The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B

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

Page 66: GOX Arm Lift, Plus Further Submergence into the Guide Columns Murk.

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And now that we've hung the GOX Arm Support Strongback on the FSS, how 'bout we follow that up with the GOX Arm itself?

And we immediately get another Renaissance Image, with a gang of four Union Ironworkers visible in the frame, plying their dangerous and dramatic craft, working smoothly together as a team, getting it done.

I never grow tired of photographs like this one. It's imagery like this that is best suited for putting you there, watching from close range as work that you yourself know you'll never be able to do unfolds before your very eyes.

I wish I could identify even one of these people, but no... I cannot.

Their names are lost to me.

But they themselves are not.

Click on the picture. Bring it up full-size.

Have a look at the ironworker closest to us in the frame, kneeling down.

He's got his left hand on the clevis end of the big turnbuckle that's attached to the spreader beam on its top end.

But he's not looking at it.

Instead, he's focused solely upon the Lifting Lug, and you'll notice that the holes in the turnbuckle clevis are matched in size with the hole in the Lifting Lug.

Now look at his gloved right hand. In conjunction with the other ironworker who's holding the top end of the turnbuckle (and there's something about where he fits in with this gang that tells me he's an apprentice), he guiding the turnbuckle to the location where he can take the Connecting Pin which he's holding that gloved right hand, and slip it through the holes and then secure it, establishing a firm connection between the turnbuckle and the GOX Arm Truss which he's kneeling down on.

And with his eyes completely off of that turnbuckle, he's trusting both his own sense of feel, and the apprentice who's got both hands on it, and the crane operator, to prevent something from, in some way (and yes, it happens), bashing the living hell out of him should that turnbuckle suddenly move in an unexpected way.

Now look at the ironworker who's standing straight up, farthest right in the image. And his right hand is on the spreader beam.

Which is close by the apprentice's face.

And his left hand is on a different turnbuckle, and that one is hanging loose, completely free to swing around, and if it was to hit someone... well... whatta ya figure that turnbuckle, just the turnbuckle itself, without any of the shackles or connecting links that are attached to it, weigh?

A hundred pounds?

Maybe only seventy-five?

Now let it swing around.

Just a little bit.

Not much at all, really.

Now let the shackle that's attached to its lower end do a little crack-the-whip flip and catch you on the exposed left side of your jaw, just below your hardhat.

Whatta ya suppose a thing like that might feel like?

Whatta ya suppose a thing like that might do to you?

Now look at the rest of this Lifting Sling. Spreader beams, swedged wire rope end loops with thimbles on them, connecting links, shackles, connecting pins, turnbuckles, allofit.

It's completely loose and free to flop around wherever gravity and human interaction might take it.

Whatta ya supposed the the very lightest component in there might weigh? Probably one of the connecting pins. Five pounds? Ten?

And before this photograph was taken, it was all loose pieces that needed to be put together, before the whole thing could then be put to work, by attaching it to whatever is that needs lifting.

Those wire rope slings with the swedged and thimbled end loops. Those spreader bars. Those shackles. Those pins. Those connecting links. Those turnbuckles. Somebody's fingers needed to be in there, assembling that stuff.

And the crane operator's controlling the hook that's urging all of it... up off the ground, bit by bit.

And stuff wants to occasionally sort of pop into a new location as it all gets urged upward. The Lifting Sling and The Thing Being Lifted, coming together piecemeal, components sometimes kind of taking a jump as they do so. And it all needs to be lifted and moved and positioned, by fits and starts, so as it can continue to get assembled, piece by piece, part by part, coming together one component at a time.

And as that's going on...

...fingers...

...hands...

...arms and legs and heads and necks...

...are all in play.

And no single owner of any finger, any neck, can be aware of all of it, nor control all of it, even if they are aware...

...and all you can do is to try and snatch away, in time, whatever body part it might be that has suddenly come into play in an unexpected way.

And that's what you're staring right at here in this photograph.

This is serious business.

Renaissance Grade serious business.

Stick your finger out and lay it on the table.

Your own finger.

And now consider...

What might it feel like if that finger were to suddenly, unexpectedly, without the least bit of warning, get crushed by a piece of cold steel that could easily weigh as much as your car?

What might the sensations be, were you to look down, immediately after the sound of a sudden event, and see that your finger was no longer there?

Assemble a group of ironworkers. Twenty or thirty should do. And count the number of fingers. Are there ten times as many fingers as there are ironworkers?

You run pretty good odds of winding up with a number that is somewhere less than ten times the number of ironworkers.

And consider the odds...

With your own finger.

Ironworking is the Real Deal, and it's not for just anybody.

Ok. Enough of that. What are we looking at here, anyway?

We're looking at the end of the GOX Arm that bolts on to the Strongback which we lifted, back on Page 62.

Part of the Upper Hinge, with one of its two Connection Plates is visible, and you can see the bolt holes in the Connection Plate where the bolts that attach the Hinge to the Strongback will be inserted and torqued down. Out of frame, below the lower left corner, the Lower Hinge is not visible in our photograph.

And as for the Arm Truss itself, we're only seeing just a small bit of it where our ironworkers are working the Lifting Sling.

The large white duct which runs along the top of the Arm supplies heated GN2 to the "Beanie Cap" (that's what everybody called it, although its proper name was the GOX Vent Hood) so they could blow it down on top of the External Tank to prevent ice build-up where the LOX Vent was, which you're seeing in the VAB, inside of Extensible Work Platform C, on the Second Level, highlighted on 79K05424 sheet S-6.

The LOX in the External Tank boiled off and became GOX at a temperature of 297 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and it was cold as hell, and if they just let that go, up there at the top of the tank where the vent was, it would seriously chill the outside surface of the tank, and then ambient Florida air, complete with a level of humidity that would occasionally cause you to wonder why there weren't fish swimming through it, would form ice on those chilled surfaces, and then that ice would build up into large and substantial objects, and during the pummeling everything started taking at liftoff it would get knocked off the Tank and fall, and it posed a severe threat to the Orbiter's Thermal Protection System, so...

GOX Arm.

And, just as a reminder, GOX is pure O2. Pure oxygen. Which is one hell of a fire hazard, and is not something you want to be dealing with at all if you can avoid it, and so they diluted that pure O2 with GN2, and thereby reduced/removed the fire hazard up there at the very tippy top of the External Tank.

There's times when it seems like everything out here constitutes some kind of fire, or explosion, or toxicity, or violently-corrosive, or somedamnthing hazard, and for that reason, the whole place is just riddled with the sorts of remediations you find that you must implement for stuff like that, and of course these remediations are the sorts of things you will see nowhere else in your experience, and it makes the place kind of...

...different.

The fear of ice build-up damage to the Orbiter's TPS was a serious one, and in fact, this exact scenario played out with Colombia, and destroyed it during re-entry, except that it wasn't ice, it was foam. The stuff they used to insulate the ET, which fatally damaged the TPS on the leading edge of Columbia's Left Wing.

Nobody had any idea that the goddamned foam could do such a thing. Foam. Light. Soft. Foam. Turns into something vastly different once you begin climbing into the sky and accelerating through the dense lower atmosphere.

Completely different thing.

And seven good women and men were killed because of it.

I rant and rave and make jokes about everything, but down at the bottom, down underneath it all, the infrasonic thrum of life and death never goes away, and we can never forget that it's always there.

This is a harsh business.

And it's unforgiving like a motherfucker, and it's terrifyingly patient about that unforgivingness.

I suppose, before we go any father, that it would behoove me to give you a link the NASA documentation that gives us a technical-enough overview of the whole Space Shuttle External Tank Gaseous Oxygen Vent System.

Maye stop here and read that whole document. In addition to the text, there's some excellent illustrations in there too, including what appears to be one of the (more) original versions of the isometric view of the whole system, up at the top of the FSS, which we already saw in our look at 79K24048 sheet M-350.

And as a small "oh by the way" note about that drawing, look in the title block and next to the "DRAWN" entry beneath "SIGNATURES" you'll see "G. VANGUILDER" and Glenda E. VanGuilder worked in the PRC/BRPH trailer there at the Pad, and she was always a pleasure to be around, relaxed, easygoing, very detail-oriented, possessed of a sweetly-impish smile, and always going a little above and a little beyond with her efforts. A fair amount of her stuff would be initialed instead of properly signed or named, and I always liked that little "G.E.V." wherever I encountered it because it also stands for Billion Electron Volts, and that's a pretty good whack of energy when you get down into the sub-atomic realm, and Glenda was full-aware of that end of things too, and it was just a nice little touch she'd put on stuff, with a slyly-knowing look and a twinkle in her eye.

And after having read all of the Space Shuttle External Tank Gaseous Oxygen Vent System document, (you have, haven't you?), we can see that the whole system was exceedingly complex, and had to deal with a zillion different things (some of which being quite outré) in sequence, and simultaneously, and sometimes both of the above, and to just look at the damn thing, you'd never in your life guess just how goddamned complicated and difficult it was.

And the Vent Hood constituted its own whole little (well, not so little at all, actually) world, and for today's lift, that thing is nowhere to be seen, and we'll eventually lift it, and hang it on the end of the Arm, but not today, ok?

For now, the Arm and Hinges will be more than enough, and just you wait till I tell you the story about those goddamned Hinges.

You. Will. Not. Believe. It.

I myself wrote what came to be called "The Pitchfork Letter" out at the Pad because of what wound up happening with those goddamned Hinges, and I distinctly recall being very surprised, sitting at my desk in the Ivey Steel home office building on State Road 3 (it's still sitting right there), when Wade, my boss Dick Walls, and John Monday (who was another one of Ivey's Project Managers at the time, and who had done and seen much, going all the way back to Project Gemini... and some of those stories... but I digress and I'm not gonna go there right now), all agreed that we should submit that letter as written.

Dick would often instruct me to create documentation, and he knew that sometimes I would do so with feeling, and then once done, he'd review it, and cut all the Hot Pepper parts out of it, and then submit it to whoever it was directed toward in cleaned-up form. And I think he did that to take advantage of my mental state when I got fired up over something (see my previous remarks about "anger", maybe, to understand that a bit more), because once I had lit up, I tended toward an exceeding thoroughness about things, and missed little in so doing. It was almost never suitable for submission as "official" paper, but it always included everything and Dick was happy to see everything get included, even as he snipped away all of the caustic parts, and we both worked really well in this mode, and it was always fun for me to cook this stuff up because... fuck all if I know, but it was (and still is) fun, and isn't that enough anyway?

But this time, things had gotten to a point where everybody was sick and disgusted with how our wonderful piece of Government Furnished Equipment, the GOX Arm, had been dealt with (or, more precisely, had not been dealt with) by the cognizant authorities, and they all read the damn letter, looked back and forth at each other, and at me, exchanging a few words as they did so, and then they all said, "Send it."

Which we did.

I wish I had a copy of that letter, but alas, I do not.

It only wound up costing them forty-thousand dollars, as I recall, but the level of hate and discontent which was generated that caused us to have to write the damn thing in the first place, was worth waaay more than that.

But they only give you for time and material, and hate and discontent are not covered in the contract, so... that's all you're getting from us, like it or lump it.

But let's not go there yet, not right now, ok?

Let's get this thing up in the air and see if we can get it bolted to the tower first, ok?

That's when all the fun with the Hinges came jumping out of the tall grass directly at us with bared fangs, anyway. Prior to that, nobody ever suspected a thing (well... Rink had his doubts, and actually, so did a lot of other ironworkers, and I even managed to get my fingers the teenciest little bit dirty with it too, but dammit... not yet).

Our GOX Arm was reworked Apollo equipment, originally furnished and installed as "a" Swing Arm on one of the Mobile Launchers back in the 1960's. And I put quotations around the word "a" because the very few drawings I have of any of the Swing Arms gives me to wonder if it was constructed out of the parts from more than one swing arm.

And we'll see if we can ferret out a couple of clues on this by looking closely at the Arm. I'm going to be using one of the subsequent images in this series as a stepping-off point to delve into the mysteries of how the Arm was constructed, and what it might have been assembled from, so be on the lookout for that when it comes, ok?

These things were a bastard back then, and they remained so (or at least this one did) while we had to wrangle it onto the FSS out at Pad B, 280 feet up in the goddamned air.

And we've already dipped our toe into the dark and turbid waters of Umbilicals, just a wee little bit, with the OMBUU, and now we're going to just go ahead and take the plunge, head-first, ok?

Nobody ever expects Swing Arms to be the Certified Grade-A BITCH that they are... but they are.

Swing Arms deal with a wide array of unpleasant substances depending on what and where they're being called into duty for (cryo, hypergol, extreme fire hazards, extreme explosives hazards, bizarrely-fussy electrical and mechanical hazards, devious and unforgiving structural considerations, you name it, 'cause there's more), interfacing them with an unpleasant object (the rocket), and it all looks rock solid, but in reality none of it is, and it all bends and sways, and expands and contracts, and pushes and pulls, and latches and unlatches, and forcefully shoves nasty stuff around at high pressure through places where pipes connect and disconnect, and it occasionally leaks and sprays terrible things into terrible places, and spouts a volcano of flames and shock waves and vibrations, and jumps straight up into the sky with enough force to pick up a whole apartment building, and just generally goes way the hell out of its way to fuck you up if you're not taking every last bit of it into account, and...

Swing Arms.

Gah.

We're gonna need to interrupt this digression, and digress even further, and we're gonna go all the way back, back to a time when the Recycled Nazi's at the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, were still publicly proud of the work they did on the goddamned V-2!

Ah, those were the days!.

Here, check this thing out.

Check out "UMBILICAL SYSTEMS V-2 TO SATURN V, by Umbilical and Disconnects Section, Ground Support Equipment Branch, Vehicle Systems Division, Propulsion and Vehicle Engineering Laboratory, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, October 1, 1963." and yeah, I had to include that whole title there, because this thing is a piece of solid gold, in a very dark and disturbing way, with NASA's imprimatur all over it, and it forms a too-good connection with a past that maybe, just maybe, just a few of the original participants perhaps should not have been quite so proud of, and it serves well to reinforce my original proposition that down at the very bottom of things, Rockets, at their very foundation, in their innermost soul, are unimaginably evil machines.

Take a gander at that illustration there on the third page of this thing. This one.

That's a pretty goddamned scary illustration, and it got inserted there, in the very beginning of this document, gratuitously. For no real reason. Above and beyond the fact that somebody, or, more likely, somebodIES, was still very publicly PROUD of the rocket in the illustration which is rendered the largest!

The V Fucking 2!

"I aim for the stars, but sometimes I hit London."

Once again, with feeling, Rockets, at their very foundation, in their innermost soul, are unimaginably evil machines.

Amen.

But.

Recycled Nazis or no, this document contains much of interest to our present focus on Swing Arms.

Ye gods! Life is so very strange and self-contradictory. People! Whattayagonnado with people?

Ok, back to the Swing Arms.

UMBILICAL SYSTEMS V-2 TO SATURN V takes us on a very deep dive into the business of getting ferociously exotic and intractable things inside (and outside) of rockets, and we learn that it's been a bastard, for everybody who's ever had to deal with it, from day one.

Right from the outset, with the V-2, you find yourself reading these descriptions of things which are extraordinarily deceptive insofar as they're written with that impossibly bland and bloodless style favored by engineers (they've got reasons, but still...), and if you're not careful you'll just sail right on through it without...

...stopping.

...and considering.

Just what in the name of all Holy Fuck was going on with this stuff, out in the goddamned woods somewhere, as it was being picked up, carried around, poured from here to there, and just generally being dealt with like you'd deal with a five-gallon bucket of water, using common plain old everyday human hands...

And it really doesn't take much imagination at all, once you've stopped yourself...

And you're putting yourself in their shoes...

As they tank that fucker up...

by hand...

With... sodium permanganate?

And hydrogen peroxide? (which was used at concentration and bears zero resemblance to any such-labeled fluid that you might purchase at a drug store)

BY HAND???

Those two goddamned things have the power to make LOX look almost benign by comparison.

Hydrogen peroxide, in particular, at concentration (they were using 80 percent H2O2 with the V-2 if you must know) is goddamned evil stuff, possessed of a ferociously bad-temper and a hair-trigger propensity for... going off.

