standing on the Pad Deck, nearly in-line with it, and it's essentially in profile view, and immediately left, above and below, of the suspended OMBUU, there are smallish platforms hanging off the face of the FSS that have only recently shown up.

Our first hint of their existence comes on Page 63 as background for a beyond-happy 6 year old Kai, in two different frames, on standing on the Centaur Porch, and the other out on the Perimeter Road. Very small things to be picking up in those photographs, blurry, indistinct, and I let it go, at the time. We had plenty of other stuff on our plate, and I knew we would be returning to them, in detail, later.

This stuff is associated with hinges and latchbacks for both the GOX Arm and the Orbiter Access Arm, and we will be seeing sequences of both of these lifts too, soon enough.

The Orbiter Access Arm (OAA) is what the crew of the Space Shuttle walked out away from the main body of the FSS upon, to gain entrance, through the open Hatch, into their Launch Vehicle.

There is a fearsome energy that hovers in the air around the OAA, and I never failed to feel it when I was in its presence. Many, perhaps even most, people were utterly insensate to that energy, but not me. It shimmered invisibly, thick in the air, all around the OAA, at all times.

The OAA had a profoundly-strong mana.

And in our photograph, down low...

Near unseeable...

Wade Ivey remains with the crane operator...

...watching.


They're closing in on it, for true and for real, at this point.

The crane operator is booming right. Slowly. Creepingly. As the OMBUU inexorably edges inward to a hard-contact, steel-on-steel, position against the face of the RSS.

Down on the ground, over by the Flame Trench, our two Union Ironworkers are now putting their backs into it for real, work-gloved hands gripping the tag lines tightly. Both lines are clearly in significant tension as they muscle the OMBUU to keep it from inadvertently bashing into something, or someone, irreversibly crushing it... or them... up in air, a hundred feet and more up above their heads.

Up on the tower, as close as they can get to things without actually interfering with the ironworkers who will be making the connection, personnel are assembling on the far end of the OMBUU Access Catwalk at elevation 163'-9", monitoring things closely. Quality, Safety, Craft Labor, Management, Engineering, Contractor, Structural, Mechanical, Electrical, NASA-direct, and more, all had very good and sufficient reason to be eyes-on as close as possible, at this stage of the Lift. It's starting to get crowded up there, but nobody is going to be getting in the way of any of the ironworkers as they continue to perform their tasks.

Don't get in the way of an ironworker when he or she is doing their job, ok? Not advisable. You will be relocated if you do. Stay the hell away from those people, ok?


And at this point, things have slowed waaay down, and in fact they've come to a complete halt, owing to an unexpected interference which I never learned the exact nature of.

For the uninitiated... For the "casual" observer... For people who have no idea what the hell they're looking straight at... Lifts can be excruciatingly boring.

Nothing happens.

For interminable lengths of time.

Which of course is utter bullshit...

...but if you're not directly involved...

...then it kind of becomes something like watching paint dry.

And as things hung there in frozen suspension, I hotfooted it over to the base of the FSS, punched the elevator button, and blasted on up to a place above where they were connecting the OMBUU (I was useless for the lift itself, so best I keep my useless ass out of the way hmm?), got out at the 260'-0" elevation, and stepped on over to the little Camera Platform on the southeast corner of the FSS there, leaned as far out beyond the upper handrail runners at the south corner of the platform as I semi-safely could, and grabbed this frame, looking down on things from above.

And a fine frame it is, too.

This one not only gets high marks for "informative", but it also gets high marks for "artistic merit" and "dramatic impact" too.

Check out Howard Baxter standing there talking to Hank Morgan, who's half standing and half sitting on the front left fender of my teeny tiny little VW Beetle way off in the distance, way way down there on the ground.

Check out that brute of a crane hook, holding up the OMBUU, suspended on its special-construction 4-legged lifting sling.

Checkout the overall composition of the image. The lights, the darks, the lines that take your eye to first one place and then another, as you cast your gaze across it.

Check out the shapes and the implied muscle of the steel that everything is made of.

Check out the people on the catwalk viewed from above, down there on the bottom margin of the frame, far right, gazing into the implacable darkness where mysterious work is being done on even more mysterious equipment, the like of which would do any respectable science-fiction movie proud.

Yeah, this is a really good frame.

I like it a lot.

So. What's going on here, anyway?

You cannot tell from this image, but the OMBUU is a little high. It's a little above where it needs to be.

You'll see that better in the coming frames, but not yet. Not this one.

And although it's hard to visualize in this photograph,the OMBUU is also offset too far toward the Hinge Column. Projected against the face of the RSS, it's high and right.

And down in the area where the work is going on, this image is too dark.

So I rendered it grayscale, cropped in on it, and worked it to bring up as much of the light/dark contrast as I could. I probably overdid it, but here it is, anyway, labeled to kind of help you see how stuff goes together down there on the "first floor" of the OMBUU.

Down at the very bottom edge of our grayscale close-crop, there's an arrow pointing to "this interface", and that's not very well-displayed, but if we go back to the very first image at the top of this page, we get an excellent view of it, and in this way you can now get a better feel for that thing, ok?

Like I just said, we're still a little bit high and right.

And now that I think about it, I haven't yet shown you the structural drawings for the OMBUU, so this might be a good time for that, to further help you with visualizing this stuff.

I do not have the actual 79K structural drawings to which the OMBUU was fabricated in the shop, but I do have the next-best thing, and that, oddly enough, turns out to be part of the Demolition Drawing Package, which was used to dismantle the RSS on Pad B in preparation for SLS and the Artemis Program, and which was taken from the original OMBUU drawing package, 79K05836.

So we'll use those, instead.

And we'll start out by taking a closer look at that funny angled cutout which fits snugly around the Access Catwalk at 163'-9" (but remember, like I mentioned farther up on this page, it might be 163'-9⅜"), and which you can see part of in the photograph above.

Here it is on the Demo drawing, but I've taken it upon myself to name that drawing (and the ones that follow, too) by its original 79K nomenclature, so here you go, OMBUU Elevation 163'-9⅜" as it was originally depicted on Drawing Package 79K05836 sheet S-4, and yes, I'd really like to get my hands on that original 79K05836 drawing package and see if that damnable little ⅜" addition to the elevation of the Access Catwalk at 163'-9" is there or not, and if I ever do manage to lay hands on it, I'll return to the scene of this crime and introduce it as evidence, for or against that miserable little ⅜" differential.

And this plan view is all well and good, and we can clearly see the angle of the perimeter framing over there heading toward the Line A-3 corner of the OMBUU, but it doesn't really tell us the whole story, and what's going out there at the extreme end of things right on the A-3 Corner, anyway?

And we look at 79K05836 sheet S-5 and we discover more than one little bit of interestingness.

To help you visualize, S-5 is looking at OMBUU Column Line A, which is the column line that butts up against the face of the RSS, and is perforce the column line that does all the actual work, when it comes to holding the damn thing up in the air, ok?

And you're looking at it, as depicted on S-5, kind of from the inside out, as if you were inside the OMBUU, looking toward Line A, with the RSS behind it, instead of what you might expect with a view like this, which would have you looking at it in proper elevation view, looking at its exterior, ok?

Inside looking out.