And don't just take my word for it, ok? Go straight to The Source. Go straight to IGNITION! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants, by John D. Clark, instead.

Here, I'll take you straight to the place where Hydrogen Peroxide gets talked about in detail, on sheet 82 of the .pdf file, which is actually Page 66 of the book.

And yeah, that back to back set of links to the same document oughtta be kind of telling you something, and what it's telling you is that you should stop reading this thing, here and now, and do not pick it back up until you've finished reading, yep, here's a third link to it, IGNITION! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants, by John D. Clark. Go do that. Go do that right now. Go read the whole thing. It's beyond fantastic, and it is, every last bit of it, real. Astounding stuff. Stuff that will take your breath away. The Best.

I only just this morning found UMBILICAL SYSTEMS V-2 TO SATURN V. Never seen it before. And I'm reading it right now, and it's answering a lot of questions I've accumulated over the years without even realizing it, and in addition to the by-implication terrifying verbiage it contains, it's also chock-full of really good illustrations (and that goes treble considering it's an Ancient PDF, and the illustrations are clear and very complete, and it includes a bunch that only deal glancingly with our present subject matter, but which are excellent, in and of themselves, on totally separate and distinct grounds), and I highly recommend you give it the time it is so very worthy of, if only just to marvel at some of those illustrations.

You'll be all the way down in there to sheet 105 (page 106, they skipped over page 2 of the numbering system in the beginning for some reason), before you get to anything at all which bears any kind of resemblance to the stuff we're dealing with out on Pad B. It wasn't until they got into The Big Stuff, with the Saturns, before they began needing the kinds of Swing Arms that everybody takes for granted nowadays on Large NASA Rockets.

And our Swing Arm in that illustration, Figure 4-29, Swing Arm Assembly SA-3, -4 (Block I), is our first encounter with a properly-horizontal steel truss, which swings away from the vehicle via the use of a set of hinges bolted to the Umbilical Tower (which itself is a newish sort of thing with these larger rockets), complete with an Access Platform (which we're also going to be seeing a lot more of, and not only with our GOX Arm). That said, compared to what's coming, it has an almost "light" look to it. It's getting there, but it's not quite one of the brutes they hung on the side of the LUT to service the Saturn V. Or the FSS to service the Space Shuttle. But we're getting there, and the basic design sense of this thing is what we're going to be working with from here on.

So ok. So there's a lot of shit going on with Swing Arms, and they only really came into their own with the Saturn V system, and it was one of those Arms (dammit, I wish I knew which one) that got repurposed for our present task out on Pad B.

Got all that?

Ok. Fine.

Let us proceed.


And now I've walked around the south end of the Flame Trench from where I was located on its west side when I took the previous photograph, and then back north just past the crest of the Flame Deflector which you see part of there in the bottom left corner of this image, to where I can frame the entire arm in a single photograph, shortly before it begins its upward journey to the top of the FSS.

There is a lot going on in this photo, and I'll do what I can to cover those items which are well-displayed in it, and hopefully I won't miss anything significant.

We'll start by pointing out that the Hammerhead Crane (which has a very distinctive-looking yellow load block and hook) is what's being used for this lift, and that is very unusual.

No ironworker that I ever met liked the Hammerhead Crane, and all of them considered it to be a large and over-elaborate toy, unsuitable for any kind of serious lifting. The sneer on Elmo McBee's face, when the Hammerhead Crane came up in discussion, remains with me to this very day, with a memory as crisp and clear as if it had only happened an hour ago.

They all held it in very low regard, to one degree or another.

Its maximum lift capacity of only 25 tons severely limited what it could handle, and that maximum lift capacity only extended out to 50 feet from the center of the Crane's rotation (and of course it's sitting in the exact center of the FSS, so you can knock 20 feet right off the top of that, at a no-margins bare minimum just to get to the edge of the checkerplate on the FSS Roof), and beyond that, it was only good for 10 tons, and that maximum Lift Radius was only 85 feet, and really, if you wanted to lift anything substantial, and if you wanted to lift it some place other than more or less right up the side of the FSS, you were out of luck with the stupid Hammerhead Crane, and you can see that here on a very doctored-up version of 79K14110 sheet V-9. The ironworkers everlastingly held it in bemused contempt, and never considered it for use when doing any kind of real work.

But of course, to a man with a new hammer, many things look like nails in need of pounding, and Boeing/TTV (and I suspect more than just a few in NASA and elsewhere too) now had themselves a great big old FSS with an operational Hammerhead Crane on top of it, and here comes along the perfect nail in need of pounding in the form of the GOX Arm, and they wanted to do the GOX Arm Lift with their Hammerhead Crane.

As I recall, Ivey wound up more or less letting them do it that way, as a favor, and I'm not sure if there was any kind of add to the contract with it or not, but it was stupid, and it was a pain in the ass, and any money that might have been saved by not using a real crane was more than offset by the significant amount of additional time and effort it took to make this lift, coordinating everything with all of the various entities that came in through the door unannounced with the use of the Hammerhead Crane, but it wasn't actually undoable, and to jolly them along in the interests of keeping peace in the family, Wade relented and told them, "Yes, we'll let you guys use your Hammerhead Crane for the GOX Arm Lift," and that's what wound up happening.

And you go back and look at that doctored-up version of V-9 again, and you compare that with the photograph of the whole Arm sitting on the ground above these words, and you can see that it's down there on the Pad Deck butt-up-against the MLP Utilities Interface Platform (And what do you suppose, in labor hours and crane time, getting the stupid Arm perfectly positioned on the Pad Deck so as the even-stupider Hammerhead Crane could even pick it up in the first place might have cost, hmm?), and yes, the lift point really does fall inside of that 25 ton lift capacity radius, but...

...not by much.

And twenty-five tons is 50,000 pounds, and our Space Shuttle External Tank Gaseous Oxygen Vent System document tells us that the Arm, with Hinges, weighs in at a total 35,100 pounds (and I'm pretty sure that includes the Vent Hood, which we did not lift this day, so you get a little extra breathing room with that), so... ok.

Go ahead and pick it up with the Hammerhead Crane if you want to. We'll be happy to accommodate your desires to prove your White Elephant can at least do something, although since the GOX Arm is the lightest of the bunch, you're not gonna be able to lift any of the other Arms with it, and we'll take care of that for you later on, using a real crane, ok?

Use of the Hammerhead Crane demanded use of Boeing/TTV personnel and in the photograph, you're seeing one of the ironworkers, with his eyes directly on the Hook, giving hand-signals to the crane operator, telling him to swing left, as the rest of the gang wrangles the rigging, working to get everything on those slings hanging from the two spreader bars, without losing any fingers in the process, I might add.

But since we're using the fucked-up Hammerhead Crane, our ironworker is completely invisible to the crane operator(s), who is/are up on top of the FSS inside of the Crane (no windows) at the control console(s) which are shown in 79K10338 sheet A-25, so the hand-signal is actually going to one of the TTV guys who's down there with his boots on the Crawlerway next to the Arm, talking into a goddamned walkie talkie, in a communications daisy chain, that I'm sure could never introduce the least additional problem or hazard into things, nor could it ever wind up taking four times longer than it would if our ironworker was simply hand-signaling to a crane operator who could see him.

But nope, that's not how it gets done with the Hammerhead Crane, and this little vignette is emblematic of how things multiply when you find yourself having to go at them in less than fully-efficient ways, for whatever weirdly political and social reasons that have caused you to have to do it in some kind of awkwardly-suboptimal manner.

So... ok.

What else is going on with this photograph? What else can we see that might be worth a little bit of our time?

What's going on with those silvery tin-can looking things over there on the right side of the FSS at Elevation 80'-0"? That's them over there straight dead even to the right of the Hammerhead Crane Load Block, sitting just above where the color of the paint on the FSS goes from light gray to dark gray (and oh boy are we ever going to have fun with the fucked-up paint spec responsible for that color change, and the people who inflicted it on us managed it, later on), partially obscured by the FSS Primary Framing Pipe diagonal that descends down to the FSS Side 1/4 Perimeter Column over there.

What are those things?

There's a whole set of 'em, complete with silvery plumbing that snakes around in between them, and if you look close, you can see that the first cluster of that stuff, closest to the camera on the Side 1 edge of things, has another set of 'em behind it, pretty well obscured back there in the shadows, but it's there.

So what is that stuff, anyway?

And 79K24048 sheet M-154 tells us that they're scrubbers, and whenever you cross paths with scrubbers in a place like this, you'd best be wearing your cautious head, 'cause they're invariably associated with hypergol.

MMH and N2O4 Scrubbers, to be exact, and that's the MMH (Monomethyl Hydrazine) one we're getting the best look at in our photograph, over on the FSS Side 1 edge of the tower.

Here's ya a little something to read for the Hydrazine Scrubber.

And here's something for the Nitrogen Tetroxide one.

Martin Marietta made 'em both, apparently.

And Hypergol, being Hypergol, it's not bad enough that the stuff is as awful as it is, placidly sitting there in liquid form. Oh no, it's even worse. It travels. It fumes off as vapor, and will come to you as quick as you might want to come to it (except that you don't), and they need to contain and neutralize it once it has become airborne, and they do that with these Scrubbers.

Damn near everything out here gets purged on a regular basis. Cleanliness is not something you can compromise on with any of this stuff, and even when your "contaminant" is the same material you're continuing to push through the piping, you still have to purge after any given fill, drain, or vent operation, or otherwise you will lose control of your quantity or concentration levels, or the residual might decide to do something on its own, and... it can get ugly in a hurry if luck (which is a thing FORBIDDEN in this business) goes against you. That said, for a lot of stuff, it's enough to let the GN2 Purge Gas (or sometimes even liquid nitrogen) you're running through the system simply vent or dump into the wider environment, and that's plenty good enough, and nothing catches on fire, or explodes, or kills all the birds, or the personnel... But not with Hypergol. Nope. Not gonna work.

You're gonna need to tighten it up a couple of notches when you're dealing with Hypergol.

Whole big contrapted deal with Hypergol vapors. Exceedingly non-trivial.

I'm figuring that they put these bad boys down here at the 80'-0" level of the FSS because it's sort of midway between where Hypergol comes up out of the Pad Deck at 53'-0" down at the base of the FSS, and where it branches across the Struts to supply (and drain) the RSS at 100'-0", but I really do not know any such thing as an actual fact. But if I was gonna be putting Scrubbers out there somewhere, I might very well choose this exact same place, since it's as centrally-located as it is, sitting there with all the rest of the Hypergol Plumbing passing by at pretty close range.

Farther to the right from our "tin-can" scrubbers, you can see a snarl of crap extending out away from the FSS over toward the West Stair Tower and Elevator, and the top side of that snarl contains a pair of nicely-rectangular pipe supports, which are supporting one pipe that's behaving itself, and another pipe that takes a funny angle, partially obscured by the "normal" pipe, and this is actually a pretty good view of the Centaur LH2 stuff that was going in over there in that area, as we were lifting the GOX Arm, and you can see it in elevation view on 79K24048 sheet M-127D, and in plan view on 79K24048 sheet M-127C.

The Fill/Drain line is a slightly smaller diameter than the Vent line, and going from a side-by-side orientation of the two lines on the ECS Platforming, to an over-under orientation on the FSS, dictated that funny cocked angle that the Fill/Drain line takes. Why the over-under orientation on the FSS, I don't really know, but I've got a feeling that they did not have room over there on Side 4 for side-by-side, so in order to save space (there's a lot of crap running up Side 4 of the FSS), they just kind of "stacked" 'em, and let it go at that. But that's a guess, ok? The real reason does not have to agree with any guesswork by James I Don't Know MacLaren, ok?

Alright. Enough. Back to the Lift.


And now the rigging is taut, the ironworkers are down from the Arm, and the TTV people are nowhere to be seen.

We're off of the ground and we're rising.

And I've stepped around a little farther north with this frame, and from here you can see that the "snarl of crap" extending north from the FSS between Elevations 80'-0" and 100'-0" is very definitely unfinished, and that horizontal LH2 Fill/Drain Line coming in from the ECS Platforming at a funny cocked angle doesn't actually go anywhere, and clearly, those people are not quite there with it yet, but that's pipefitter work, and we had no interest in it, so I cannot give you the slightest bit of additional information about what and why is going on over there with this stuff, so... ok.

Looking at the terminal, horizontal, end of the vertical piece of LH2 Fill/Drain coming down from above on Side 4 of the FSS causes me to wonder how they're going to be connecting the two separate pipes together, and I guess I'll be keeping an eye on subsequent images in this series of photo essays, to see if I managed to get any frames showing it after it was finished, and if so, I'll loop back here with it, to let you nice people know, ok?

But for now...

And this isn't really the best possible angle for seeing what's actually going on with all that vertical stuff on Side 4...

Who knows?

And of course it's Centaur piping, and we all know what wound up happening in the end with Shuttle Centaur, and it never got used, even once, so...

It was all for naught, anyway.

Of other interest in that same area, this series of images is about all we'll ever get by way of showing you the stair which went from the ECS Platforming at Elevation 90'-2¼" to the FSS at Elevation 100'-0", shown here on 79K10338 sheet S-155, except that it didn't, and instead the top riser on that stair was at Elevation 100'-5¼" and it had a little step-down as you went onto the main flooring of the FSS, which was exactly 100'-0", and that damn thing was a nasty little trip hazard, coming and going, headed into the FSS or out and down to the ECS Platforming, and it would get you, even when you were already fully aware of the sonofabitch.

I think they had to do it that way to give clearance for some damn duct, or pipe, or conduit, or some fucking thing that was running horizontally along the north side of the FSS Side 4 Main Framing, tied directly to the web of that big W30x99, but I cannot swear to that. I'm pretty sure I have no photographs which show the area up underneath the top riser of that Stair, and any previous understanding of that thing in the form of sensible memories is long gone, so... 'tis a mystery.

But, mystery or no, the fucking thing would get you, and you really had to mind yourself, cause it would have been the easiest thing in the world to take a bad fall on that bastard.

Despite the fact that I traversed that stair at least a million and one times, conceptually, it always remained an orphan, and that orphaned state included all of the ECS Platforming back here, too.

Recall that I previously identified this whole area, which is shown on 79K10338 sheet S-173 (and a bunch of other stuff in other places, too) as being the "9099 Building" even though most of it wasn't, and while I was out there, the 9099 Building was just... junk... in no way worthy of any real interest or consideration, and my understanding was commensurately murdered, and I've previously mentioned that I deeply regret my signal failure to become interested in it at the time, and now the time has long passed, and I am unhappily reduced as a human because of it.

Sigh.

Very well then, let us proceed with the Lift.


And now that we're properly up and off the ground, and everything has been given a good looking-over, and we're vertically clear of the Pad/MLP Utilities Interface Platform, we can get started with rotating the arm around toward the general orientation it will take, to let us bolt it on to the tower.

And this is the image I was referring to earlier when I said "I'm going to be using one of the subsequent images in this series as a stepping-off point to delve into the mysteries of how the Arm was constructed, and what it might have been assembled from..."

And I'm going to need to mark it up, and use such few original engineering drawings as I've been able to find, to let you see how it might have been assembled from more than one original Apollo Swing Arm, taken down from one of the LUT's, when those things were demolished.

And we start that by simply cutting out the GOX Arm from our above photograph, Image 102, so as there can be no doubt about what parts of the image are GOX Arm, and what parts are everything else, and then fading the background, leaving the Arm as-is, so as it stands out properly, and it looks like this, and I chose this image with care, because it's the only one that lets us see what's behind that white duct that comes over the side and heads straight down to the bottom of the Arm. More on that, in a bit. This is not a surgical cutout, and if you look close enough, you can find places where I did not cut every single last little teency bit of background away from the Arm, but this is plenty good enough for what we're about to do, and I guess if you want to go at it with a scalpel and maybe a microscope, well then, you have my blessings, so... roll on with it if you want.

And our main interest here, regarding what this thing might have been assembled from, will be Truss Elements, and there's three of 'em, so let us get a look at that aspect of things on the Arm, as-is, so we can understand the engineering drawings I'm about to show you, as regards cutting that stuff up and then putting it back together, differently.