It's a perfectly-legal way of looking at things, but with the backwards numerical Column Line system on the OMBUU, as compared with the numerical Column Line system on the RSS, it will, as I warned earlier on this page, get you, and cause you to utterly misapprehend things, with left and right reversed. So. Mind where you're at, ok?

And while we're minding where we're at, notice please, that the Work Point for the lower Connection Plate on OMBUU Line 2, shown on 79K05836 sheet S-5, which is dead-nuts the same as the center of the Bolt Pattern, and is the exact same elevation as the center pair of the five vertical pairs of bolt holes on that plate, is shown as 163'-5".

Ok.

Fine.

Now let's compare that exact same place, as shown on 79K14110 sheet S-26, which Wilhoit erected using Sheffield's steel.

Son of a fucking bitch, but it's one inch lower in elevation on the OMBUU drawing than it is on the RSS drawing!!!

Same.

Exact.

Place!

Now... how in the name of living fuck you get from the bottom of the OMBUU itself, where it connects to the RSS, being one full inch lower, and somehow still manage to get the top of the grating on the Access Platform that goes to it, being ⅜" higher, I have NO idea, and for now, I'm just gonna walk away from that one...

And right around in here somewhere, I'm starting to get a sneaking suspicion that at some point between my time building the RSS working for Sheffield, and my time building the RSS working for Ivey (and time there was, and among other things that happened during this time was that the FSS went from red to gray, when they sandblasted and painted both towers), they went out there and surveyed the goddamned thing, and they surveyed it closely (the whole world works to the goddamned Space Shuttle, and ALL elevations must match the Space Shuttle as it sits there on the MLP, and they must match that goddamned Space Shuttle EXACTLY), and when they did that...

They discovered that the motherfucking RSS had sagged a little here, and warped a little there, and instead of the as-built elevations for stuff in this area, mid-face on the RSS, they were now looking at as-exists elevations...

And they didn't have anybody to blame for it (except themselves of course, 'cause somehow somebody failed to take this creeping alteration of elevations on the RSS over time into account, so, as we've already seen too many times, they swept the motherfucker under the rug, and then they simply altered the elevations to match as-exists on 79K24048 (which they nevertheless still managed to fuck up in a thousand and one other places in a thousand and one other different ways), and 79K05836, and god knows where else too, and blithely put subsequent Requests For Bid out there incorporating the set of changed numbers without making any reference to it, or any comment about it, and not a goddamned peep came out of them about any of it, and...

Yeah...

...it's all starting to come together here, and if this is not enough, just you wait till we get to the Guide Columns, and oh boy, do I ever have a story for you there, and "as-exists" looms LARGE in that story, and I wound up writing the goddamned paper on it myself, so I should know, right?

But not yet.

Not now.

We'll file this one under the heading of "Foreshadowing" for now, and move on, elsewhere.

Ok, what else is going on down here at the bottom of the OMBUU on its Line A-3 corner?

And another look at 79K05836 S-5 lets us see that the "column" over there on the A-3 corner, doesn't even make it all the way down to the proper "bottom" of the OMBUU, and instead stops short, complete with a nominal ⅛" shim space, and will come to rest on top of the Access Catwalk framing member, and we know for a fact that the Catwalk was never intended, and never designed as a proper structural member for bearing static loads above and beyond the sorts of live loads you'd expect to see from personnel and equipment that might be traversing that catwalk.

And then we look at that flimsy WT4x10 diagonal which comes down to our A-3 "column" from the Upper Connection Plate on Line A-2, to a work point of 171'-9¼" on Line A-3, and we see that it has clearly been designed to take loads primarily in tension instead of compression, and we suddenly realize that our "column" on Line A-3 is actually a HANGER.

And it too is designed to take loads primarily in tension, and then we look back at those two Connection Plates, one high, and one low, on Line A-2, and they both tie to some pretty hefty RSS Main Framing on RSS Line C-3, and it all suddenly becomes very clear that the whole OMBUU is being held up by just those two Connection Plates on Line A-2, and the stuff over there that meets the Catwalk on Line A-3 is just kind of dangling. Read the Installation Notes on 79K24048 sheet S-152, if you'd like any further confirmation, and notice that the bolts are spec'd out as A-490, and on top of that, they're telling us to weld the Connection Plates, all around, and then leave the bolts in place, and... yeah, they don't want that sonofabitch going anywhere after it's been hung on the tower, and those connections are what makes that happen.

And then we look back over to the Connection Plates past Line A-1 to the left, and we see they're much lighter than the Plates on Line A-2, and there's some pretty good WT5x24.5 diagonal bracing going to them, over twice as heavy as what's going to our hanger, and that heavier bracing is going to be noticeably better in compression as well as tension, and it then becomes clear that those guys are for stiffening things on the side of the OMBUU which faces the Orbiter directly and which the Cat Racks and Carrier Plate which interface with the Orbiter are going to be coming off of, and which need to be held in place as rigidly as possible, and then all of a sudden, the entire design philosophy of the OMBUU becomes clear, and...

Shit like that is just as cool as fuck, if you ask me.

The sensation of actually figuring it out, and the sensation of actually understanding what's going on with stuff, for me, is just about as delicious as hell.

Your mileage, of course, may vary, and for a lot of people, there is no mileage, but that's their problem, not mine, and that's their life reduced by never getting to feel these kinds of very pleasurable sensations, not mine.

So ok.


And here we find ourselves looking at a Renaissance-grade tableau, and if everybody was dressed in robes and had fucking halos around their heads it would still fit the tone and sense of the image perfectly, and this is yet another image from this Lift that I really like. I did exceptionally-well with photographing this Lift. I got lucky with it way more times than I should have.

Ok, where are we looking at this from?

Clearly, we're dead-level with the OMBUU Access Catwalk, but equally-clearly, we're not on the OMBUU Access Catwalk, because you can see there in the bottom right corner of the frame, that we're outboard of that handrail, and there's some toeplate down there too, and that stuff leaves no doubt that we're not standing on the catwalk that everybody else is standing on...

...so where are we?

The RSS is demated, of course, and that means that if we were anywhere within the perimeter of the FSS looking toward it, we'd be looking through or past the Hinge Column, or the Struts, or both of 'em, and...

...nope, not there, either.

But we're close 'cause that's Crossover Number 5 we're seeing a curved piece of, intruding into the frame over there on the right-hand side, above the assembled group's heads, which means the Hinge Column is just barely out of frame to the right...

...so....

There's nowhere else we can be except for that portion of the OMBUU Access Catwalk System which comes into play when the RSS is mated, and which, when the RSS is not mated, just kind of sticks out there between the FSS and the Hinge Column, directly above wide-open yawning death over 150 feet above the bottom of the Flame Trench, east of the Struts. And yeah, this too was one of my favorite "Fortress of Solitude" places to go on the towers when The Fates permitted me to. Jaw-droppingly stupendous views in all directions, up and down, all around you, and nobody ever went out on this thing which meant you were always utterly alone, so whatever time you might have spent out on it (and me, being me, spent perhaps just a bit more time out there than I properly should have) was time very well spent indeed.

And here it is here, all nice and labeled-up for you on Image 045 showing you your location and your direction of view, so as you can get a proper feel for where you're seeing everybody here in Image 095.

And in our photograph, we see Wade Ivey, closest person on the catwalk to the OMBUU, with his back turned toward it and his hands together in front of him the way he would do, addressing the assembled group, and it's clear that he has everybody's attention.