Here's Image 102 again, but this time, the GOX Arm cutout has been marked up, color-coded for each of the three Truss Elements that make it up, along with additional coloring and notes to point out those sorts of details about each Truss Element that might otherwise escape notice, and once you're up to speed with the differences of the Elements, you can go and look at the engineering drawings, and recognize not only Truss Elements having a lot in common with our GOX Arm, but other ones as well, which are different, and do not appear to have been considered for re-use as part of the GOX Arm. You can also now see why I chose this particular image, and that's because the connection between Truss Elements 2 and 3 has a pair of vertical pipes which locate it for us quite obviously, once we know what to look for, and it's the only image of the bunch where you can see that pair of nearly-touching vertical pipes, which are otherwise hidden behind that vertical duct running down the side of the Arm.

And just so you know, that duct was a side-branch (one of two, with one on each side of the Arm) coming off of the heated GN2 Supply, which terminated in the near vicinity of where the GOX VENT DUCT (also, two, also one on each side of the Arm, and here's my best not-very-good depiction of that on 79K24048 sheet M-353) dumped its vented pure oxygen, (Which was also colder than hell, and could cause trouble as a fire hazard or maybe as an ice build-up hazard, and yeah, fire and ice, all at the same time, and ain't this Launch Pad one hell of a weird-ass place, eh?), to dilute and warm-up things to acceptably-safe levels over there where I just showed it to you in the marked-up copy of our photograph above these words. And, while we're here, I may as well let you know those two paddle-looking things sticking out from the sides of the arm, down low, are there to support that Vent Duct. So ok. So now you know.

Ok. Time to look more engineering drawings so we can see how the Arm(s) got built.

Here's an original LUT, unmodified for the Milk Stool, complete with a full set of numbered Swing Arms and a Saturn V sitting on it, taken from the "Apollo 10 Saturn V Technical Information Summary" which you've already met, back on Page 41.

Then we move to Page 233 (actually Page 7-8) of the Skylab Saturn IB Flight Manual, to look at Figure 7-7, which shows us the numbering nomenclature for the Swing Arms on the modified LUT with the Milk Stool. Read down below, for additional information regarding how SA (Swing Arm) 1A was put together from what had formerly been an S-IC Forward Arm, (yes, it gets confusing, and you gotta watch out), but the remaining four arms were original from the unmodified LUT, and also kept their original numbers.

And here is a drawing that shows us the general sense of basic Swing Arm construction.

Drawing Package 79K30000 covers the demolition of the last LUT, which was the one that was still out there when I first showed up, working for Sheffield Steel. Return to Page 26 to admire the photographs I took of it, back then, if you'd like. It had the Milk Stool, and had been modified for use with Saturn IB, the top half of which was near-identical to the top third of a Saturn V, and it had five Swing Arms up there. As part of the Milk Stool modifications, all of the lower Arms, numbers 1 through 4, had already been removed, but the lowest of the five remaining arms was a rework job, kind of like our GOX Arm is a rework job, so things are not quite as straightforward as they might at first appear.

And, just as a reminder, the Saturn V consisted of a stack of three main stages.

The first stage was called the S-IC (the naming nomenclature for this stuff is quite the fascinating story, in and of itself, but we're not going to be getting into that here, and I leave it as an exercise for the reader to dig into and learn what was going on back in the early 1960's that resulted in the different names for these different pieces of flight hardware) and it was 33 feet in diameter, and that larger diameter perforce dictated shorter Swing Arms.

The second stage of the Saturn V was called the S-II, and was also 33 feet in diameter, and it too dictated the use of shorter Swing Arms.

So. Right off the bat, we can pretty much (excepting the reworked Arm) disregard Swing Arms 1 through 5 on the old LUT because all of them are going to be short, and we can turn our attention to Swing Arms 6 through 9, which serviced the Saturn V third stage, the S-IVB, and of course the Apollo Service and Command Modules above that. The S-IVB was narrower than the S-IC and the S-II, being "only" 21'-8" in diameter, requiring a longer arm than everything that had existed below it. The Service Module was narrower still, at only 12'-10" in diameter, requiring the second-longest Arm of all, the longest of which is the Arm that serviced the conical Command Module sitting on top of everything else.

We'll work from low to high, ok?

Here's Swing Arm Number 6, the S-IVB Aft Service Arm, as shown on 79K30000 sheet 59.

Notice how the back end of the truss, Element 1, along with its Hinges, is quite similar to Elements 2 and 3 of our Gox Arm, along with its Hinges, too. This tells us what they were using to make the GOX Arm with, although it does not tell us exactly which Element, from which Original Arm, it was that got used, nor does it tell us where those elements wound up in the GOX Arm. But clearly, you can see they're grabbing what they've already got laying around, and re-using it.

In this possibly re-used Arm, and others, Truss Element One, the part with the Hinges on it, consists in four Bays. But with the GOX Arm, there are a pair of Truss Elements, Two and Three, which match the overall construction, but they've only got three Bays.

Looks to me as if they decided to get their required extra length in the GOX Arm by connecting three of these Elements, but that would have been too long, so they simply cut one of the Bays off of the pair farthest from the Hinges, and beefed up the Bay which is attached to the Hinges by adding some additional bracing members, and in that way, they reduced their work (a simple cutting and trimming operation is cheaper and easier than fabricating new from scratch, and welding some extra bracing members into an existing Element is also cheaper and easier), and in that manner, they wound up with what they needed, for the least time and money to do so.

So as many as three of the original Arms may have been cannibalized, in order to produce one finished GOX Arm.

And it makes for one hell of a scrambled story, but when you're building this stuff, you don't give a rat's ass about some damn story or other, and you do what's most efficient, to get the job done.

And you go back to my marked-up version of Image 102, and now that you know what they were working with, it all stands pretty well to reason, and there's nothing about any of it that would cause us to doubt things, so... ok.

And on our end, we've done the best we can, with what we've got, and we went as far as we could, and once we got to a place where any kind of actual certainty disappears...

Well then... we went as far as we could, and that's a sensible distance, and we content ourselves with knowing what we know, and also knowing what we don't know.

The end result of what was cobbled together out of existing Apollo hardware consisted in a 63-foot-long truss, with Hinges on one end, and Beanie Cap on the other. And this is a pretty long truss, and none of what they had to work with was that long, so you can clearly see that they had to take pieces and parts, and put them together in a way that would give them what they needed.

Here's the rest of the Saturn IB LUT Swing Arms above the reworked 1A Arm which I do not have a drawing for, from low to high, using unmarked versions of the rectified drawings, since you are now presumed able to recognize their salient features and also spot the similarities, and the differences, with the GOX Arm.

79K30000 sheet 60 shows us the S-IVB Forward Service Arm.

79K3000 sheet 61 depicts the Service Module Service Arm.

And up at the very top, 79K30000 sheet 62 gives us the Command Module Access Arm.

And we'll be getting into additional Arm stuff, when comes time to hang the Orbiter Access Arm on the tower, but that should be enough for now, ok?

And I may as well stop right here and let you know, additionally, that this is going to be the best view, in all of my photographs, of the Utilities Interface Platform (nobody ever called it the UIP, for whatever mysteriously cultural and linguistic reasons), so I'm gonna stop and give that thing a little bit of attention, here and now, too.

We first crossed paths with it back on Page 41 when we were taking our walkabout on the Pad Deck, beneath a cold blue Florida Sky, considering the very long, and very dark, Lingering Shadows of Apollo up there, along with everything else, including the shades of those who originally built it, and whose lives have come, and gone, and are now forever out of our reach, in a way... that our own lives will become ungraspable for those who might consider them from a far future which we will never know.

Their handiwork is everywhere around us, but they themselves...

...are gone.

This place is very technical...

But it is also very...

Spiritual.

And the MLP Utilities Interface Platform remains, and it is enough of a lingering enigma that I decided that I was sick and tired of not having all of this information, about a single place, collected together into a single place, so I decided to label all of that plumbing you see in the photograph above, sprouting from the implacable concrete of the Pad deck, by golly that's what I did.

Here is our same photograph, Image 102, with labels identifying all of it.

And four drawings from which the identifications were extracted are linked herebelow (and yeah, plenty of it shows up on more than one drawing, but I only invoked a single drawing when I slapped those labels onto the photograph to kind of maybe hold it down some with the fucking clutter), that you may ensure yourself of the accuracy of my labeling effort. I'll give them to you in order of the time from which the various elements first appeared in the relevant drawing packages:

Giffels & Rossetti Original Apollo Program Pad B Drawings, Volume 10, sheet 10044, M-306, Launch Pad Cells & Flame Trench (North) Mechanical.

79K10338 sheet M-13, Pad Water Piping to SSAT Plans And Details.

79K24048 sheet M-102, Pad to MLP Firex Line Mod.

79K24048 sheet S-32, Utility Platform Modifications.

Of the four drawings, 79K10338 sheet M-13 (which is from the contract just before I showed up on my first day at the Sheffield Steel field trailer) is by far the best when it comes to letting you see the ridiculously contorted things they wound up having to do, because they had to reuse existing facility infrastructure, and it serves as a bit of a warning about that kind of thing, and if you consider it properly, you'll start to maybe get a few glimmerings of an idea as to exactly why, it's almost always cheaper to just rip everything out by the roots, and start over from scratch.

When you start with design and build, "clean sheet of paper," from scratch, the benefits of designing for maximum efficiency will almost always, with very few exceptions, vastly more than offset any "cost savings" gained via the reuse of existing infrastructure. But, for some reason, this is a hard lesson to understand, and with each succeeding generation of hot-shot idiot bean-counters and insufferably-overconfident management nitwits, the battle must be rejoined yet again, as the dumb sonofabitches cannot be persuaded, that... god damn it... it's fucking CHEAPER! And faster, too.

One day I'll tell you how the hot-shot idiot bean counters and insufferably-overconfident management nitwits at both Martin Marietta and the United States Air Force learned that goddamned lesson, working Launch Complexes 41 and 40, one after the other, in that sequence, and let me tell you, once we were done with doing what the contract specifically instructed us to do, at 41, the whole philosophy of doing the exact same work at 40 was completely altered. But not now, ok? Maybe later.

Well... ok... maybe now.

But only just a little bit. The barest little bit, ok? It's a giant story. The equal to this thing. But I do not have enough photographs, nor do I have the engineering drawings, to permit me to ever properly tell that story, so you only wind up getting the barest little bit of it, it in tiny little fragments, sprinkled around in this one. Please accept my apologies for not being able to do it all.

Both Pad 40, and Pad 41, got completely redone as part of the major upgrade to the existing Titan III system that the Air Force, and a few Three Letter Agencies, deemed necessary for the security interests of the United States.

And the upgrade to Titan III was sufficiently major as to wind up being expressed as a complete, new, Launch Vehicle, and that new launch vehicle was called Titan IV (it was a dog, and it eventually went away, but for a pretty good while there it was the only dog they had).

And the Titan IV was sufficiently different from the existing Titan III family of launch vehicles (there were quite a few permutations), and as an aside, I still have in my possession a trinket that was given to me by one of the Martin Marietta upper management guys, maybe Darrel Heckart, maybe Harry Solana, both of whom were pretty high-powered and savvy humans but yet down-to-earth and easy to work with, too, and my trinket takes the form of a lapel button emblazoned with the words "Last In Line - First In Performance, 34D·2, Thanks Team!" on a background depicting the variant in question pushing upwards in front of the Umbilical Tower with a cloud of liftoff smoke billowing beneath it.

And that "34D·2" is only one variant of the Titan III family of rockets (dig into it, there's some interesting stuff in there with all of the differing versions of the Titan III, all of which were well-handled by the existing Pad structures at Complexes 40 and 41), but the Titan IV was enough larger that it required a complete reworking of both the Mobile Service Structure, and the Umbilical Tower, at both Pads, and they did CX-41 first, and for that first go, somebody... somebody in the the Upper Echelons somewhere in Denver Aerospace where Martin oversaw the Programs from... somebody from the Bean Counting World, determined that they could reuse, most of the existing MST and UT structures, and the contracts were put out for bid, and Ivey Steel got both the Tear Out, and the Refurbish contracts for the structures... and...

It went badly south on them, but it was a sneaking, creeping, slow-onset malady that only fully manifested itself well after the work had been entered into, and the point of no return has been passed...

And they were stuck with it...

And I'm pretty sure that no small amount of the gray hair on my head today was turned that color because of just how far south this thing went on...

...Everybody.

And to sum it up succinctly, once we were done with Pad 41, they put the same work out for bid at Pad 40, and all previous contractual requirements for "refurbishment" of existing Pad Elements (which were very precisely spelled-out in great detail in the contract for the work on Pad 41, and which we had to do) had been removed from all of the plans and specifications which now only concerned themselves with new construction, and we bid it, but Bechtel came in low bidder, and the first thing that Bechtel did on Pad 40 was to completely demolish and remove both the MST and the UT (Go back and look at those pictures I just linked to. Go back and look at the size of those things.), afterwhich they fabricated and installed them both, complete, brand new from scratch.

So.

Lesson learned, I guess.

It's almost never cheaper to reuse or refurbish existing facility infrastructure, no matter what your own eyes might be telling you to the contrary, as you attempt to size things up for the purpose of significantly modifying things.

Ok, enough of that. Back to the photograph.

What else is going on here in this one?

Besides the GOX Arm, of course.

Well... bonding and grounding. Electrician work. Stuff we never messed with, but which was ubiquitous, and which was one of those things that you saw so much of that your brain would turn it off, and you wouldn't see it at all.

The psychosis of explosive atmospheres is a deep-seated one (for damn good and sufficient reasons, I might add), and up here on the Pad Deck, in a location which would, at some point, wind up sitting directly underneath a fully (or maybe only partially, who knows?) fueled rocket, all nice and gassed-up with Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen (and other stuff, too, but let's leave that out of it for now, ok?), they weren't taking any chances on a stray spark being given an opportunity to set things off, and your number one source of stray sparks would be static electricity...

And anything metal that could maybe make or break contact with anything else, was considered to be a prime suspect, and in the interests of keeping our prime suspect from being able to do anything, they affixed a zillion little copper grounding wires, with a zillion little screws (or sometimes it was exothermically welded) to a zillion different adjoining things that might or might not make or break contact between one another, and you're getting a front-row-seat view of one of those things extending between the two removable handrail segments, closest to you, down near the bottom of the frame, on the east side of the Flame Trench.

Just a wee little piece of droopy wire between those removable handrails.

And then, look across the Flame Trench to the other side, over there on the west side, and... yep.

Every single separate piece of removable handrail is connected to every other piece of removable handrail, with those little bitty pieces of bonding and grounding wire.

Except for that last piece, extending out of frame on the right-hand side.

Which further illustrates the psychosis insofar as not every last thing had these stupid little wires attached to it, and no, I hold no hope whatsoever of ever understanding the how, and the why, of that one. Clearly, distance between prime suspects was part of the criteria, but there were enough exceptions to the rule that you could never quite assure yourself that you actually understood what you might be looking at with this stuff. Arcane? Obtuse? Incomprehensible? You bet!

Suffice it to say that this crap was everywhere, except for where it wasn't.

How bad could it get? Well... little stuff, stuff like maybe handrails, or the part of a flip-up platform that does the actual flipping, back at the hinge line where it connects to the non-flipping fixed part, or maybe individual segments of Cable Tray, or...

Yeah, that all kinda makes sense, right?

But it didn't stop there, and these people (whoever it was that had responsibility for this stuff in the Electrical World)...

Were not fucking around...

All the way up to, and including, bonding and grounding the whole FSS to the ground, and further bonding and grounding the whole RSS to the FSS.

79K14110 sheet E-10.

79K14110 sheet E-11.

Separate, specifically called-out installations for both of 'em.

And, of course, all points in between, high and low, big and small, allofit.

I say again, this is how it's done, and they weren't fucking around.

Now that I've specifically brought your attention to it, maybe, as you cast your gaze around all the other photographs in this thing, and maybe some of the photographs in the linked documents and other backup and supporting materials which I've given you a vastly-more-than-adequate supply of, and start looking for these things. I'm sure you'll find more than enough to amuse and entertain yourself for hours, and hours, and hours of Big Bonding and Grounding Fun.

Ok. Enough already.

What's going on with the GOX Arm?

Well... it's now up above the stupid Utilities Interface Platform, which means we've now got ourselves a little room for maneuvering, so whatta ya say we rotate it around into an orientation more in keeping with what it's going to be looking like once it's all the way up there, and we're ready to make the connection.

The hook on the Hammerhead Crane's load block swivels, so the block stays in place, more or less, as the hook swivels around when we reorient our load.

Look close and you'll see there's tag lines on both ends of the Arm, but the ironworkers holding the tag lines are out of fame, on both sides.

What that guy in the middle there is doing, the one standing on the Crawlerway with the big Ventilation Air Duct directly behind him, I cannot say.

There's no crane or anything else over there for him to be looking up at, so I'm not sure precisely what he was doing at the exact split-second I hit the shutter release and grabbed this frame.

"Oh look at that pretty bird!"

He almost looks like he's posing for some kind of goof-ass Russian Propaganda Poster, but I'm pretty sure this guy holds no love in his heart for any of the goddamned drunken barbarians that live in Russia.

So who knows?


And around it goes.

As a result of Ivey Steel having had to turn the Arm through nearly 180 degrees of rotation during the Lift, while I was photographing things, we wind up with a pretty good view of the Arm from multiple points of view, allowing us to see it clearly as it was originally configured.

As time went on, the GOX Arm, as well as the structures associated with it on the FSS, went through several quite significant modifications, and in the end, what shows in most photographs of the Space Shuttle at Pad B no longer agrees with what we see here, when the Arm was first installed on the tower.

Looking closely at the tag lines in this frame, you can see that the one on the Hinge end of the Arm, extending down and to the left in our view, is just a weency bit less tensioned than the one on the Vent Hood (which isn't there, of course) end of the Arm, which extends down and to the right in our view, and it's pretty hard to make out because it runs near-parallel with the edge of the Arm's underside, but it's there, trust me.

At this moment, people on opposite ends of the Arm are pulling their tag lines in opposite directions, and with the Arm up, and coming around the way it is, the wind has now entered the equation, and it now wants very much to rotate the Arm, as it presents Sail Area to that wind. The people on the tag lines need to pull against that wind-induced rotation to keep things under control.

Wind loads, sail area, and the entire business of how air wants to do things, and just how strongly it wants to do things, is an astoundingly-complex subject.

A little something called ASCE 7-10 which is plenty big enough to require breaking it into smaller pieces, simply to allow us to get some sort of a grip on its full ramifications, with things like Wind Loads, Guide to the Wind Load Provisions of ASCE 7-10, which itself can be broken down into smaller pieces that focus on any number of subsets of this nightmare like Wind Loads for Petrochemical and Other Industrial Facilities and all of it gives us some guidance, but in the case of lifts like the one we're seeing here, there can never be any substitute for the experience of Union Ironworkers, and the sense of feel they have developed over years of working hands-on with this stuff. Trying to work the wind-loading calculations on this Arm, which has a center of mass which is very offset from its center of wind loading, which itself will be changing as the arm rotates, as the Arm gets higher and higher, rotating while doing so, as the wind becomes more and less and then more again partially blocked by the Utilities Interface Platform, the 9099 Building and the FSS... well... best of luck with that one. I sincerely hope that your calculator has a set of really good buttons, 'cause you're gonna be punching them right off of the goddamned thing before you're even close to being done with figuring this one out.

But we're ok, nonetheless. Ivey's Union Ironworkers have got this one.


And as the Arm continues to rotate around to the orientation it will need to have in order for the Lift to proceed, its center of gravity/rotation causes the end of it closest to my position across the Flame Trench where I'm shooting from to swing noticeably to the left, taking my field of view with it as I panned across with my camera.

I've also rolled the camera over into Landscape View orientation, and this allowed me to keep the north side of the FSS in-frame, even as the hulking mass of the RSS has now entered the other side of the frame over on the left side, up above, as a dark and vaguely sinister apparition in the sky.

I have no sensible recollection of the weather this day, but everyone is wearing jackets or overshirts even though the sun is out, so it must have been cold, and you only get cold sunny weather in Florida when it rides in on a stiff north-northwest wind.

And in this frame, you can see that stiff north-northwest wind.

Bottom left corner of the photograph. Two ironworkers. One of whom is holding a tag line, and the other who may be there... just in case... a little more weight might become necessary to stay on top of things with the tag line.

Follow that line as it arcs upward to where it's tied to the end of the GOX Arm.

Look how far it's bent to the left. It's not hanging down, at all. It's hanging across.

Now look again at the size of that GOX Arm.

And that stiff wind is working it, and is urging it, and will take it away from everybody if given the slightest chance to.

People see images of Lifts, and they marvel at the steel, and the rigging, and the workers, and the drama of the whole scene, but they never seem to marvel at the wind.

Which is only to be expected. The wind after all, is invisible, and it can be hard to consider a thing that you cannot see.

But here. In the form of that tag line that's hanging across, you can see the wind.

And the force it's applying to the GOX Arm is substantial.

And it's gusting. And swirling. And the GOX Arm isn't sitting still, either.

And what you're really looking at here is a dance, and it's a dance that comes with severe consequences if you get it wrong.

Ho hum, just another day on the job.

Also, the ironworker on the farthest left down there in that bottom left corner, watching his buddy as he dances with the tag line...

I'm pretty sure that's Glenn Johnson.

And we've already met Glenn Johnson.

But the Glenn Johnson we've already met was from the future, and our present-day Glenn Johnson, the one working with his buddy on the tag line as the GOX Arm was being lifted at Pad B, the one we're seeing in our photograph...

Doesn't know...

Does not know what the future was holding in store for him...

And yet again we find ourselves having to stop and make a deliberate and conscious effort to actually see these people.

The ones in the photograph.

And it all looks so ho-hum, and it all looks so banal, and it all looks so tediously work-a-day...

But it's not.

And it never was, and it never will be.

And we're looking at a group dynamic here, and our pair of ironworkers are working in tandem with another group of three, across the Flame Trench, and you can see the leftmost and center members of that group of three looking back across, and in this way, everyone stays on top of what everyone else is doing, and in so doing, the GOX Arm continues to be well and properly controlled, even as our stiff wind does its dead-level best to snatch it away from them.

By himself, across the Flame Trench, left of Mobile Launch Platform Mount Mechanism Number 6, Wade Ivey watches over it all, letting his team of Union Ironworkers do their job without interference or micro-management, while at the same time being there, if need be.

And as an additional tiny little vignette, completely unrelated to the main subject of our photograph, an ironworker is down at the very bottom of RSS Stair #2, one of the two "Stairs of Doom," working the modifications which had to be done to it, which you can see on 79K24048 sheet S-278.

At some point, somehow (I wish I knew, but I do not), something came along that caused them realize that they would have to provide additional temporary clearance with the MLP Deck when needed, by cutting the C10 stair stringers down near their bottom ends, and placing a hinge in there to allow that last little bit of the bottom of the stair to get folded back upon itself, up and out of the way. It wound up giving them less than a full foot of additional vertical clearance between the untrimmed bottom of the stair stringer and the MLP, but whatever it was, they needed it, and so they did it.

Look for them over there in the distance with their float and what appears to be a small temporary windbreak of some sort.

Far left of the photograph, near center, silhouetted against the brightness of the sky.

Fifty feet of clear, unimpeded, lethal drop above the concrete of the Pad Deck.

Another life. Another story. Another past. Another future.


And now we're starting to gain some proper elevation.

And the Arm is now more or less weathervaning into that north-northwest wind, and in this orientation, the wind goes from a condition of wanting to induce rotation in the Arm, to a condition of wanting to suppress rotation in the Arm, which will now remain oriented more or less the way you see it here, but of course it's never going to be sitting still, and the wind is going to want to wag it around, so the tag line on the Vent Hood end remains in play, and will not be coming out of play until the actual bolt-up begins, once the arm is in direct metal-on-metal contact with the FSS at the top of this Lift.

Which all of the principles in this Lift know like the back of their hands, and look close and you see the tag line on the Hinge end of the Arm is only about forty feet in length, and was only there for near-ground work, and now that we're up in the air, you can see it dangling free, hanging down to where the end of it is damn near on-center with the FSS, a foot or three below the steel-bar grating at elevation 100'-0", where we can see silhouettes of people watching the lift. Who these guys are, I do not know, but I would imagine they're not Ivey people. At the moment, Ivey needs to be on the ground and up at the destination, but in between... not so much.

But there's a lot of other interested parties, so we're never going to lack for onlookers, making sure that whatever entity it is that they're representing, has a pair of good eyes on that entity's interests.

Okey doke.

We've now got a fair whack of empty space down below our GOX Arm, and through that empty space we can see things, and one of the things we can now see is the new Centaur Platform that's going in there, between the Hinge Column and Side 2 of the FSS between Elevations 120'-0" and 140'-0".

And we've caught it by luck at a pretty good time, from just about the one-and-only viewing location that does not involve being just above it, out over the Flame Trench in the gondola of a hot-air balloon. From where we are right now, you can see almost all of it, and it's mostly complete except for the Porch, which means we get to see pretty much the whole thing. And our viewpoint, from an angle allowing just enough daylight showing between the members making up the "floor" of it, lets us get a feel for what's going on with the framing that supports the steel-bar grating (and which will also be supporting the Psychosis of the RBUS, too) you'd be walking across once it was complete, which in turn gives us a feel for pretty much the whole thing as a discrete item.

So that's kind of nice, isn't it?

I introduced you to this framing before any of it ever went up, back when we were seeing the world through the shining eyes of a rapt six-year old child, my son Kai, when we were out on the Crawlerway just south of B Pad, during one of the exceedingly-rare open-house days for employees and their families, watching the return of Challenger at the end of Mission STS 41-G, back on Page 63.

And that introduction starts in earnest, right here.

And now, at last, we've been given our first (and only) chance to actually see the fucking thing, and, based on where it lives perhaps you'll understand just how lucky we really are, to have accidentally been given a point of view which allows us to see it at all, and especially without the Porch blocking it from view, because it's buried in there, straddling and intertwined with the Struts, deep within the Steel Forest between the FSS proper, and the RSS, more or less between Elevations 120'-0" and 140'-0", just beneath the Crossover Catwalk that takes you from the FSS over to the RSS, dead center, downtown, to the Anteroom and Airlock which is the Entrance to the PCR Main Floor at elevation 135'-7".

Here's the Centaur Platform Framing, highlighted on the above photograph, Image 105.

But even with the framing highlighted, it's still less than fully-wonderful, and it's still pretty confusing, so ok, so I'll doctor it up some more, and we'll try Image 105 with the Framing highlighted, and the blurred-out visual obstructions blocking parts of it from view labeled, to kind of give you an idea as to why the Framing is as chopped-up in appearance as it is.

And I'm still not happy with it, so here it is again, one more time, but this time you get Image 105 with Centaur Platform Framing blue-highlighted and labeled, with blurred-out visual obstructions blocking parts of it from view labeled.

And at this point, I'm still not happy, but...

...fuckit.

Here's 79K24048 sheet S-50, and sheet S-51, and sheet S-52.

Figure the goddamned thing out for yourself, I'm done with it.

Suffice it to say, they way the just sort of crammed this monstrosity in there, into a place were you could hardly tell there was a "place" there in the first place...

And yet, by some miracle, we actually get to see the goddamned thing...

...sort of.

\\\\\\\
ADDENDUM, 2024 03 07:
And the gods (and yet another anonymous benefactor) have chosen to smile down upon my unworthy ass yet again, and have tossed a piece of manna to me in the form of an image that lets you see what this thing looked like from the inside, looking back east towards the Porch (which of course was not there yet when we hung the GOX Arm), and although it's not a large-scale image, it's plenty large enough, and from this vantage point you're getting a pretty goddamned good look at just how intertwined the Centaur Porch was with all of the pre-existing structure, out there in the Steel Forest between the FSS and the RSS.

Behold: The Steel Forest as seen from the West End of the Centaur Porch.

And like I just said, they shoved this thing "into a place were you could hardly tell there was a "place" there in the first place..."
///////

Ok. Next frame, please.


And now we've gained some proper elevation, and now the images grow commensurately more dramatic.

As with the GOX Arm Strongback Lift we saw back on Page 62, as the lift proceeds, and more and more elevation is gained, the farther and farther I have to step back, to keep it all in frame.

There are times when I marvel at my good luck to be forced into having to do this, because of my fixed-zoom camera.

It caused me to include no end of other really cool stuff in the frame, viewed from angles that I'd never thought to view it from at the time, and here we are today, reaping the benefits of my not having a damnable zoom lens on my camera.

At the time, I felt woefully constrained, but now, all these long years later, I realize I was just about as lucky as you can get with this stuff, and as I never grow tired of saying, "It's always better to be lucky than smart."

The Great Snarl of the "9099 Building" is particularly well-displayed in this frame, and this photograph gives you an excellent look at all that stuff over there in the sense of it being... a godawful mess, bereft of all visual appeal, ugly as only industrial ugly can be ugly, without the least redeeming artistic merit about it in any way, shape, or form.

The FSS (and the RSS too), has this impossible-to-describe sci-fi ambiance of unsettling potency, of inscrutable looming, as a Great Dark Force, possessed of a mana, a keeper of Dark Secrets. It did not seek to conceal itself from you behind a glittering facade of glass or concrete as all run-of-the-mill skyscrapers you encounter downtown will do. It exposed itself to you completely, and yet, in so doing, that only added to its enigmatic presence. It was a thing that may or may not have exerted some sort of strange draw upon you in and of itself, evaluated strictly on form, which became greatly altered when cast at colossal scale, blotting out the sky, bearing down on you from high overhead as a first-order mystery, and just in general forcing itself on you in ways that cannot be ignored. But the 9099 Building had none of that going for it, and it was merely squat... and low... and... ugly. It never stood a chance with the frightening power of the FSS and the RSS right there next to it, holding sway over it, looking down on it.

And the viewpoint of our photograph above is just about exactly how you'd initially encounter all that 9099 crap over there visually, as you first came up on top of the level part of the Pad Deck in your car, every time, getting ready to turn left and go park in the shakeout yard area at the tippy-top of the Pad Slope just south of the RSS, or maybe head over there to the far side of the Flame Trench from the towers on the east side of the Pad by the TTV trailers or someplace like that.

Right now we're looking at things from over there in front of the TT&V trailers, and farther down this page, as our viewpoint changes radically again, we'll get to look back down, from up where the Arm is being connected, which is unseeably out-of-frame above the top margin of this image, and see right were I took this picture from.

The sheer overpowering luck involved with all of this stuff (and more, too), getting to see it as we do in these photographs, leaves me dumbfounded.

Just... unbelieving of it all.

But here we are, nonetheless, and the facts of the matter are beyond dispute.

From where we stand now, we're facing directly, exactly, into the blowing north-northwest wind, looking down the length of the Arm longitudinally from below as it weathervanes in that wind, far above us.

The Load Block and Hook of the Hammerhead Crane is hidden from view, behind the Arm. The lines which carry that Load Block are visible, but just barely. Both tag lines on the Arm are easily-enough visible, and above and to the right of the white thread which is the line affixed to the Vent Hood end of the Arm, a darker, and much-less obvious thread is also visible, and that is the mid-reaches of the Lightning Wire which extends a thousand feet from the top of the Lightning Mast, to its concrete anchor out near the Pad Perimeter Road, to the north.

The overall effect is one of the Arm floating in space far above us, adding yet another layer of mystery to this image, which is already plenty well-endowed with enough mystery on its own, as is. The more I look at this photograph, the more I like it, and more and more different reasons for liking it keep creeping subtly into the matrix as I continue to keep looking at it.

Down on the ground, bottom-left corner of the frame, Wade Ivey remains right where he's been the whole time, letting his people do what they do best, and giving us a sense for the grand scale of things as he does so.

Next to him, I'm pretty sure that's Ray Elkins.

Ray was one of the older ironworkers out of the 808 Hall, and had seen and done it all by this time, which is one of the reasons Wade has him there right next to him. He was short-statured, but, as with so many others, now that I'm thinking about it, was possessed of a fiery presence. But Ray kind of kept that fiery aspect of himself on the down-low, and was an absolute peach to work with.