Behind him, to the left in the image, significant daylight is showing between the still-suspended OMBUU and the end of the Access Catwalk, and without the slightest doubt, something unforeseen has come up, and whatever it is, it's interfering, and unless and until it gets addressed, the OMBUU isn't going anywhere.

Wade was a man of his word, and was well-known out on the Cape (and elsewhere) as a man of his word, and my money is on him being right in the middle of telling everybody his immediate plan for removing whatever is is that's in the way, so as he can, as quickly as possible, finish the Lift, and let everybody who has been denied access to the area (including other Ivey personnel, working elsewhere on the tower) get back to work.

But somebody, owns the interference, and if their stuff gets summarily torched off of the tower, then that right there constitutes extra work, as well as a modification to the tower, and you don't just go blasting away with something like that (or at least most of the time you don't), without the advice and consent of a whole lot of people, not limited to just the owner of the to-be-torched whateveritis, but also NASA, and QC, and Union Stewards, and Engineering, and... you know the drill.

But.

Wade being Wade, everybody up there has already internally agreed, in principle, to allowing Ivey Steel to do whatever needs doing, right now, because they all know that Wade will make good on anything that turns out to be Ivey's problem, and he will also follow up with getting such paperwork as must follow an event like this, squared away, depicting the as-built results of stuff like this (and that end of things is where I came into the picture, often enough, but not this particular day).

And if he wasn't a man of his word, then the whole goddamned thing shuts down until official paper is produced and issued, and...

...that could take a while...

...and that could wind up costing a bunch of different people a lot of money and schedule time.

So it's in everybody's interest to get this thing, whatever it is (and I never learned), dealt with, right now, on the spot, and worry about all the niggly little details later on some time.

NASA, and Engineering, and QC, and Safety, and the other Contractors, and all of the rest of them, were fully capable of bending the rules in time of need, and so long as you dealt with them honorably, and never evidenced any inclination to get over on them, then they would very happily wink at deviations from the plans, and from the specifications, and from the contract, some of which deviations were quite significant, in the longer-term overall interests of getting the job done as efficiently and as rapidly as possible.

This very certainly wasn't always the case, and there were those individuals and those offices that were utter pricks about it, every single time, but thankfully, they were in the minority, and everybody else worked as a team, to keep those miserable sonofabitches in the dark, as often as possible, and in a lot of instances, they never knew. And the tower got built just fine without their "help," and the Space Shuttle cleared the tower just fine without their "help," too. So fuckem.

Rink Chiles is standing there in a yellow hardhat, looking down, just a bit, and I can guarantee you that as Wade elucidates his plan to the rest of the group, he's already way ahead mentally, and is going through things conceptually in his mind, and once agreement is arrived at by everyone else, Rink will be hitting the ground running. And that's just how Rink worked, and that's one of the things that made him as good as he was, at what he did. Rink was savvy, and had an ability to size things up, and execute them, at lightning speed without mistake, and without having to alter course, once set.

As to who actually owned the interference, I never learned. Electricians? Pipefitters? Sprinklerfitters? TT&V (yes, those people too, could have been the source of the problem, and their handprints were all over the place by this time)? NASA? Engineering? Somebody else? No idea. None at all.

And while we're here, let us not be too hasty to move on.

Let us have a bit of a look around.

Let us consider a few things, while we can.

Check out that pickboard, running along beneath everybody's feet there on the Catwalk.

There might be room enough to stand up straight on it, but... maybe not.

And directly beneath Wade's left arm, you can see the horizontal members of one of the Pipe Supports (or maybe it's a Cable Tray Support) hanging down in there, so even if you could stand up straight, you're still going to be having to deal with that stuff as you move from one end of the pickboard to the other, doing your work, and it's a long way down, over the side of that thing.

And of course the Catwalk itself is not without its own set of issues.

How do we get down there to that pickboard underneath it in the first place?

And you look directly in front of the feet of the farthest person away from Wade, with his back to the camera and a pad of paper in his right hand, held against the back side of his hip...

Wide open.

Wide fucking open.

And you look close, and you can see just a teeny little bit of the top of the ladder that takes you down below...

And yes, there's a bit of light roping around the area there, but really...

A thing like that is FAR easier to get into than you would ever imagine, sitting in your comfortable chair, reading these words.

The place is a deathtrap, make no mistake about it.

And of course that's the missing grating panel, right there, stood up on edge and leaning against the handrail, right next to Rink, and the guy in the yellow shirt who's standing behind him there on the catwalk.

"Don't step in the hole."

On the OMBUU itself, in the gloom just past the end of the Catwalk, that looks like some welding blanket that's been tossed there in preparation for whatever's about to happen.

And up above, there's more of it draped over the corner of the "Awning" that sticks out from the side of the OMBUU Roof, and a pair of Union Ironworkers are up there getting organized, and one of them is on the OMBUU itself, but the other one looks like he just might be standing in that Cable Tray that comes around the corner there, and...

I'm not so sure I would personally, for myself, trust a cable tray with my full weight plus the weight of whatever it was that I was handing to my buddy on the OMBUU...

...'cause you can rest assured that fucking cable tray was never designed, and never intended, to deal with those kinds of live loads, and it's aluminum, not steel, and it's very definitely not as strong as steel...

But maybe that's just me. I dunno.

Nobody got hurt this day, so...

Ok.


I have once again relocated myself, departed from where the previous frame was taken, and walked across the crossover catwalk from the FSS to the RSS, and now we find ourselves out on the OMBUU Access Catwalk itself, and ninety-nine and a half times out of a hundred, this is what a guy with a camera out on Pad 39-B, while it was under construction in the early 1980's, would see when he placed that camera to his face and looked through the viewfinder, getting ready to pull the shutter release.

You're either being completely ignored, or you're being given an unpleasant look.

One or the other.

And I wasn't one to collect photographs of unpleasant looks, so I would relocate, reframe, let the person move out of the way if they could, or simply wait it out, and that's why you don't wind up getting a collection of unpleasant looks throughout these photo essays.

But once in a while...

I'm pretty sure his first name was Bill, and my brain, in its prosopagnosic way, wants to give me fragments of a last name that quite likely (but no guarantee here, ok?) contained the letter 'H' and 'A' and maybe an 'M' or 'N', and I want to say "Hamilton" but when I say it I feel strongly that it's wrong, and is mis-scrambled somehow, and the sounds of those letters might be mis-sequenced somehow (happens all the time with me), and it's a shame, but it just won't come... right now anyway... although Billy Lee's name did come, FORTY YEARS LATER, so I continue to revisit this inaccessible area in my memory-vault because one day, for no reason, the damn door might just swing wide open at a feather's touch...

And he looks like he's just about an inch from springing into motion and taking direct action with me...

And he may very well have been about to do just that...

And you can see me, close, within easy reach, in yellow t-shirt and white hardhat, reflected, top left corner of Bill's left-hand sunglasses lens, elbows down and in, holding my hands and camera steady to my face, in my standard "take a picture" stance...

But the shutter had fallen, and the deed was done, and the two of us got along exceedingly well at all other times, in all other places, and we worked well together, helping each other whenever our worlds intersected...

And the moment passed, just as quickly as it had arrived.