He had a wry smile, and a wry sense of humor to go with it, and there was always a twinkle in his eye. I got along marvelously with him, and considered him a dear friend and one hell of an asset on the job. If there was ever anything I could do for him, I would do my utmost, but that hardly ever happened because he was just about as complete as a human being can be. And he must have seen some damn thing or other in me, because from the very outset, when I first crossed paths with him when he was with Wilhoit and I was with Sheffield, he was unstinting in his efforts to help show me around, show me how things worked, and in particular was everlastingly excellent with tipping me to hidden subtleties and nuances of things that I would never have noticed on my own.

And then he'd suddenly flip into "silly mode," point gravely at a piece of aluminum laying there, and say, "That's loonium," with a continued grave expression masking laughter which was working its hardest to erupt to the surface, but which was unable to, although his eyes were a dead giveaway, every time.

But. As with so many other Union Ironworkers I met, Ray had lived a hard life and had endured much, and was long past countenancing the least whiff of bullshit from... anybody.

And he'd be smiling, and he'd be telling me something, and without causing me to think he was warning me or anything like that, he'd nevertheless get it across that...

Ray Elkins was a man not to be fucked with.

And this, of course, caused me to like him even more.

I really like no-bullshit people. It's just my nature, I guess.

And Ray and Wade are down there on the ground, and they're both looking up at that goddamned GOX Arm floating up there in the blue sky, complete with lines hanging down from it like mooring lines hanging down from a fucking zeppelin, except it's not a zeppelin, and instead it looks like something off of a doomsday sci-fi book cover, and it's coming this way, and... boy, I dunno.

I've been looking at this picture too long.

Let's look at the next picture, how 'bout?



And now we've walked around to the area just south of the Flame Trench, and we've stepped farther away from the Lift yet again, and now at last we're able to frame the whole FSS (with the exception of the Lightning Mast), but we've also managed to just clip the Pad Deck out of things, down at the bottom.

But this is a good frame anyway, and the scale of things is shown pretty well, and that scale is... quite large.

Look closely at the full-size rendering of this photograph, above and to the left of the Arm, and I'm about ninety-nine percent sure that's Wade Ivey standing there on the GOX Arm Lower Hinge Access Platform, which is the lowest of the two dark protuberances sticking out to the right of the main envelope of the FSS, between the suspended Arm and the Hammerhead Crane.

You're seeing him silhouetted against the sky from about the waist up. White hardhat, dark jacket with a bit of white running across the shoulders. We're pushing it pretty hard, given the quality of the photograph we have to work with, but nobody else on the tower this day was dressed quite the same, and that white across the shoulders in particular is pretty good identification. Maybe go back and look at some of the images above this one, with Wade standing on the Pad Deck, and compare for yourself.

Wade was an ex-ironworker, and, if he deemed it necessary or prudent, he would be out on the iron with the rest of the gang, keeping a close eye on things. He never interfered. But he never went away, either. Which of course is one of the main reasons he did as well with his company as he did. You don't consistently turn profits in this line of work year after year by sitting at a desk in a wood-paneled office, snapping your fingers at people.

Elsewhere in frame, the Arm continues its stately ascent, and from this angle the Load Block on the Hammerhead Crane, along with some of the Lifting Sling attached to the Arm has once again come into view.

To the left, part of the Great Bulk of the RSS is in view, with the large dark rectangle of the RCS Room Door Opening, far top left in frame.

And extending downward from out of the top of the frame, just to the right of the RCS Room Door Opening, a vertical trusswork that goes all the way down to the level of the bottom of the OMBUU (which we only very recently hung on the tower) can be seen, mostly-illuminated by bright sunlight.

More Guide Columns.

Which I'm still dreading, even though we've encountered a lot of it already, since I first tickled you with it, back on Page 53, and again, after that, when I threatened you directly with it on Page 64, and then again, after that when the bludgeonings began in earnest farther down on Page 64, and you've already seen the marked-up version of Image 093, which was a sequence frame from the OMBUU Lift, and the marked-up version is mostly blurred out, so here's Image 093 again, unlabeled, unblurred, and please note the fairly-close similarities in viewpoint and subject matter between Image 093 and Image 107 just above these words, complete to the inclusion (barely) of the RCS Room Door Opening in both frames, and that is one hell of a lucky thing, because it allows us to actually see the changes as the hateful Guide Columns hanging down beneath the RCS Room on both sides, Orbiter right on RSS Column Line 4.6, and Orbiter left on RSS Column Line 3.4, were more and more installed on the tower as the work specified by our contract continued to progress, and what you're seeing now is the plumb version of things, following the resolution of the daffiness...

And we're getting slices of time here that...

...nowhere.

Nowhere else, and nobody else can can show you these two time slices where the nascent Guide Columns System started appearing down below the RCS Room at Pad B. Beginning first with the Columns on and below the right side of the RCS Room, and after that, when the left side started morphing from lines on engineering paper, into cold hard steel.

Interestingly enough, we do have similar Guide Columns time-slice images of Pad A, and one image in particular is quite well-known. Back in the early 1980's when it was taken, prior to the the first launch, this image appeared everywhere, and could be seen as a poster on the walls of numerous places. Around here, in Brevard County, for a while, this thing was ubiquitous, and plenty of copies of it yet remain, hanging on walls in no end of places, from gas station mini markets to bank lobbies to public buildings to private homes.

It's a rare look at the Orbiter sitting on the Pad, with the RSS rolled back giving a clear view of Columbia sitting there on the MLP, and it was taken at night, and it's lit with searchlights like some kind of sci-fi movie, and it's as dramatic as hell, and...

Why?

Why would Columbia be sitting there totally exposed, middle of the night, brilliantly illuminated by searchlights?

And then we look at the image closely...

And we're very much jumping ahead with some of this, but here's that same famous image of Columbia illuminated by searchlights, and this time I've labeled it, to show you exactly what's going on, which explains why the RSS had to be rolled back, well away from Columbia, with the whole place lit up like a rock concert. And what was going on when this photograph was taken was going on at a dead run, and...

There is much beneath the surface of things here, very much, unspoken, and we're going to need to go behind the scenes to understand what we're actually seeing here.

And nobody who looks at this dramatic image of Columbia sitting there on Pad A has the least glimmer of an idea that what they're really seeing here is people scrambling, working furiously against a ticking clock, attempting to execute an ad-hoc fix, a great and scary kludge, which was forced on them by a life-threatening oversight, involving a National Asset, and National Prestige, and things were hanging by threads in too many places, and in too many ways, to sensibly enumerate, and they managed to pull it off, but at the time it was by no means a given that they would succeed.

And right now, in similar manner as how we interrupted our tale of the OMBUU Lift, we're going to interrupt our tale of the GOX Arm Lift, to bludgeon you some more with additional Guide Columns.

And the Guide Columns are devilishly tricky, and devious, and what you see here above these words in Image 107 as a single sunlit-illuminated vertical trusswork is in fact, three separate things, and all of it exists as you see it in our photograph after the Upper Fixed portions of it had to be cut down off the tower and reworked to keep it all nice and plumb while it was hanging off the face of a very-much not-plumb RSS...

And it just keeps getting worse and worse, and you can depend on that, but for now, we're only interested in just the three separate pieces showing in our photograph, the topmost of which we first learned about as we encountered The Leaning Tower of Pad B, which makes up the Upper Left Fixed Guide Columns.

And perhaps right now a little review might be in order, and...

In the Beginning...

...they refused to Roll Back.

And that was strictly a political decision, but it was manifested as an engineering decision, and it was a bunch of goddamned bullshit in both regards, but it was mandated...

...and it came to be.

And you are presumed to have read the relevant material on Page 55 that I just linked to with "In the Beginning..." where the explanation is given for just exactly why this stuff had to be done the way it was done. And if you have not, well then, goddamnit, go back there and read that motherfucking thing, right now, because you will nowhere else in your life find this hidden story, out in the open, told in plain words.

Read me, or read nothing. Your choice.

And the raison d'être for the Columns was the pair of Split Platforms, one matching set of Split Platforms above the other, which rode up and down vertically in that god-awful cramped little crevice between the near-flat belly of the Space Shuttle and the roundness of the External Tank, from one end to the other, from the Aft Attach Struts to up above the Bipod, which are the two places where the Tank is attached to the Orbiter.

That first tanking of Columbia, out on the Pad, which, never forget, was the very first time the goddamned External Tank had ever been fully filled with its half-million gallons of cryogenic fuel and oxidizer, betrayed the hidden flaw, the oversight, which might very well have destroyed them on their very first flight, and they became, deeply terrified (rightfully so, I might add), of what might happen.

And since politics intervened, ergo, The Platforms.

They needed the Platforms, to inspect the Tank... to repair the Tank, if need be.

...out on the Pad.

And the place that needed inspection was not an easy one.

Far from it, in fact.

In fact, it was the worst place you could have possibly picked.

Hemmed in on one side by a wall of untouchably-fragile TPS Tiles on the belly of the Orbiter, which, if damaged, even slightly, would have pronounced sentence upon the vehicle and crew, during re-entry, and that sentence was death.

No right of appeal.

And on the other side, the equally-untouchably-fragile coating of Foam which insulated the great cylinder of the Tank, and which, if damaged, had the potential to be knocked loose during ascent, and that too could have pronounced sentence.

And there's no fucking room in there to work, anyway.

"Build us the Platforms."

"Heed us. Obey us. Do as we say."

"Or it will be the worse for you."

And here again, is the photograph of where you will be doing your inspection work. And where you will be doing your repair work.

And where you will find a way to insinuate Platforms into, such that technicians could gain sure-footed access to things.

Out on the Pad.

And here, on 79K20408 sheet S-227, we'll get our first look at the E.T Access Platform itself. And I'm going to doctor that drawing up some, in order to point out a few salient features, some of which are a little less than fully-obvious, and some of which reflect less than altogether wonderfully on the quality of the PRC/BRPH engineering that went into creating it. RS&H ruined me with 79K14110. Spoiled me rotten. But that does not make this PRC/BRPH stuff one iota better, no matter how you slice it.

A lot of the trouble with the PRC/BRPH 79K24048 stuff consisted in breathtakingly lousy naming and identification features, and extended from there all the way down into deeply critical technical and configurational flaws, some of which very definitely had the power to kill.

Simply navigating around in the damn thing was a trial.

Also, please note, that we're dealing with a set of as-builts, created after the fact, dated "11-5-85" (it's there in the Title Blocks showing in those Rev. E boxes), and oh by the way, there were one hell of a lot of other changes to these drawings that are not shown, and instead, as we've already seen in other places, it all gets subsumed into the drawing just as if the drawing had been fine and dandy from the very beginning, which it most manifestly was not, and yours truly wrote too much of the goddamned paper, in the form of RFI's (Request For Information), which resulted in Change Orders (every one of which was issued... grudgingly, but they had to, every goddamned time) incorporating no end of drawing alterations to correct no end of... bullshit, and a vast quantity of my time on this job was spent over in the PRC/BRPH field trailers...

...and I'd hit Jack Petty (ex-ironworker, and he was their structural tech rep, and he did not care for politics, social maneuvering, finger-pointing, or who pays for it, and all he wanted was for the goddamned thing to be right) with the conundrum-of-the-moment, and he'd spread out the drawings, and a look would come over his face, and he'd get up out of his chair, and the two of us would take a walk outside, perhaps to the company car for a ride to Pad A, to see how they handled it over there (a huge amount of this stuff was repeated mistakes that, over on Pad A, had already been solved and yet somehow reappeared in 79K24048), perhaps to head up to the towers on foot and walk high steel with clipboards and tape measures in hand, or perhaps he'd simply walk across the open area inside the trailers to somebody else's desk, or maybe just pick up the phone and call somebody, and without him we would probably still trying to build the miserable goddamned thing today, and... if you think I'm being picky with this stuff, think again because this is exactly the sort of engineering sloppiness that winds up killing people, and... ok MacLaren, it's going to be alright, MacLaren, calm down, MacLaren, go outside for a while maybe and take a breather, ok?

So ok. So here's 79K24048 sheet S-227 again, showing you the general layout of things, with some informational notes and some good old-fashioned MacLaren Snarl pointing out things that were no fun at all to work with back when we were trying to build this stuff.

And of course that's just a General Arrangement drawing, and the Platforms themselves were quite complicated. Rube Goldberg stuff.

Get a load of this thing. Here it is on 79K24048 sheet S-228.

All-aluminum construction, welded tube-steel frame. Which you don't get told about here on S-228. Oh no. That would be too easy. Can't be having any of that can we? We'll give you "aluminum" for the grating and the checkerplate and the handrails here on S-228, but you're gonna have to go back to 79K24048 sheet S-224 and read Note: 1 to find out what you're gonna be making this drug-induced hallucination out of for its actual framing members. Sigh. Keep reading the notes if you want to learn how to weld it together. I don't see anything about heat-treating with this thing, but it's gonna need it, and it's gonna need it done right, or otherwise it will warp all to hell. I do see that they're invoking KSC-STD-Z-0004 down below Note 1, but that doesn't really tell us anything about heat-treating aluminum weldments, and I've already gone on enough about welded-aluminum monstrosities back when we did the OMS Pods Heated Purge Covers on Page 60, so, suffice it to say, it's probably in there somewhere, but I don't feel like chasing it down right now. Maybe later. Maybe. Maybe not, too.

So ok.

So the whole Platform is aluminum. Fine. Well... except maybe for just the weenciest little bit of it. Little Stuff. Lifting shackles. Detent pins. Hinge pins. Nuts-n-bolts attach hardware. That kinda stuff. But you gotta mind, 'cause some of it might not be what you think it is, and ya gotta be careful about it with reading these drawings, lest you get crosswise with the QC and Engineering people, who you can rely upon to not be any kind of nice, about any of it.

And it's complicated. Don't believe me? Ok, how 'bout we take a gander at 79K24048 sheet S-230, then. Let's look at the Guide Shoes, how 'bout?

And these are the things that keep you up in the air, safely pinned-off to the Guide Columns while you're working boots-down on the ET Access Platform, instead of falling to your death down onto the steel deckplates of the MLP far below you, and while they're keeping you up in the air, they're also keeping you on The Path of Righteousness, on the ever so Straight and Narrow, which is precisely defined and maintained by the Columns themselves, stuffed up in there, plumbing the depths of that god-awful hundred-foot-deep crevice, between a marshmallow and a soft place, which you can not so much as touch, lest you kill people by inadvertently damaging the thing that's keeping them alive as they hurtle along at 25,000 feet per second enveloped by a Plasma Sheath at significantly plus-one-thousand degree temperatures, and...

"Careful there, Lou. Don't be fucking those tiles up, ok? Those things are fucking delicate. And don't be touching the foam on that goddamned Tank, either. That thing's even worse. That thing's made out of mush. We're here strictly just to look at it, and see if maybe somebody else fucked it up. Nothing else. Don't be touching any of this shit, alright?" From inside the dark confines of a goddamned crevice. On a flimsy-ass aluminum platform that necks down to a minimum width of 1'-4½", which does not take into account the deduct for the thickness of the pipes that make the frame that holds up the Environmental Enclosure that's mounted on it, which makes it pretty damn close in there, in a place where you cannot so much as even touch the walls of your fissure of a prison.

I launched off into this diversion of a diversion because of what we were getting a look at up above these words in Image 107. Up there hanging off the face of the RCS Room on its left side, chandeliering down, out and away from the body of the RSS, all the way to the bottom of the OMBUU.

Here it is again in a marked-up version of Image 107, just to make sure we're all on the same page with it, ok?

We're gonna look at the three individual elements that make up this deceptively-simple looking piece of vertical trusswork (which is only the upper part, after all, and it gets better and better, the farther down we go, but we're not gonna go there right now 'cause that part of it hadn't been built yet, and now that you've seen the Platforms, and the Guide Shoes, maybe you're starting to develop a sense of just how complicatedly-whack this stuff wound up having to be, because somebody didn't want to Roll Back for fear that it might make them look bad, and because other sombodies, prior to that, never conceived that people would need to be given hands-on access to the Tank (and the underside of the Orbiter too), while they were sitting out on the Launch Pad, ready to go.

Keeping in mind, of course, that once Fueling was underway, or at any time between completion of Fueling and Launch, this stuff was nowhere near the Orbiter or the Tank, hanging off the face of a demated RSS, and nobody was ever going to be taking a ride on it, and...

Should something untoward have occurred as a result of Thermal Shock, as it did the very first time they tanked the goddamned thing, which of course is what precipitated all this bullshit...

...and nobody picked up such untoward thing visually from farther away, looking at a screen which displayed camera views from a safe distance...

...well then...

You're on your own with it, good luck, and godspeed.

And we already started out with the toppest and simplest part back on Page 64 when we were lifting the OMBUU, and now we'll work our way farther on down.

And to do that, in order to refamiliarize with the toppest and simplest part of the Left Fixed Guide Columns, we return to 79K24048 sheet S-234, which is a General Arrangement view of things, and which we've already been introduced to, and back on Page 64, down near the bottom of the page, we got to see the Right Upper Fixed Guide Columns on S-234, and it's all pretty straightforward and sensible, with simple-enough vertical runs of trusswork tied back to various bits of RSS framing steel. Once you've managed to get it all plumb, of course.

All well and good.

But that's about to change.

Below the bottom margin of the RCS Room, over there on its left side, where the run of Guide Columns merrily continues on downward, we find ourselves encountering a little something that might occasionally get in the way, and that little something that might occasionally get in the way is the Orbiter Access Arm. And of course without an OAA, we're not gonna have any ability to get our crew inside of their Launch Vehicle, and without a crew, things become Less Wonderful. And that Arm will get in our way when in its extended position, which is the position it has to be in for Crew Access, or even to simply allow the RSS to rotate around into the mate position. And with the RSS in mate position, the OAA is butt-up against the face of the RSS, inches beneath the RCS Room, more or less even on its bottom margin with the Antenna Access Platform, and we've been here before, and we even talked about that weirdie bumper over there just above the Side Seal Panel in case the OAA was to accidentally hit the RSS, and...

...now the time has come...

...to deal with it.

And can you see how this fucking Guide Columns thing is starting to snowball on us?

Stop a minute and think about it.

For that Orbiter Access Arm to get in there behind the Guide Columns, as the RSS is mated and demated, that section of Columns is gonna need to be out of the way. That little run of Guide Columns over there on the Left Side just beneath the RCS Room, traps the Arm behind it when the RSS is mated to the Orbiter. Take a look at 79K14110 sheet M-45, which I've previously showed you, marked-up, and take note that the Left Guide Columns are outboard of Line D, over there where it intersects with Line 3.4 on the Front Left Corner of the RCS Room. Clearly, the Guide Columns are trapping the OAA, and that's not gonna work out well for anybody.

So. Something's gonna have to be done about it.

And what they did was to put hinges at the top of this segment of the Guide Columns, which allows them to swing it up and out of the way when they need to pull the RSS around into the mate position where the OAA is going to be banging into it unless they get it the hell out of there.

And to gain a sense of what and where, we return once again (and we'll be doing this repeatedly as we step through this stuff) 79K24048 sheet S-224, which is our General Arrangement for the whole Guide Columns System, and I've highlighted it and labeled it for you, so as you're properly squared away with just exactly what and where.

There's mistakes on this drawing, but I'm not gonna fault them for it, this time, because, clearly, this rendering of things was done back at the very beginning, and the Lifting Boom in particular was not a "finished thing" at the time, and so they just kind of SWAG'd it in there, they best they could, knowing that it would get properly finished-off farther on into the Drawing Package when the actual engineering for this thing had been fully nailed down.

And I further marked up this annotated version of S-224 with a note indicating that the reeving for the Hinged OAA segment was all wrong, and we'd need to go to 79K24048 sheet S-232 to see it done correctly. Notice that the winch that does the actual lifting and lowering had nowhere to go, nearby, and they wound up having to put it over on the Access Catwalk, that takes you to the SRB Access Platforms, and this, as you will continue to learn, is typical, because...

It's a a Great Kludge, and they had nowhere to go with far more of this stuff than might otherwise be pleasant. Or even sane.

And now that we know how it all fits together with its lifting apparatus (We don't, really, but we're close enough, so let's let it go at that, ok?), I'm going to jump you forward, to a time well beyond the time which we're seeing in Image 107, and show you the finished version of our Left Hinged Guide Columns, with a really nice isometric view of it, which includes a lot of bells and whistles that have yet to appear on the tower as our GOX Arm Lift proceeds. 79K24048 sheet S-274 shows it to us in all its contrapted glory. During the GOX Arm Lift, none of the ECS Duct stuff was anywhere to be seen, and it would be a while yet before it would show up, because that's Pipefitter Work, and the fitters were going to have to wait till Ivey's Union Ironworkers were done building the goddamned thing in the first place. So now you know, ok?

And it's even hairier than it looks, because at some point along the line, the SRB Access Platforms were ripped off the sides of the RCS Room, and completely redone. And just so as you know, the "old" SRB Access Platforms are what you will be seeing throughout these photo essays, and the "new" ones did not appear until after I was gone, and I have zero hands-on familiarity with them.

And 79K24048 has a nasty habit of mixing the "old" and the "new" together, without bothering to tell you what it's doing, and you're kind of on your own with it, and what you see in the above marked up version of S-232 turns out to be the "new" SRB Access Platform framing and bracing, and this whole mess with the Lifting Jib on the OAA Hinged Guide Columns Segment was threaded through that bracing, and... jesus fuck, why can't these people get fucking organized?

Oh yeah, I remember now.

They can't get organized because C-suite management decided they could do this on the cheap, bid it that way, won the bid, and then walked on over to engineering and said, "You figure it out. It's not our problem anymore. You've been given the budget and you'll allocate your humans per that budget, and those humans will by-god do the sonofabitch or we'll toss the lot of you out on the street and find somebody else who can."

We must view our problem in its original context, and all of this went down back when Regan Republicanism was really starting to sink its teeth into The Body Politic, drawing blood for real by this time, feasting on it, and people like Jack Welch had secured stranglehold grips around the throats of the corporations they were "leading", and were being hailed as Shareholder Value Saviors, and we're still suffering from their murderous assault on our culture and on our nation, and at the time, the squeeze was on and people were literally saying things like greed is good, and all of the Little CEO Fish were making like the Big CEO Fish, and every last one of them was raping and pillaging for all they were worth, making short-term profit look like a good long-term plan, despite the fact that smarter people were warning of The Train Wreck To Come, and the boots were already firmly in place on workers necks everywhere, and...

"Never fault the guy behind the counter for not doing the job right when it's the guy you can't see in the back room who's understaffing the store."

Fucking assholes. Fucking corporate-greed assholes. Every last one of them.

And we're looping through the skies over the Pad, diverting our diversions as we go, and hey why not, let's ask, "Why did they re-do the SRB Access Platforms anyway?"

And the reason for that is so as somebody could get on the fucked-up ET Access Platforms. (Remember them? Those are the things that ride up and down on the goddamned Guide Columns, which of course were precipitated by the fact that some puffed-up asshole in an oak-paneled office somewhere didn't want to be made to look bad, and... here we are.) Sigh.

The "old" SRB Access Platforms headed straight and true toward the top of the SRB where the work got done, and for this to happen, the platforms stood well away from the sides of the RCS Room. Also, please note, there was a significant elevation change along that pathway. See it all here on 79K14110 sheet A-16, which I've pasted the Guide Columns with their Ladders into, so as you can see how the existing "old" SRB Access Platforms and the Catwalks taking you to them will never be able to give anyone access to those Ladders, which needed to be pushed over there to the far side of things, making them that much harder to get to from the Main Structure, in order to locate 'em right next to the ET Access Platforms (not shown), which of course is what they were there for.

And when the fucked-up Guide Columns entered the picture, with their even more fucked-up ET Access Platforms riding up and down on them, they realized they didn't really have any way for any of the techs to actually get on the damn things, and they built that ladder that runs on the exterior side of the Guide Columns, and the sense of the thing was to step off the Ladder, over on to the Platform, and that's pretty sketchy, but that's what they were stuck with, except that they didn't even have any way to get onto the goddamned Ladder in the first place, and so they had to figure something out, and the best they could do was to use the SRB Access Platform as an embarkation and disembarkation point, and for that to happen, the SRB Access Platforms had to get dragged back over there right next to the side of the RCS Room, so that the back end of 'em would be close enough to that miserable fucking Ladder, which now means the front end, which is still going to the exact same destination as the old SRB Access Platforms went to, was going to have to depart the new back-end Ladder embarkation point at an angle and...

Is there no end to it?

Does it ever stop?

There are times when I wonder. I really do wonder.

79K24048 is signally worthless for showing us those "new" SRB Access Platforms, and how they have been pressed into double duty as an embarkation point for the Ladders, but they didn't quite manage to cover their tracks all the way, and once again, as before, it turns out that the Electrical drawings contain the missing parts of things that weren't quite swept all the way under the rug.

79K24048 sheet E-471 gives us the "new" layout, and as before, I've pasted the Guide Columns and Ladders in there, so as you can see how access to the Ladders is now gained off of the reworked SRB Access Platforms.

And we've got ourselves an excellent photograph of the scene of this crime, and you've already seen it, but I'll link back to it for you anyway, and it's the lead image for Page 65 which I presume you've already read, but if not, click away, baby, it's all yours.

And there stands James Fucking MacLaren, on the old SRB Access Platform, the day we hung the OMBUU on the tower, and directly behind my big stupid block-of-wood head is where the Guide Columns would be, but we hadn't built 'em yet, and Tommy Northcutt is standing on the Catwalk that takes you to the SRB Access Platform, and the Catwalk is near-flush against the side of the RCS Room, and between Tommy and me you can see the little stair that heads out and away from the RCS Room to where my boots are down on the steel-bar grating, and you can clearly see how the SRB Access Platform is set out away from the RCS Room, and of course underneath it, you get a good look at the pipe-framing that held that cantilevered goddamned thing up out there, and...

All of this disappeared when they realized they needed an embarkation point for the Ladder that would give them access to the ET Access Platform, happily running up and down the Guide Columns so as people could get into that horrid crevice, and see if maybe there was something hiding in there on the Tank, or maybe even the Orbiter...

...that was going to kill them all if somebody didn't spot the motherfucker in time, and fix it.

This blighted little area where the SRB Access Platform was press-ganged into double duty as an embarkation point is difficult, conceptually, because that little plot twist is... tricky... and it's nowhere well-depicted cleanly and understandably, on the drawings I have or any of the photographs I took back when we were building this crap, and it stands as an emblem as to just how nasty things can get configurationally, coupled with the additional nastiness of a drawing package that just throws it all into the same stewpot, old, new, mixed, whatever, you figure it out, 'cause we're not gonna tell you.

Here it all is, labeled for you, on an image supplied to me by another Anonymous Benefactor, letting you see what this part of the Left Upper Guide Columns all looks like from below, after they'd redone the SRB Access Platforms.

Miraculously, NASA had chosen to place surprisingly-useful photographs of this whack system on the internet, and when I found 'em, I promptly grabbed 'em, and you get to see them, and not just as a casual looky-loo, but as somebody who now, via my own exertions with this stuff, can actually understand what you're seeing, and appreciate it in all of it's beyond-whack glory.

And you thought I was joking when I said "the sense of the thing was to step off the Ladder, over on to the Platform, and that's pretty sketchy, but that's what they were stuck with..." but I wasn't.


Pretty radical, huh? Pretty low-rent, low-tech, and low-safety too, if you ask me, but oh well. Left ET Access Platform. Left Fixed Upper Guide Columns.

Unlike the way things were done back in the early 80's when we were doing the work, at least they've got their High Crew (And those people NEVER come in for enough praise and support, and what they did, and what they do, is pretty hard core, and without 'em you don't fly, but yet somehow, you never hear about 'em, and no, thank you for asking, I do not like that, as a matter of fact.) guy in a harness, but even so, that's one hell of a bad fall if you take it, and you can never discount the possibility of taking it. That never goes away.

I've got more of this stuff. Not gonna fill the whole page with the images, though. Just gonna give you links to 'em, ok? I'm pretty sure all of it is Pad A, but I cannot state that as a proven fact for any of the images where background scenery which provides positive identification does not show.

We'll start out backed away, to let you get a look at a more generalized overview of things on the Left Side. Of note in this image, when you give it a close look, you can see that the technician who's standing there is just about to go hands-on with the safety-line clip which he will be attaching to his harness. This tells us he's about to be heading up as opposed to just coming off of it. Also, different person than the image above.

In this next image, we're backed even farther away on the Left Side, and looking down from the FSS at the entire area up on top of the RSS, giving us an excellent perspective on how the Guide Columns (with the trusswork smoothly paneled-over and coated in white paint) attach to the front side of the RCS Room (gray paint) and run all the way up to its roof. Our ET Access Platform along with its white-fabric work enclosure remains visible in the lower left portion of the image.

Elsewhere, a lot of different work is being done by at least four separate work teams, one of which is not even visible in the image, but an individual's presence is betrayed, hidden on the ET Access Platform, by the safety line which hangs down at an angle from it's red spring-loaded retainer which can be seen hanging from the gray steel framing which projects up above the roof of the RCS Room on its front-left corner. This line disappears around the back side of the Guide Columns just above the white-fabric work enclosure on the ET Access Platform, and although it's far from prominent, it is distinctly visible when given a close look.

The roof of the RSS is a beehive of activity with a lot of temporary equipment in use, all of which will need to be removed and/or properly stowed prior to launch. Everybody is dressed for the weather, and I can attest from personal experience that it gets cold up here, and the north-northwest wind that's blowing is much stronger at this elevation than it is down on the ground, and it's blowing for true and for real down there, and... it'll cut pretty good, and you need to be dressed for it up here, Florida or no, and whenever you rest the palm of your ungloved hand on bare iron, yeah, you can feel the cold that way, too.

Much of what you see here is at variance to our available drawing packages for this series of photo-essays, and this is mute testimony to the fact that the Launch Pad is more of a process, than it is a place. It never stops changing. Operational Requirements and Lessons Learned never stop changing, so the Pad has to change right along with them, too.

Note the work ongoing in the extreme bottom-left corner of the image. They've erected a temporary work scaffold over there, and that scaffold is sitting on the Intertank Access Arm, which is a thing that hangs off of the north side of the FSS, and is very definitely wholly separate from the roof of the RSS, which is the main subject of this wide-angle photograph.

And in this image we get a look of one of the techs using the ladder on the Right Upper Fixed Guide Columns as seen from the Access Catwalk that takes us to the Right SRB Access Platform. It's impossible to know for certain, but the look of his body and the placement of weight which that look informs me of, tells me he's descending, having just come off the Platform. In this frame you're getting a fairly good look at the little Safety Gate on the Platform "ear" where it sticks out past the Guide Columns and allows you to step across to the Ladder. That gate does not inspire confidence in me, and I never trusted any of the Safety Gates anywhere on the towers, but that's all you're going to be getting between a solid footing on the Platform and certain death. And yeah, this is a very different day than the previous image, and we're dressed for noticeably warmer weather in afternoon shadow under a clear blue sky than we were on the previous image.

And I suppose I've about beat this end of it to death, so let us move down the trusswork to the third, and final, segment of the Upper Left Guide Columns that were originally pointed out to us in Image 107, shall we?

And this is the part that's hanging off the OMBUU and extending up above it too, some, and we've already learned that the OMBUU itself needed to have one of its corners clipped, to keep it from bashing into the Orbiter during mate/demate operations, so of course any Guide Columns stuff in the same area, is also going to have to accommodate that kind of interference, and since we're now facing the unpleasant fact that we need the Guide Columns, we can't just whack a corner of 'em off, and instead they must be pivoted out of the way in this area. It would be nice if we could just lift 'em, like we did with the OAA Segment, but there's more stuff down below, which you have not met just yet, and will not be meeting during the course of our GOX Arm Lift (Remember the GOX Arm? Whatever happened to the damn GOX Arm? Is it still hanging there in empty space, 'twixt and 'tween? We need to get back to that thing here at some point. But not right now.), but it's gonna be there, and to be able to get that stuff out of the way, we're gonna have to be pivoting what we've got right here, right now.

Oh boy! Big Pivoting Guide Columns fun! And we're allowed to call it the "Pivoting Guide Columns" without reference to Left or Right, because it was the only one that pivoted so, ok, skip all that left and right jazz, and just roll with it, as is, and you're fine, and you won't get lost, and nobody else will, either.