Bill was Olson Electric's general foreman, and Olson was the Electrical Contractor for 79K24048, and there was a lot of electrical work that went on, as the structural steel bones of the Pad got fleshed-out with all of the equipment required to launch a Space Shuttle, which of course is the whole reason for having those bones there in the first place, right?

The two great disciplines (and with Piping, make that three, could never match perfectly as they arose from their separate sheets of paper, and formed a Great Construct reaching upward into the sky, and the amount of coordination required between disciplines, between Crafts, to make it happen, was extensive and never-ending.

In the photograph above this one, we can see Sauer Mechanical's general foreman in attendance, but he's well-away from Wade Ivey, and this tells me that whatever is interfering has turned out to be electrical, and not mechanical, and he very definitely needs to stay involved, because things like this can change, but most of the time they don't, and if so, he remains interested, but not directly so.

Bill, on the other hand, in that same image, might be standing there right next to Wade, partially obscured by Rink, and somebody else in a dark shirt, but the distinct red and white "Olson" diamond cannot be seen on the front of that person's hardhat, but I'm more than half convinced that it's there, and the camera failed to pick it up because it's overexposed, being exactly where the brightest sun glint would be coming off of that hard hat.

Who's to say?

But.

Presuming that it is Bill in that photograph, and in combination with the fact that he's closest to Wade and Rink as they consider the OMBUU before them in the photograph directly above these words, it becomes quite likely that our issue is one of something electrical, some cable tray support, or conduit, or piece of unistrut, or light fixture, or...

And Olson is not going to be eating the costs for any extra work on this one if they can help it, and Bill is right there, making sure Ivey doesn't unilaterally decide to do something, because Union Ironworkers...

...just might...

And Bill is also there to help Ivey Steel.

Presuming it does not become onerous and expensive, Wade and Rink will happily accommodate Bill by altering their plan of attack, such that the altered item(s), are in sensibly better shape for whatever follow-on Olson might be required to do in order to leave things in proper finished condition so as QC can come along afterwards, give it a look, and sign off on it.

Little shit has the power to become outrageously complex and recondite out here, and you can never let your guard down against it.

Out on the OMBUU itself, look close and you can see a white plastic bucket with a welding hood sticking up out of it, and if you look even closer, that might be the word "Skinner" scrawled down the side in permanent marker lettering denoting ownership of the bucket and its contents. Neither Dave nor Steve Skinner has shown up in this series of images, but rely on the fact that they were there. They were both good hands, and could always be counted on to appear wherever well-done ironworking needed to occur.

Below and left of the bucket, that looks like one of the shims that will be getting placed between the Connection Plates of the OMBUU and the RSS per Note 2 on 79K24048 sheet S-152, which we've already seen.

And of course, beyond the white plastic bucket, the outré weirdness of the OMBUU's innermost guts can be seen in all of its old-timey-science-fiction-movie glory, and if Maria from Metropolis was to come striding out from behind that stuff into plain view, I don't think that I'd be as surprised as perhaps I should be.


And a final relocation, for yet another different perspective on this Lift, for our 12th and final photograph in this series.

And for this one, I got as far up above, and as far out out in front, as I possibly could, so that I could peek around and even see the stupid OMBUU at all from up here, and when you first look at this photograph, it kind of leaves you scratching your head as to where the hell I might have been standing. No drones back in those days, so the camera had to be attached to a human and that human had to be boots down some goddamned place or other, so...

Whereisit?

And our clue, and our proof, runs along the full height of the left margin of this image.

And to understand the clue, and to understand the proof, we're going to have to temporarily veer away from the OMBUU, and take our first plunge into some very dark and cold water, which we always referred to out on the Pad as simply the "Guide Columns", but which is more formally and properly named the "E.T. Access Platforms Guide Columns System." We've already been splashed in the face with a couple of handfuls of this unpleasantly cold and dark water, but we rinsed it off, and dried ourselves off, and put it behind us, but now we find ourselves having to deal with it yet again, and now, like it or not, we're going to become immersed in it.

And you've already seen your first fleeting glimpse of it, and now we're going to be returning to that glimpse, as depicted on 79K24048 sheet S-224, because things have now passed beyond the world of concept and have entered the world of structure, and of course structure is a thing you can see, and lay hands on, and...

It is becoming...

And here it is here, on 79K24048 sheet S-234, in a closer view of the parts of things we're interested in right now, and I've highlighted just that part of it that had departed the world of concept, and already arrived in the world of structure, and had become visible in our photograph, the day we hung the OMBUU on the tower.

And it's that thing which you see running down the left-side margin of our photograph, Image 097, and it's also that thing which tells us precisely where I was standing when I took this final image of the OMBUU Lift.

And it is just the barest sliver of the Upper Right Fixed Guide Columns.

And again, as with the Access Platforms for the OAA and the GOX Arm, we've already had our first, ever so faint, encounter with this stuff, on Page 63, close-on to the line where the visible becomes invisible, as background for my son Kai. And as with the Access Platforms, I let it go, at the time. But it was there, and it showed, however dimly and indistinctly, on the photographs, which stand in mute testimony as to its inchoate existence... then.

And there's only one place I could have been standing, where that thing could encroach into our image, and that one place would be on the Right SRB Access Platform, up at Elevation 220'-0".

And I'm gonna show you how that works by taking 79K24048 sheet S-225 and sheet S-226, and doctoring up S-225, and then pasting the OMBUU from S-226 into it, creating 79K24048 S-225/S-226 Frankendrawing, so as you can get at least half an idea of what I had to go through up there to get this photograph, and to also increase your own familiarity and understanding of this dreamworld I found myself walking around in, so as you can maybe improve your own ability to enter this dreamworld, 'cause it was a marvelous, fearfully-uncanny, not-to-be-believed place, and I really do want to share this world with you, and with everybody, ok? It's not every day you find yourself walking around in a dream so vivid that it could send you to bankruptcy court or even kill you, but at one and the same time was also one of the most fantastic and delightful places you could ever imagine (presuming your imagination could even go so far in the first place), and it's well worth your time to do the best you can to enter into this place, ok?

I really really want to take you here.

Which is why I'm hitting this stuff so goddamned hard.

And with what you've learned to this point, now we can go back to Image 093 and give our Upper Right Fixed (non-mobile) Guide Columns a look, in highlighted and labeled form, to help us further understand what we're seeing over there on the left margin of Image 097, and I really do wish I had a better image of this stuff in its as-shown intermediate form, but alas I do not, so we work with what we've got, and oh by the way, Image 093 (and all the rest of this stuff too), is EXTRAORDINARILY rare, and I defy you, or anyone else, to find anything with this stuff in it, as herein seen. NASA themselves are worthless, and it only goes downhill from there.

And as we continue our plunge, farther and farther into the fetid murk of the Guide Columns, at some point after Image 093 and 097 and all the rest of this OMBUU Lift series of photographs was taken...

Some outrageously daffy bullshit occurred, the likes of which I would never have believed possible, except for the fact that I wound up getting involved with it personally, writing paper on it.

After reading the words up above here, and seeing things like 79K24048 sheet S-234 which is telling us that we've got an extensive vertical run of structural steel which is tied back to the face of the RSS, we've already got the background information we need to understand the daffiness of what happened next, after Rink had supervised the installation of this iron, but prior to pretty much anything else being done with it or added on to it.