Here it is in a really good isometric view on 79K24048 sheet S-248E, which is titled "Fixed Wing Cover Mods at OMBUU" and if that doesn't constitute fair warning as to what's coming then I don't know what else might. We are now crossing an invisible event horizon into the overlapping murk surrounding the ill-defined border between the actual Guide Columns themselves, and all of the no-longer-creeping Orbiter Weather Protection crap that is getting ready to start raining down out of the sky like a hailstorm of butcher-knives and meat-cleavers, just a few big fat widely-scattered dagger-sized drops at first, and thankfully we're not getting hit with any of them, but the torrent is most assuredly on its way.

And the way they're showing us the OMBUU here is nothing short of precious, because...

Three empty decking levels, without the least sign of any of all that... stuff that's plastered all over the damn thing like far too much icing on a crazed wedding cake, and... sure thing. Whatever you say. We already know what's all over that thing, top bottom and middle, so go right ahead PRC/BRPH Engineering Guys, whatever you want. It's all fine with us, either way.

As before, with the Left Hinged Guide Columns Segment, the actual Guide Columns themselves are quite straightforward and simple. Just a pair of vertical columns backed by enough diagonally-braced trusswork to keep them rigidly in place, forming a plumb, square, and true trackway for the ET Access Platforms to move vertically wherever they might be needed.

But the stuff that supports our Guide Columns is...

Not so straightforward...

Not so simple...

And it was forced on us because these things were never foreseen when the RSS was originally designed, and now we find ourselves having to just sort of cram it all in there somewhere, and all well and good, but we're running out of room to put pretty much anything, anywhere.

And now, on top of that, we're beginning to deal with OWP as an integrated part of our Guide Columns, and that too needs someplace to go, and that too, is running out of room.

And hey, why not, we'll also spice things up a little by having to use a set of drawings which is showing us a bunch of stuff that's not yet visible in our photographs of the GOX Arm Lift, forcing us to jump ahead, and I'm gonna have to figure out a way to extract that which is, from the larger matrix of that which will be, which we're dealing with on our drawings.

Wish me luck, ok?

I'm gonna need it.

As it stands, in Image 107, almost none of the OWP stuff has been installed. From the point of view of our Union Ironworkers, that stuff was all a bunch of fluff, fit only for getting in the way of the real work which was very much still ongoing, and they wisely left it undone until everything else was finished, and it would no longer constitute some kind of roadblock getting in the way of moving more substantial things around and working them into their finish-constructed places. In Image 107, they've worked their way down to the bottom of the Left Hinged Guide Columns with the Cover Plates, but that's as far as any of it goes. Nothing more than that. They skinned-over the top end of the run, and stopped right there to give themselves enough freedom of movement to keep on going with the actual iron.

79K24048 sheet S-248E does not lend itself to me altering it by removing all the Cover Plate stuff and all the rest of the OWP, graphically, to let you see the bare Guide Columns with its Pipe Bracing, so I'm going to take you over to 79K24048 sheet S-237, which is what builds this stuff, so you can see the "bare iron" parts of it, which is what you're also seeing up there in Image 107, although not all of it is visible. It may or may not be as pleasing to the eye, although it does have more than enough Artistic Merit on its own anyway, and it's very informative, and... it's also what we used to do the actual work, creating and installing this stuff, so ok.

You have to kind of look, but once you do, you start to realize just how sneaky that Pipe Bracing turned out because of where they had to connect it back to the RSS Main Framing. That top triangular piece showing in View 'A' Plan at El. 197'-4¼" that I call the "arrowhead," looks perfectly symmetrical, side-to-side, but it's not. Where it connects to the big W36 on RSS Column Line 3.4 is not as far away from its "point" as where it connects to the 16"Ø pipe on Line 3. And on top of that the "point" is not exactly midway between Lines 3.4 and 3, either. Which makes the whole "arrowhead" just a little bit lopsided, but you'd never notice that just to give it a quick look.

And then if you really want to have some fun with it, give that 6"Ø Knee Brace, which is identified as a Knee Brace in View 'A', but which is also visible in Elevation 'B' and View 'E', and follow it back and down, to where it encounters the RSS Main Framing between Lines 3.4 and 3, and you can see that thing is way off center, and then, if that's not enough, give the 4"Ø pipe running from midway along it, back up to the "arrowhead," and... holy shit, it gets hairy as hell with all this stuff, and somebody had to run the calcs on it (remember, early 1980's, no computer for you, Mister Engineer, do it with a hand-held calculator or don't do it at all), and somebody else had to figure out the lengths, bevels, and cuts required to get it all to fit, and... whoa!

They give us another look at our Pipe Bracing on 79K24048 sheet S-225, and the depiction is small and low-res, but it's just enough, and from here you get a good look at that Knee Brace heading off at a weird angle beneath the "arrowhead." And you can also see how our Left Vehicle Access Platform at El. 191'-0" has to thread through that Pipe Bracing, too. Lotta shit going on in there with that Pipe Bracing.

On the next drawing in the package, 79K24048 sheet S-226, we're getting the same low-res looks at stuff, but this time we get to see the top of the OMBUU, and the screw-jack that actuates the Pivoted Guide Columns, pulling them around and out of the way when it comes mate/demate time with the RSS.

The actuation mechanism for the Pivoted Guide Columns, like all of the rest of it, was pretty straightforward and simple. It was all winches and screw-jacks. This one consisted of a Screw Jack attached to the Guide Columns Frame on one end, and resting in a simple-enough Bracket that was welded down to the OMBUU Roof on the other end, and the Bracket allowed the Screw Jack to swing side-to-side, as the angle the screw made with its support changed when the Guide Columns were rotated around to their retracted position. Give it a look on 79K24048 sheet S-251 if you'd like. There's not very much to it, really. We actually got a pretty good look at that Bracket in one of our photographs, back when we were lifting the OMBUU, on Page 64. You can see it sitting there on top of the OMBUU in Image 094.

And if you might also want to see how all that Cover Plate skin paneling on the Guide Columns works, you have to bounce down to 79K20408 sheet S-273, which further bounces you back to the Left Hinged Guide Columns(!) which we thought we were already done with, and are trying to get the hell away from, but we're not succeeding at it as well as we'd like... And in case you haven't noticed yet, 79K24048 is a choppy motherfucker, and if you start watching the sequence of the drawing numbers as we step through all this stuff, you'll get a feel for what I mean by that. It's almost as if somebody dropped the whole package, and a really strong fan was blowing, and everything went all over the place until somebody turned the stupid fan off, and they just sort of scooped it all up from wherever it landed, desks, floor, outside, who knows, piled it all up on a table, made sure that at least everything was right-side-up, and then said, "That's close enough. They'll figure it out."

I already know that you're over it with hearing me rant and rave about 79K24048, but the fuckups contained within it are so outrageously manifold, that we never stop finding new and different ways that they managed to fuck it all up in the name of Shareholder Value.

And if you think putting up with my endless griping about it is bad, try bidding the goddamned thing, and then after that, try building it!

So leave me alone, and I'm gonna keep on pointing out the fuckups as I go, and... welcome to my world.

And while we're looking around for other people to blame, let us not forget to blame ourselves while we're at it. My own recounting of the whole Guide Columns Nightmare is also choppy like a motherfucker, and commensurately hard to follow. And it's not an excuse, but you're getting it that way because that's the way it shows up on our photographs which, of course, are what runs the whole show with this saga, and I want very much to keep an at least half-accurate timeline with this stuff, so when more and more of it starts showing up in the photographs I took, well then, more and more of it will start showing up in the narrative too, and in between...

...choppy... ...gappy... ...hard to follow...

And I suppose, in a way, that's telling us a little bit about the goddamned Guide Columns, too.

Ok, I'm sick of all this Guide Columns shit. We've hardly scratched the surface with it, but I'm already overdosed on it. Never liked the damn things. Too kludgey. Too contrapted. Too tricky. Too stupid.

Let's get back to hanging the GOX Arm on the FSS, how 'bout?


And again we take a wild swing from the workaday complaints and conundrums of a difficult job, and suddenly find ourselves transported into a world of stark beauty where function creates unimaginable form, and the resulting aesthetic is enough to send chills down your spine, even as other, stronger, chills are already running down your spine, created by the raw emotions which are involuntarily elicited because of the absurd danger in which you have placed yourself, directly beneath a Great Slow Dance of Steel, being played out against a clear blue sky in the air directly above you.

And no, I do not expect that last paragraph to convey any of what it discusses, in the slightest.

For things of this nature, for otherworldly things you find yourself somehow a part of, in this world, there can be no conveyance.

You stand, rapt, vibrating with energy, spring-loaded ready to run for your life, even as the aesthetic pours down on you like a waterfall, overwhelming, utterly impossible to understand on your own, nevermind trying to convey any of it to someone else.

But me, being me, I try, anyway.

And I just this moment had an epiphany regarding the signal lack of response to the aesthetic on the part of everyone else around me who was working on the Pad at the time.

Allowing yourself to be transported, to be taken away to another world, a world where things like form, beauty, harmony, symmetry, and all the rest of that sort of aesthetic appreciation of things...

...was deeply stupid and dangerous!.

As you stand rapt, as before a stunning piece of Art, in a museum, you, even though you are staring directly at it, become utterly disconnected from the world around you.

And in a place like this, any kind of disconnect at all, however small, can, without warning, become a Capital Crime, punishable by death, immediately, on the spot, in the blink of an eye.

And the participants, the inhabitants of this world, all know that, have seen with their own eyes what a moment's inattention can do, and they learn quickly, and they learn thoroughly, to block it all out. Every last bit of it.

And I'm not sure if any of them properly realize that's what's going on, but they don't need to.

All they need is to stay focused. And if the guy next to you starts in on some bullshit about the look of something, in a way that has nothing to do with the work, then you, as a worthy member of the team, will promptly and roughly, jerk them back to reality, with harsh words of stern disapproval, derision, or whatever else negative thing might be required to break the spell.

Because if one of your teammates, one of the people you're working with, becomes disconnected...

Well then, suddenly it's no longer just them.

It's now you.

And they have the power to kill you by failing to stay focused.

And you will call them down if they ever show the least sign of such a thing.

And now, forty years later, I think I might, at long last, actually understand.

Which means I was even luckier at the time than I already believed myself to be.

I wasn't on anybody's team.

I was not an Ironworker.

And no one's life was hanging in the balance based on whether or not I was there, mentally, or not.

And every last one of them was happy as a clam to let me go.

I neither held nor controlled anything at all which could have disrupted them, had I not been focused.

And the thought of the freedom I was somehow, impossibly, afforded in this way has got me utterly gobsmacked, disbelieving.

The Fates needed a single person. Somebody who was already disconnected.

Who could, at will, disconnect even farther.

All the way out into the aesthetic.

Where no one else was granted entrance to.

And this can't be true...

And I'm going to do my best to disprove it...

But for now...

I'm inescapably stuck with it.

So I hereby take back all the unkind words I've spoken about people in this regards. They knew what they were doing. And I did not. And I was viewing them from a position... apart. And I did not know. Please, all of you, accept my apologies.

But it still gripes me that nobody else could see any of this stuff.

Sigh.

And the thought that I somehow did not manage to kill myself, through my own willful disconnection from things...

...is an unsettling one.

The Hand of Fate was holding me...

...gingerly. Carefully. Like a newborn baby...

And all I can think to say is...

...why?

And never the answer shall I know.

And the more I write these words trying to teach you about The Pad, the more I find myself teaching little, and instead learning much.

About myself.

And about the wide world, all around me.

Very well. Enough of that. Let us return to our Science-Fiction Movie.

Image 108 is powerful, and it's powerful on a multitude of different levels.

What, exactly, are we seeing here?

What, in our image, can we identify?.

And I'm going to mark it up and see what I can point out to you, visible, from this very-unusual viewpoint, looking more or less straight up, from below.

And I'm certainly doing this for you, but I'm also doing this for myself.

The process of marking it up forces me.

And it forces me to go through he drawing packages closely, making sure everything I've identified really is what I say it is.

And if further forces me to deal with a lot of platforming that's hanging off the face of the FSS, and to this point my photographs have not really shown this stuff properly, and this one doesn't either, but a hell of a lot of work was going on with this stuff while I had you occupied elsewhere, and at some point, we're going to be paying all of it a visit.

And when we do, I'm gonna need to know what the hell I'm talking about before I open my big stupid mouth about it.

So here's Image 108, marked up, letting you see what you're seeing, and giving you a foretaste of what's coming, over on the FSS.

Now let's get out from underneath this thing before something falls off of it and kills us.



In the image directly above these words, I am jumping you ahead, in the actual sequence of events, to let you see the Arm once it was connected to the tower. There will be seven more images coming, all of which were taken before this one. But I want you to see the lift proceeding from the same general point of view down on the ground, stepwise, just so as you can form a decent mental picture of the motion of things. I have returned from taking photographs up on the tower, to a place far enough away to get it all in frame, from the top of the Flame Deflector to the bottom of the Lightning Mast, and we're able to see the whole thing, now that the Arm is in place.

This image also allows me to introduce further Guide Columns stuff, while that's still reasonably fresh in your mind, too.

The seven images upcoming, all of which were taken before Image 109 which you see just above these words, were all taken up in the air. They form a coherent group, in similar manner as 109 is part of a coherent group, all taken from the ground. So. We'll take a little stutter-step forward, talk about what we're seeing, and then return to the proper timeline, once again.

To sum up: I believe no real harm is done in inserting this, the last image in the sequence, here, and I can only hope you agree with me on that.

From this vantage point, you can see how very little remaining margin they had with the Hammerhead Crane, not only with the 25-ton lifting radius for weight, but also with the overhead lifting clearance they had, vertically.

Look close at the Load Block on the Crane, and you can see a bare sliver of blue above it, but I'm guessing they only had another couple of feet of vertical clearance left, before the Block started getting into the Boom, and of course once a thing like that happens, you're done with lifting, then and there.

The ironworkers had an expression they used for times when things were brought to a halt, in a way that no further progress could be made, like it or not. That expression was "two-blocked," and it comes from working with cranes, lifting, and the load block and the head sheaves (or such block as may have been above the load block), come in direct contact with one another, preventing any more line from being taken up, and when that happens, you're done. Nowhere else you can go. No further room for maneuvering. The two blocks are touching each other, and further lifting is thereby rendered impossible. And we're damn near two-blocked here, with our GOX Arm beneath the Hammerhead Crane. This expression was applied, generally, in broadest-possible meaning, to anything and everything that had gone as far as it could, with no further margin for additional progress, whatever that may have been. Occasionally, I still find myself using it, all these years later. It's a good, pithy, expression, denoting that you might like to be able to keep going with something, but circumstances have you... two-blocked, so you cannot.

At far left, bordering the entire top half of the frame, we can now see that the Right Guide Columns are installed, complete, top to bottom, along with cover plates extending to down near the bottom of the run (And that's as far as they go. The very bottom end had no Cover Plates.) and our view includes a very thin sliver of the Right Wing Cover, but we're not going to be getting into any of that right now. But. I draw it to your attention to let you know the sequence of things, and in that sequence, the Right Guide Columns had been fully framed-out by the time we lifted the GOX Arm. I'll show you the Right Wing Cover now, on 79K24048 sheet S-248C. But that's all you'll be getting for time being. Just the one unannotated look, no more. We'll be returning to it, all in good time, I promise, ok?

Up above, extending out of the top of the frame in Image 109, over on the left side, above the RCS Room, you can see the darkness of another sliver. And this one is a bear, and it's incomplete and by sheerest good luck, the incompletion, and in particular the stuff we're not seeing, out of frame above, matches near-perfectly with an exceptionally-fortuitous drawing we have, which is also very incomplete, and in being so, it allows us to begin the disentanglement of things up on top of the RCS Room, and lemme tell you, once you see what else is going on up there, and you get tasked with trying to figure THAT shit out, you'll be very happy indeed that you're only getting things in teaspoon quantities right now.

79K24048 sheet S-268 shows us the OWP Roof, and the OWP Roof is inextricably intertwined with the Guide Columns, but it's also inextricably intertwined with what actually raises and lowers the ET Access Platforms up and down on those Guide Columns, which we are not seeing in Image 109 or drawing S-268, and there's going to be a scary story associated with what raises and lowers the ET Access Platforms, but even without the scary story, this shit is hard like a motherfucker to understand, and... just you wait.