So ok. So vertical run. Vertical. And they're just as fussy as hell about things like vertical, and we've come more than far enough to understand how fussy they are with dimensions in general...

...and...

Rink being Rink, at this point, he decided, on his own, that he'd give the stuff he'd already installed, shop-fabricated Fixed Guide Columns truss segments, complete with tie steel sticking off their sides which attached them to the face of the RSS along their full length and some fairly heavy iron which they connected to up at their tops that's a little out of frame high, on Image 093 (W18's, the one on Line 4.6 being a little heavier than the one on Line 3.4 'cause it held up a longer length of Fixed Guide Column), per the drawings (and yeah, we're gonna be punching through the front wall of the RCS Room to get to the structure underneath it up on top, and welding it on to various other platforming and stuff farther down, using the specified dimensions for those members that tied the main run of Guide Columns Trusswork back to the tower, and we're going to look at the drawings which give us those numbers here a little later on... and make a few discoveries about just how devious these bastards are/were, following their own fuckups which precipitated the daffiness.

Now before we go any farther, it all gets very closely looked-over, and not only by the ironworkers who are hanging it on the tower, but also by NASA oversight representatives, QC people, and...

The iron shows up on a flatbed truck, and it winds up in the shakeout yard, and eventually it gets picked up by the crane and hung on the tower, and at multiple points along the way, our people and their people are giving this stuff a good close looking-over, complete with drawings, and clipboards, and tape-measures, and all the rest of the tools of the trade, making damn good and sure it's right before anybody gets a chance to incorporate something that's wrong into the growing structure.

Hell, this is some of the stuff that I did myself.

Checking delivered steel against the detail drawings it was produced from (themselves checked against the engineering drawings they were produced from), is part of the job, and you can rely on the fact that it regularly and routinely gets done as part of the job.

All well and good.

And everything was "all well and good" and it got hung on the tower, and nobody had any reason at this point to question any of it...

...but Rink had been doing this kind of work for too long, and had seen a few things along the way, and he knew iron in an astoundingly intimate and gut-level way that no engineer ever will, or ever can, and on his own he decided to run a piano wire down from the top tie-member which was the structural attachment point for the actual Trusswork, to the bottom tie-member, just to make damn good and sure that steel formed a perfectly straight line, with no funny business anywhere along its vertical extent (and iron being iron, it can be persuaded, through the use of tuggers and come alongs, and drift pins, and beaters, to maybe go places that you might or might not expect it to go)...

...and all well and good.

The taut piano wire told the tale, and the tale it told was, "Yep, this stuff is all nice and straight."

All well and good.

Again.

But Rink, being Rink, this did not make him happy enough, and he then took the next step of disconnecting the piano wire from the bottom tie member, and hanging a nice heavy weight on it, to check his work to see if it was not just straight, but also to see if it was plumb, and when he did that...

The shit hit the fan, right now!

Somehow, by some means, some sort of subtle error had crept into things such that the tie-members became progressively, and very smoothly and evenly, out of plumb, with the error getting worse and worse and worse the farther down the face of the RSS you went.

Hmm...

And Rink being Rink, he immediately brought this to the attention of my boss, Dick Walls.

And they discussed it in the field trailer, and they puzzled over the smoothly-creeping increase in the errors that were found as you descended the face of the RSS, and they scratched their heads and double checked, and then triple checked, even going to the extent of getting a different piano wire (bearing in mind that physics pretty well prevents the goddamned piano wire from being the culprit, and they knew that, and they got a different wire anyway), and it all checked exactly the same it did when Rink first discovered this shit...

And somewhere along in there I got drawn in to the vortex, and was tasked with going over all the drawings, looking for something, anything, bad dimension, incorrectly applied dimension, missing dimension, whoknowswhat dimension, that might be the root cause of this mystery, and by now Wade Ivey was involved, and it was his company, and his money getting wasted because of the dead halt this work had come to...

...and no matter what anybody said or did, the problem refused to resolve itself...

...and a slow dawning was coming over all of us by then...

And Rink went back up on the tower with the piano wire, and this time he checked the whole fucking RSS to see if it was plumb...

AND IT WASN'T!!!

Holy shit, the RSS was bent!

And the amount by which the RSS was bent was breathtaking!

Literally caused people to involuntarily give a short, sharp, intake of breath when they heard it the first time.

The whole goddamned RSS, from the top of the RCS Room to the Pad Deck, was leaning forward, up at its very top, by EIGHT FULL INCHES!

And this is an unheard-of-ly gigantic amount for a large steel structure of this nature to be out of plumb, and anybody who's been in the business can tell you that, and if, with their next breath, they tell you that I'm lying, because no such thing could ever possibly happen, I will not begrudge them trying to steer you clear of somebody who's "lying", because clearly, they have your best interests at heart, but equally clearly, goddamnit, I was there, and in addition to that, I also had to deal with it, and...

It was pretty bad. It was really bad, actually.

And that shit, after having initially hit the whirling blades of the fan, was hurled everywhere, and a lot of different people in a lot of different places immediately started maneuvering.

And different people in different places had different reasons for making different maneuvers, and in some quarters a very dark cloud indeed descended upon those who dwelt there.

We dug down into it as far as we could go, and came to the ineluctable conclusion that none of it was a result of some fuckup, or fuckupS, which we had inadvertently committed, and once we were fully convinced we understood what was happening, yours truly got tasked with writing paper on it, and submitting it to NASA for their review and dispositioning of things.

Whereupon all action on this thing came to a full and complete stop.

Without directive from NASA, we could not, as a contractually-bound entity, do anything.

Stop. Full STOP!

And the days passed without a peep from any of them. And of course as days are passing, schedule-impact is growing, and schedule-impact can turn out to be a very expensive thing, once measures which become necessary to bring the schedule back in are imposed upon you and perforce undertaken.

So. While we're waiting for an answer, and admiring the bars on our Gantt chart as they push inexorably farther and farther to the right, perhaps we need to look into the causes for it.

And the primary cause was that the RSS, as originally designed and built, was never intended for the torrent of follow-on encrustations of steel with which it was subsequently burdened with, almost all of which was out past Column Line B, cantilevered out there without anything directly underneath it, holding it up.

Time went on, and the RSS grew more and more and more top-heavy, and almost all of that additional top-heavy weight was hanging out there over empty space...

...and the RSS, as all steel structures will do when placed under a sufficient load, yielded.

Not too far.

Not too suddenly.

Not too radically.

But yield it did.

And it was never in the least danger of tipping over, or anything remotely resembling that kind of failure, but as it yielded, it began leaning over, as the steel adjusted to the never-intended-in-the-beginning additional weight.

And I'm gonna stop right here, and see if I can come up with the most important numbers associated with this thing, and those numbers would be the deviation from the design dimensions for clearance with the Space Shuttle (which of course is the whole point of having an RSS in the first place), as regards the RSS being plumb, along the full vertical extent of the Orbiter, where it comes in very-near but not-quite contact with the Orbiter.

And it all boils down to the length of the region of the Orbiter they need to interface with, using hard-ass structural steel, plus such additional margin as they need, to mate with it.

Down at the bottom, that would be the elevation of the APS Platform at 112'-0", and up at the top that would be the elevation of the Antenna Access Platform at 198'-7½".

These are the two farthest vertically removed places from each other where structural steel is going to be getting very close to the Orbiter.

The parts of our Rolling High Rise Hotel that directly interface with our Space Shuttle.

Work the numbers and wind up with an overall length of consequence of 86'-7½" where an out of plumb dimension of 8 inches that runs along a total vertical length from the Pad Deck at 53'-0" to the top of the RCS Room Roof on its front side at 242'-0". Which is 189'-0" total, from which we extract 86'-7½" to get a percentage of the total 8 inches out of plumb, and that percentage is .458, and we multiply our original 8 inches by that to get 3⅔ inches, which is somewhere between three and five-eights and three and eleven sixteenths, and why not, just to play it safe, we'll round it up to 3¾" because my tape measure doesn't have any goddamned thirds, so we'll go with what we've got, and now we know that across the full vertical extent of where things matter we're 3¾" out of plumb, and that's what we're really going to have to deal with, ok?

And actually, it's not even as bad as that, because the only places where anything (personnel, umbilical flex lines and carrier plates, and things hung from monorail hoists excepted, and they're all mobile) actually touches the Orbiter are the PCR Main Floor at 135'-7", the Antenna Access Platform at 198'-7½", and the Side Seal Panels running vertically between those two places, all of which has Inflatable Seals that make actual contact with the Orbiter. So we can knock a little over twenty feet off of our critical dimension, and the percentage of the 8 inches of out-of-plumb along with it, and come up with a reduced figure that really really matters here. I don't feel like running the numbers again, so I'm gonna let you do that, now that you know how, but my gut feeling is that we're now somewhere a little under three inches, and that's not such an awful number to be dealing with, insofar as they were already leaving themselves some margin in addition to the fact that the RSS can be parked pretty much wherever they want to park it, in relationship to where the Orbiter is actually sitting as we come trundling in toward it on Mate Day.

And of course, following The Debacle of the OMS Pods Heated Purge Covers, (and the Guide Columns, too) the Floor Steel down at 135'-7" got ripped out (again), and redone, (again).

It gets a little involved, but it's all very straightforward arithmetic, and it's legal because the RSS was out of plumb in what amounted to a nice straight line, instead of some wavy god-awful curve, so at least we've got that much going for us.

And this is all stuff we had to do at the time, but the precise numbers are no longer retrievable from my old-man's memory, so I just had to work 'em up again, in order to get 'em.

And of course you can bet your bottom dollar that NASA's people were working them up, too.

And probably a lot of other people, too.

And the silence kept right on dragging along, despite the fact that we'd see these people in passing, at the cafeteria, out on the Pad, wherever, and we'd informally ask them about it just about every time we saw them...

...and no answer was forthcoming, and neither was any explanation for the delay.

So we'll while away the time by looking at our drawings in this area, just to see what's going on with that.

And you've already learned that the Floor Steel down at 135'-7" got butchered twice, and at the time I was ranting about that butcherment, I was not particularly interested in the way things turned out after I left, but...

The time has come.

We first properly crossed paths with this place back in the Tracking The Steel subsection on Page 3 - Orbiter Mold Line Grating Panels Elevation 135.

And then we hit it again, in greater detail, on Page 60 when we hung the damnable OMS Pods Heated Purge Covers on the tower.

And in the department of Cutting to the Chase herewith, please find the re-butchered Inflatable Seals at both the Antenna Access Platform and the PCR Main Floor on 79K14110 sheet M-68, and the quickest of cursory glances will tell you that the Seals down there at 135'-7" are visually wider than their counterparts up at 198'-7½...

Hmm hmm hmmm...

And then we look at the Floor Steel that wound up getting installed down here on the rebutcherment, and we start with 79K14110 sheet S-53A, but that's not quite enough, so we'll finish it up with 79K14110 sheet S-53B (and yes, that 'A' and 'B' tacked on to S-53 oughtta be sounding some, "Hey, they just kinda stuffed this crap in here after the fact, didn't they?" warning bells and whistles).

And you begin to grow suspicious of all this, especially when added together...

And then you go to 79K14110 sheet M-72, and you give the dimensions for the goddamned Seals, a good close look...

And Son. Of. A. Bitch!

That Inflatable Seal down there at 135'-7" on the PCR Main Floor turns out to be THREE AND A HALF INCHES longer than its counterpart up at the Antenna Access Platform...

And didn't we just work the numbers, and didn't we just come up with a figure of 3¾" for the gross out-of-plumb dimension??? Which 3¾" we decided we could pare down some, when we're only taking into account the difference between the PCR Floor and the Antenna Access Platform, where the Inflatable Seals live?

Oh yes.

Oh yes we did!

And if I was a NASA Cat, and I didn't really want to rebuild the Brooklyn Bridge from scratch, 'cause it was only just a little bit bent, I just might decide that I could roll my, bent, RSS right on up to my Space Shuttle, and keep a close eye on things up at the Antenna Access Platform, where I was kind of hanging over a little bit...

Maybe... oh.... I don't know, maybe 3½" or so....

And get the Antenna Access Platform right where it needed to be...

And let things take care of themselves down below, down at 135'-7", down where they were a little farther away, and just maybe put a little extra Inflatable Seal in there, and paint "NO STEP" on some Flip Panels that came down from structural steel that might have been a weency bit too far away...

...and let it go at that!

If I was a NASA Cat, would I do such a thing as that?

Would I???

Maaaaybeee... just maybe I might.

Do a thing like that.

And meanwhile, back at the Launch Pad...

We still hadn't gotten an answer, and by now a couple of weeks have gone by...

And you could tell that no matter what they did, it was gonna hurt 'em, and they really-o truly-o wanted to hurt US instead, but they couldn't figure out how to do it...

And the clock kept merrily ticking on, and the answer kept merrily not showing up!

And somewhere in there we came to the very reasonable conclusion that, although they weren't plumb, the tie-members for the Guide Columns were straight, and as straight as they were, the Guide Columns would work perfectly, as-is, serving as a perfect guide for the E.T. Access Platforms which would run up and down along their full vertical extent, and at some point shortly thereafter yours truly put together a piece of paper, and submitted it, wherein we innocently asked a very simple question, and that question revolved around the fact that things would work just fine, as installed, but we needed to know if we should proceed, on the assumption that the RSS was fine, as-built, and we could save both time and money by getting back to work here, but...

"Is the Shuttle plumb?"

And that is the sort of question you could have lived many many many lifetimes without ever considering that such a question might ever, in all the wide universe, ever get asked.

But we had to ask it, and we did!

Formally and officially.

"Is the Shuttle plumb?"

AND THEY COULDN'T ANSWER US!

They couldn't do it!

"Is the Shuttle plumb?"

"Fuck all if I know."

And as the clock kept right on ticking with this thing unanswered, we finally realized they knew the jig was up, and they knew it was gonna cost 'em a bundle of time and money to finally, reluctantly, foot-draggingly, say, "Yes. The Space Shuttle is plumb. And our nice new RSS is not."

At which point they were trapped, and change orders had to be cut which resulted in taking it all down, refabricating it so as it too would be plumb, and then putting it all back up on the tower.

Which we did. And yeah, it cost 'em a bundle in time and money and they had to eat the whole thing, on their own, with nobody else to help 'em eat it.

They never lived it down.

And we were damn careful to make sure they didn't live it down.

Traces of all this bullshit yet remain on the Guide Columns drawings themselves, despite the fact that herculean efforts were undertaken to sweep it all under the rug after the fact (no word about the plumbness of the RSS will you ever find, anywhere), and cause it to disappear so as nobody would wind up looking bad.

Get a look at this stuff (warning, tricky dimensions with tricky nomenclature on two separate drawings, dead ahead).

Let's learn where our Guide Columns actually need to go, ok?

Sounds simple enough, doesn't it?

After all, they're telling us to build this fucked-up thing, so you'd expect them to give us all the information we'd need to do that, including where to put the motherfuckers, right?

And it's for a set of Mobile Platforms that can be adjusted for elevation, wherever we might want or need to go in that god-awful crevice between the Belly of the Orbiter and the External Tank, and we must assume that they know where their Orbiter and Tank are, when it's all sitting on the MLP out at the Pad, so ok, so firmly fix the Mobile Platforms into their matching horizontal location with a set of Guide Columns so as they can ride up and down along those Guide Columns and take us wherever chance and circumstance tell us we need to go.

And it all boils down to how far up and how far out we need to put our Guide Columns, in relationship to the RSS which they are hanging off the front side of.

So. Once again, here's our old friend 79K24048 sheet S-234, giving us our general arrangement for this stuff, on both sides of the RSS, at Column Lines 3.4 and 4.6.

And what a beauty it is, eh?

Ok. Fine. Where do the fucking Left and Right Upper Fixed Guide Columns actually go, hmm?

That's easy! They go right...

...uh...

...right...

...where?

There's nothing showing that gives us any proper elevation or horizontal distance with respect to the goddamned gigantic steel structure we're gonna be hanging this crap off of.

Nothing? Really?

Well... look close, and on our good friend 79K24048 sheet S-234, and in the world of the vertical, we get some sort of goof-ass elevations that may or may not be of any actual use, and in the world of the horizontal, nothing whatsoever for the upper portions of things attached to the face of the RCS Room, and a few stray numbers for the Right Guide Columns down below that, which I suppose is maybe a little bit better than nothing at all, but then again maybe not, and we shall be returning to these very numbers here in a bit, but they also do manage to point us to Detail A on 79K24048 sheet S-235 via the use of a cartouche (and yes, my connecting this stuff linguistically with Egyptian Hieroglyphics is deliberate), for the iron that's tied to the face of the RCS Room, so let's go look at that, maybe?

And here you go with 79K24048 sheet S-235, and I've been careful to leave it strictly alone with the sole exception of highlighting such an innocuous little note there, in yellow.

And that little note, ostensibly, is telling us right where our Guide Columns need to go, horizontally, and in conjunction with the size and weight of the W18's (they're slightly different on each side of the RCS Room) they tie to the undersides of, along with the T.O.S. elevation of 244'-7 3/16" given for those W18's... ok, I suppose, we, just barely, seem to have enough here, vertically too.

But do we?

And why are they going about it in such an indirect, and, truth be told, devious way?

And we read that note again...

And it says "Top Of RCS Room" and what, exactly does "Top Of RCS Room" even mean?

And why would they use such a goof-ass set of locations and notations for what amounts to a benchmark for an entire structural system in the first place?

And why would they bury a note about the "Top Of RCS Room" down below the cut line that divides the Fixed Guide Column from the Hinged Guide Column beneath it? Down below the RCS Room Floor?

The whole Fixed Guide Columns world seems to pivot on those W18's, and yeah, it's all hung from them, but again, what's with the weirdness? Why so coy about things?

And it turns out that "Top Of RCS Room" has no meaning at all!

None!

Is it the top of the insulated roofing up there?

It it the top of the structural framing that underlies that roofing?

Is it the top of those W18's?

Is it the top of the Guide Column itself, where it's bolted to the side of a W8x31 which hangs from beneath the W18's?

All of these locations (and more, but let's give it a rest) could serve just fine as "Top Of RCS Room" but none of them are actually specified, and...

What the fuck, over?

And it turns out that those big W18's, and all the rest of it, had been furnished and installed, and it wasn't until after then, that the horrifying discovery that the whole fucking RSS was out of plumb got made, and...

Time.

Money.

And as with the Inflatable Seal far below, down at 135'-7", somebody... somewhere... made a decision...

And that decision was "We're not gonna so much as touch that motherfucking RSS, including those big W18's sitting on top of it, and we understand that because the goddamned thing is so far out of plumb, we're gonna have to cut the entire Fixed Guide Columns System off the tower, and modify it so that its tie members get refabricated long enough in order to reach the additional distance back to the structure to allow them to connect to it, rehang it from the exact same bolt holes in the W18's it was originally hung from, and this time it's gonna be plumb goddamnit, and we'll park the RSS wherever it needs to be parked so that the overhanging top will be properly mated with the Orbiter, and the rest of it is going to be allowed to run wild, and everybody is going to learn how to deal with it, thenceforth.

And that's exactly what happened.

And it was reflected in the odious 79K24048 Drawing Package by doing a little dance with the dimensions after the fact.

And one of the dance steps was our bullshit note giving us a precise dimension (plus or minus a sixteenth, which is pretty close work), that takes us to...

A place that has no location, which you see here on 79K24048 sheet S-235.

Unless you believe that "Top Of RCS Room" actually means something.

And then we step back across to 79K24048 sheet S-234, one last time, and come to an understanding of what their ever-so-sly nomenclature actually means...

...where they dodged it, and weaved it, and plussed it or minused it, and...

...it all looks very official and engineer-like on the surface of things...

...but when you really start to dig down into this stuff...

...you start making some very awkward discoveries...

...and...

And never, even if I live to be 200 years old, do I ever expect to cross paths with the original version of these drawings, with the original... wrong... dimensions on them, and a part of me believes that those drawings, with those wrong dimensions showing on them, were successfully extirpated by...

...someone.

And what's really going on here is that things, as they existed with those W18's, were left strictly alone, and the existing bolt holes and stiffener plates in their existing locations, via which the whole thing was located and suspended, were untouched, and from there down...

It was all put in using field work, "cut to suit, beat to fit, paint to match" just like they did over at Pad A, letting the ironworkers follow a plumb line, straight and true, as they refabricated this crap, up in the goddamned air, cutting, welding, beating, banging, until it was all right back where they originally had to cut it down from, and then, again, after the fact, they punched the resulting numbers back into their drawings, give or take, and that's what wound up on these goddamned drawings, and that's why they're so fucking coy about all of it.

And it was a lot of work. And it took a lot of time. And it cost a lot of money.

And basically, once they told us it needed to be plumb, they handed it over to Rink (and every one of them had by that time learned just how good Rink and his crew were at this stuff), shrugged their shoulders and said "Make it plumb," and then got the hell out of the way so that Union Ironworkers could bail their sorry asses out with a proper reinstallation, and about all that any of 'em did, throughout the whole ordeal, was to run their own piano wires down the face of the RSS, to verify that what Rink told them was true. That yes, "Now it's plumb."

And the presumption (that's all it is, ok?) was that over on Pad A, when the Mad Scramble was begun after the foam had popped off the External Tank the first time they tanked Columbia out on the Pad, and the Guide Column System was originally concocted, and it was all done at a dead run, "cut to suit, beat to fit, paint to match," and they came along afterwards and took measurements, never suspecting how very different the two Pads really were, and they just plugged it and chugged it into 79K24048, and it was WRONG. And they never realized it. Either that, or Pad A was cock-ass-tilted too, but it was field work and "cut to suit, beat to fit, paint to match," is really how it gets done, and nobody even really bothered to measure it afterwards and they just punched some theoretical numbers into an equally theoretical drawing of the RSS, that lived in a neverland where steel doesn't bend, and... whothefuck knows?

All because, one fine day, over on Pad B, Reynsol Chiles, general foreman of Ivey Steel Erectors, and one hell of a crackerjack Union Ironworker (although quite the Difficult Child, too), decided to go get himself some piano wire...

And do a little checking.

On his own.

Unasked for.

'Cause he was a savvy motherfucker...

...and he knew...

...how things sometimes are not what they're presented as being.

And that's how that went down.

So. We can return to our photograph above these words, taken from way up and out there on the Right SRB Access Platform standing on the grating at Elevation 220'-0" just inboard of Column Line 5, and admire things secure in the knowledge that we know exactly what we're seeing, and where we're seeing it from.

And this is yet another one of those, "Down the Boom" shots of a big crane doing a Lift, and there's always something quite pleasing about this kind of thing, from this point of view.

This is another one that scores well on "Artistic Merit."

In addition to the Lift, we're also getting a pretty good look down into the yawning abyss of the Flame Trench, north of the Flame Deflector, down there just about 220 feet below eye level where the image was taken from.

And I've mentioned the Water Screen For SRB Ignition stuff already on this page, and from here, we get to see over on the right margin of the photograph, how they came along and cut the south end off of the Spray Header on the east wall of the Flame Trench, so as they could refit it for attaching that big pipe that curves upward along the north side of the Side Flame Deflector, and I may as well go ahead, here and now, and give you some more of that, using the engineering drawings to do so, and that way you'll be able to add yet one more thing to the list of stuff you will now understand in fairly close detail.

And you can see that they had to lop off the south end of the existing Spray Headers that lived just over the edge of the Flame Trench Walls, so they could then connect this new stuff to it and use it to supply SSW Water to new and better places, and since the new stuff further connected, up on its top end, to the MLP's SSW Plumbing, it needed to be removable, and mobile, so they just said, "Ok, we'll trim a little off the north edge of the Side Flame Deflectors, hang some brackets on it, and then let the SFD carry our nice new pipe to and fro as it traveled on its rails from its park position at the north end of the Pad Deck, to its working position up underneath the MLP.

79K24048 sheet S-301, Water Screen For SRB Ignition Supply Pipe Detail lets you see all of that from three different perspectives, and once you kind of get a feel for it, it's fairly straightforward stuff.

On their very first mission, STS-1, they came a gnat's whisker from loss of vehicle and loss of crew because they failed to appreciate the full extent of the forces that would be applied to their brand-new Space Shuttle when they lit the Solid Rocket Boosters.

And they completely flipped-out after Columbia had come back home (in one piece, thankfully) once they had a chance to properly inspect it...

...gnat's whisker. Far less than an inch away from killing John Young and Bob Crippen, and losing Columbia in the process...

Forward RCS System damage could have finished them off (and we've already talked about that one)...

Body Flap damage. This too, could have been the end of it, then and there. John Young himself is reported by James Oberg to have said that, had he known the full extent of the damage when it occurred, he would have aborted the mission by pulling the D-ring on his ejection seat. The shock wave that came off of SRB Ignition knocked the shit out of Columbia, and it just barely did not get taken out of the sky. Waaaay too close for comfort.

Thermal Protection System Tile damage also occurred, and I distinctly recall, at the time, Corporate News Media really keying on this one, fanning the flames of fear (but, bad as it might have been, we were lucky to not have any Social Media, with all of its Conspiracy Idiots, Axe-Grinders, Overconfident Fools and Liars, Chemtrail and Antivax Fuckwits, Russian Social Media Misinformation Troll Farms, and all the rest of it working as hard as they possibly could to make things worse in exchange for 30 Pieces of Silver). Nobody really knew, while they were still in orbit...

...what might actually wind up happening...

...during re-entry.

But in the end, they came home safely, and that's what really matters, right?

So, because of what I've mentioned, and plenty of other stuff too, the Sound Suppression Water System got reworked on the MLP in the area where the Solids kick their twin volcanoes of fire, and sound, and pressure, through the Exhaust Holes and on down into the Flame Trench. The reworked plumbing for the Water Screen for SRB Ignition on the MLP was fed with water that came through the existing SSW Plumbing on the Pad, into the Spray Headers on either side of the Flame Trench, where it got diverted upwards through the new Piping that hung off the north sides of the SFD's. And STS-2 proved that it was a good fix, and this was never an issue, thenceforth.

Elsewhere in our photograph, we're getting a pretty good look at the OMBUU from an angle not commonly found, and among other bits of interestingness in there you can see both of those old-timey handwheels they used to crank the extensible parts of the OMBUU in and out, one at the 172'-2" level, and one up on the Roof at the 181'-11" level. I would presume these to both be very similar in aspect and action to the one we first encountered back on Page 6 where we learned about "SRB ACC" on our Sheffield Steel shipping list. Those handwheels were irresistible, and I always gave them a turn, wherever and whenever I crossed paths with 'em. The Little Kid inside of me was not to be denied, and I happily obliged him every chance I got, although the OMBUU was a place where I never played around with anything, because... OMBUU.

Zoom in close, on the OMBUU Roof, and you can see the Rotary Handle on that Handwheel, sticking up, right next to the vertical handrail post that's behind it. The one below, down at 172'-2", evidences, yet again, the astounding propensity for structural steel to wind up with chance alignments that defy belief, wherein, things line up with other things, to cause them to disappear, or to merge, or to otherwise confound visual understanding, in ways that the human mind just refuses to accept as being nothing more than sheer random chance. I'm surprised that the World of Conspiracy Idiots has not somehow found a way to latch on to structural steel, as a General Thing, in a way that gives them a nice loud drum to beat, attempting to Enforce Their Stupid upon the wider population. That rotary handle is there, but it lines up perfectly with the rim of the handwheel, and all you get visually in our photograph is a bit of a lighter-colored dot, at around ten o-clock on the ellipse of the handwheel.

Also, just left of the Handwheel on the Roof, you can see where one of the ironworkers left a beater laying there on the deckplates. Union Ironworkers are, as a general rule, excellent with their tools, but every once in a great while, you will come across something that got left behind somehow, and you may or may not ever be able to return it to its rightful owner.

I myself picked a beater up off the ground one day, back when I was working for Sheffield, and I never did manage to reunite it with its owner, and it wound up lingering in my possession, and I've still got it. Beaters have short handles of course, and my son Kai (who was quite young at the time) immediately christened it "Mjölnir," in recognition of that short handle, same as with Thor's Hammer, and often enough, I find myself referring to it by that name, reflexively, and Kai seems to always refer to it by that name, so ok, so Mjölnir it is, and Mjölnir it shall ever be. But somewhere... there's an ironworker missing a beater, and it's my fault.

And I suppose the side-tale of Mjölnir makes for a nice coda to our Saga of the OMBUU Lift, and so I shall close the door on things, here.

And now.

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

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