But not now. Not yet. You're not ready for it yet, and I'm gonna let this sleeping bear lie... for the time being.

The "Roof" itself, is a dead-simple enough thing. Nothing to it, really. The rest of it? The stuff we're not seeing yet? Not so much. Not so much a "dead-simple enough thing." Be warned.

We are building up a pretty significant static charge of stuff we'll be "returning to," and once we go back again, and get close enough to all of this stuff for the stroke of lightning that's going to be coming off of it to use us as its pathway to ground...

...you will be feeling it.

Believe me, you will be feeling it.

But right now, Union Ironworkers are getting ready to connect the GOX Arm to the top of the FSS.

Let's go look at that, ok?

Let's go see what they're doing up there right now.


And here you see the rightful image which should have immediately followed Image 108, after my harrowing pause, looking dumbfoundedly straight up beneath this suspended load. Getting the hell out of there, I then walked over to the FSS Elevators, hit the button, and got out up at the 260'-0" level, which was as far as it went, because the 280'-0" level was taken up by the Elevator Machinery Room, which of course contained all the hoist gear to raise and lower the cabs. There were two elevator cabs, side by side, on the FSS, in case I haven't mentioned it.

From 260'-0", if you want to go any higher, you walk around behind the Elevator shaft to the FSS Stairs, and climb 20 feet up the stairs to get to the next level, which is 280'-0", and the only thing that's left after that is the FSS Roof at 300'-0" where I did not want to go. So I took the main FSS Stairs to 280'-0" and walked across the steel-bar grating to the little stair over near the Side 4/1 Perimeter Column, and climbed another five feet up to Camera Platform 8, which sticks out to the northeast, out beyond the Main Framing envelope of the FSS at elevation 285'-0" and took the photographs you see here.

As vantage points go, they don't come any better than this. In and of itself, and in regard to being able to watch, from very close range, while still remaining totally and completely out of everybody's way, as the GOX Arm was drawn in to the tower, where Union Ironworkers went hands-on with it.

Another marvel to behold.

Another superlatively indescribable thing that I will never be able to properly describe. But I'm going to attempt to, anyway.

As ever, wish me luck, 'cause I'm gonna need it.

We'll start with the mundane aspects of my perch, looking down on everything.

And I'm going to give you this part of things twice!

And the reason for that is because this is one of those ever-so-sneaky places where Pads A and B diverge, and the divergence is something you'd never spot without having it specifically directed to your attention.

This is fascinating stuff, but it's also troublesome stuff, and occasionally it can become quite dangerous stuff, insofar as things which look to be the same on the surface of things, turn out to be different, and in this case there's definitely the potential for trouble, but not so much for danger, but it's not always that way, and this is a good enough example, without being overtly hazardous, that I'm gonna use it to illustrate the point anyway.

On Pad A its official name is Camera Platform 8, and you see that abbreviated to CP8 at times, and it is reused Apollo stuff.

Drawing package 79K04400 for Pad A shows it, but, as ever, mind the elevations, 'cause Pad A is 5 feet lower, across the board, and you have to add that missing 5 feet back in when you're talking about Pad B stuff, but once you're up off the Pad Deck, where the five-foot elevation differential between the two Pads occurs, things are pretty much the same...

...but not quite, of course.

Ok. First, Pad A.

Let's look at the LUT, before it got chopped up and turned into an FSS.

Pad A drawing package 79K04400 sheet S-134 tells the tale, and in so doing, also tells us that Camera Platform 8, the highest one on the LUT, was the odd man out, insofar as it was on the opposite side of the LUT from every other camera platform. And it got torched off the LUT, and put away for re-use, later. It also shows us that the Camera Platforms were numbered in a non-obvious way, and why the numbering of these things did not proceed in a straight numerical order, going up the tower (or even down), I have no idea. Somewhere... for some reason... but I have not properly learned of it yet. It almost looks as if they originally thought they'd only need five of 'em, and then, at some point later on, they came back and inserted the next three of 'em, with both presumed numbering systems increasing as you went from low to high on the tower. That, however, is sheerest guesswork, so take it with the very large grain of salt which it is due. Maybe I'll find out later, and if so, I'll come back here and let you know. But for now, the numbering system for them will just have to remain a mystery.

By sheerest luck, we have actual photographic evidence, showing us that Wilhoit had to take all of the Camera Platforms off of the LUT, prior to cutting it to pieces, and in this photograph (taken quite dramatically with a camera placed down in the weeds at the MLP Park Site, looking through an MLP Mount Mechanism and its Strut), you can see that Wilhoit's twin-boom demolition lifting rig had both booms (very reasonably, I might add), tucked in as close as possible to the vertical envelope of the LUT, and those booms were so close to the tower that the Camera Platforms had to go, and in the image, by golly, they're gone. So. They all got torched off the tower, and then some of them got put back on, per our good friend 79K04400 sheet S-135, after the chopped-up LUT reappeared in the form of an FSS on Pad A.

S-134 also gives us a look at where so many of those radical close-up vids of Saturn V liftoffs were taken from, and the tipoff is that the videos which came from cameras on these Platforms were always slightly off-center, not perfectly lined up with the centerline of the ascending Saturn V looking due south.

79K04400 sheet S-135 shows us six Camera Platforms as they initially reappeared on the Pad A FSS, and it even has a nice plan-view detail showing how they're constructed, and all well and good. For the time being, anyway.

On Pad B, they handled the Camera Platforms in a completely different way, and they only reused a single platform at Pad B, the one at elevation 260'-0" on the southeast corner of the FSS. The others were new, and not only that, there were only three of 'em in total, the one I'm standing on taking the photograph above these words, and another pair of 'em on the other side of the FSS, over on the Side 1/2 corner, one at elevation 200'-0" and the other one at elevation 260'-0", which we we've already learned is the only one of the bunch that got reused from the original Apollo stuff that used to be on the LUT.

79K10338, which had just wrapped up when I first arrived at the Sheffield Steel field trailer at Pad B on Saint Patrick's Day, 1980, only calls for the installation of a single Camera Platform, at elevation 260'-0" on the southeast corner of the FSS, and is otherwise dead silent about Camera Platforms anywhere else on the FSS.

Delving into the depths of 79K10338, we see our one and only Camera Platform hanging off the side of an SSAT, on sheet V-16, which I'm showing you, highlighted, just so you're fully up to speed with all of the other Camera Platforms on the FSS that it's not showing.

And 79K10338 sheet S-78 tells us how to hang our one-and-only Camera Platform on the tower, and it also clearly specifies it as being reused.

And then, just to be damn good and sure we really do understand the extent (or the lack thereof) of the Camera Platform work which was done when the FSS was still red, we can go back to Image 045, and see for ourselves, that, above and beyond the single Camera Platform at Elevation 260'-0" (which is labeled as a Camera Platform in the image) the FSS is utterly without any of the rest of them.

So they did it very differently on Pad B than they did it on Pad A, and I'm sure they had their reasons, but I do not know what those reasons were, although I've got a feeling that back in the early 1970's, when things were still very much in a formative stage, and the concept of what became the RSS was still something small enough, and light enough that it didn't even need support on its far side, away from the Hinge Column, there was going to be a lot of open space in between the FSS and the "RSS" and if they wanted to get good photographic documentation of their launches (they did) then they were going to have to make Platforms to put the cameras they'd be using on, and...

Check out this early concept art with a Space Shuttle very dramatically blasting off. Look close at the area between the FSS and the triangular RSS. Lotta open room in there. Whoever did the art didn't bother with Camera Platforms, and, more importantly, the RSS is bolted on to the side of the FSS, and the Hinge it rotates on does not make it all the way to the ground.

Look even closer, and you see that the retracted RSS is actually sitting on top of some kind of pedestal, or stand, or some damn thing, with its own spindly legs going down to it from all three corners (and back there where the support pedestal's far edge should be, our artist didn't really quite know what to do, and just sort of made the ground beyond it a very similar color to the color of the PCR, and the more you look at it, the less sense it makes, and the more physically impossible it gets), and it was freely detached from any support in contact with the ground besides the FSS itself, at all positions between that support pedestal and the MLP which presumably supported it in the mate position, and... Ah... those were the days... and such a simpler and more hopeful time it was, eh?

Since we've taken a little side-branch into the history of this early concept stuff, I dredged up EXTERNAL TANK GH2 VENT ARM, which is included in that vast treasure trove of stuff you'll find in Space Shuttle Technical Conference, Part 2, and on Page 4 of EXTERNAL TANK, you'll find an outstandingly-primitive rendering which includes a very early RSS concept, and I'm dead-certain (without any actual proof, of course) this rendering is the source image which our unknown artist who did the dramatic liftoff image which we just saw was given, and told to spice it up a little for dramatic effect. But of course, looking close, you can see significant differences between the two images, and the Primitive Rendering gives no sign that the RSS is actually supported anywhere besides its hinge on the FSS (which at least makes it all the way down to the ground), and that "pedestal" down there could simply be a means of access, but... I'll never know, and... you probably won't either. Oh well.

But in the end... there was so much other crap in there that they discovered they could just stick the damned cameras just about any old where, and not have to worry about a dedicated Platform, because they could just bolt 'em down to the cruft, and it would work just fine, that way.

And allow me please, to take this salient opportunity to give you a look at just how bad the drawing quality is with some of the stuff I find myself having to work with, trying to show you how the Pad was built.

Behold! the glories of 79K24048 sheet E-198 OTV Camera Locations. And if you look for my little "79K Rectification/Annotation" Copyright notice, you'll discover it's not there, because this is an original, untouched version of what I'm having to work with, and...

Some of it ain't pretty...

And you have no idea what's actually involved with that "rectification" part of the Copyright notice with this stuff...

And this one, E-198, in its original form, is quite the prize specimen, eh?

OTV stands for Operational Television, and this is pretty old-school tech, dating from back in the late 1970's, when this kind of stuff was still being figured out, and it was all big, clunky, low-quality, and required a lot of wires and power and support miscellany of all kinds, and... then you find yourself working with a drawing like this one.

Gah.

But. Despite the utter illegibility of the actual structures depicted in this thing, the Bill of Materials, the listing of the Cameras, along with their ID Numbers and given locations, came out pretty much crystal clear (And if this isn't a good example of the wildly-differing natures of the various quality defects across single images I'm working with, I don't know what is. And on top of that, almost every single one of these rectified images winds up with a cockeyed drawing border line which I had to leave that way to keep the CONTENTS of the drawing reasonably square and undistorted, and how a thing like that might work, I shall never in my life know, but however it works, I had to work with it, and... such jolly fun it all is!), and with that, we can learn a lot, and one of the things we can learn is that they had this stuff everywhere, welded and bolted to whatever existing cruft turned out to be pre-existing in the locations they were interested in placing a camera, save a lonesome three dedicated Camera Platforms, and they were just fine and dandy bolting it all down to the densely-packed riot of local ferrous vegetation which grew so luxuriantly all over this place.

And of course a part of my job with Ivey, working 78K24048, consisted in riding herd on a bazillion Camera Mounts, and the stupid things are sprinkled around all over the place, and a lot of 'em consisted in one or more six-inch pipe segments bolted and/or welded to angle iron, steel plates, channel iron, or whatever the fuck else, which itself was bolted or welded to... whatever the fuck was already there, and... no, I'm not going to show you every last one of these things because it's a fool's errand, and my momma didn't raise no fool.

As your consolation prize for my refusal to run that fool's errand, here's 79K24048 sheet S-40 Typ. Camera Supports for you to admire. There. Are you happy now? No? Well then... fuck you, it's all you're gonna be getting out of me right now. I've got a better photograph of one of these things, and when we get to it, I'll give this stuff to you in proper detail then. But not now, ok? Right now it's Camera Platform time, and we need to finish one thing before starting another, and for the time being, it's gonna be Platforms, not Mounts.

But one of the dedicated Camera Platforms that remained, turned out to be the one I was standing on when I took the photograph above these words, and we can go to 79K24048 sheet S-118 to learn how to build it, and the stair that takes you up five feet to get to it, too.

Compare the one on Pad B with the one on Pad A, and you can see they're different, and the B Pad version is longer, and a little beefier along that near-side rail to the departing Orbiter, where they would be bolting their blast-proof (they hoped) cameras to it. And over on Pad A, the corresponding Camera Platform is accessed by a short ladder, instead of the stair I tromped five feet up to get to where I wanted to take my photographs.

And then, just as a little more configurational icing on this unexpectedly-complicated cake, at some point (most likely well before I ever showed up), over on Pad A, they removed three of their six camera Platforms, and if you examine the photographic record of Pad A, you can verify that my little platform at 285 (280 at Pad A), and the ones over on the other side at 260 (255 at Pad A) and 200 (195 at Pad A) were all that was left once the hatcheting was all over and done with.

Phew!

And that might seem like a lot of trouble to go to, just to show you this Platform as it actually existed on the FSS, sticking out to the side mostly to the north, but with just enough east angle along its front side to allow any cameras mounted on it to kind of peek around to the south, maintaining full visibility of everything on the east face of the FSS, but I've found that it's exactly this sort of thing that tends to trip people up as they're trying to follow along with it, but find themselves constantly stubbing their toes on no end of weird niggling little inconsistencies and unexplained Mystery Items. So, in the interests of trying to keep things comprehensible, instead of just firehosing you with it, shrugging my shoulders, and walking away from it to leave you abandoned, I figured I'd give you the full-and-complete story because... I'm such a nice guy.

Ok, back to the photograph, and what's going on here.

You are eye-level just a trifle less than 300 feet above the open grassy areas of the Pad and the curve of Perimeter Road just below the top margin of the frame, with the matching curve of the Pad Access road above it, bending away toward the unseen Atlantic Coast in the top left corner of things.

Bottom right margin of the frame includes an arcing segment of the Rail Beam which carried the RSS across the Flame Trench which you can see part of, black, previously-yellow firebricks rendered to near-obsidian by the insane fires of Apollo launches which occurred here.

Two field trailers are visible, along with some ant-like people nearby.

The upper right trailer is where Howard Baxter, Hank Morgan, and John Bell managed their end of things with TT&V, and the lower left trailer held a few Quality and Safety operatives that I very rarely interacted with as they worked their own end of things, which usually did not come into play until after Ivey Steel had completed any given work effort, which meant that our worlds did not intersect very much at all. Their job revolved more around the testing and validation of structural, mechanical, and electrical systems that had been completed, and bought off, but which nonetheless required a lot of additional work to integrate into the overall operational wholeness of the Pad.

Bringing a thing as gigantic and ridiculously-complicated as a Space Shuttle Launch Pad into a finished state of proper operational working order is one hell of a job, and does not happen on its own, or overnight. It is self-interacting in vastly too many combinations to enumerate, and, as with a well-shuffled deck of cards, there's no way you're going to ever run through all of the combinations in advance, and instead, you give as much of it a proper self-interacting workout as you can, structural, mechanical, and electrical, all interfacing with each other, interacting with each other, affecting each other, and in so doing assure yourself that the damn thing at least works to that extent, but... come Launch Day... sometimes you wind up finding additional stuff anyway, and sometimes that additional stuff doesn't quite behave like you want it to, and... It's its own complete world in and of itself, and the overlap with the stuff that we (and other contractors) were still building, was minimal. But once in a while we'd deal with one of the QC people in there, who's name was, I think, Jim Lassiter. Most people have small photographs of their family here or there on their desks, but Lassiter had small photographs of his white sports car, which you can see parked right behind the near end of the TTV trailer, partially obscured by it. Make of that, what you will.

Bring up the image full size, follow the tag line down to the ironworker who's holding it, and just behind him Harvey Dixon's weird bow-legged posture is a dead giveaway.

I'm sure I know others in-frame, but cannot identify any of them from this remove.

And of course, utterly dominating the image, the suspended GOX Arm closes in on the FSS like an apparition from a Stanley Kubrick science fiction movie.

Notice the dark shape of the Spreader Bar, with its lifting gear hanging down beneath it, attaching to the Lift Points on the Arm, straddling the white GN2 Duct, just past where it bends, upper left quadrant of the image.

Notice that the Bar itself, is held up with a pair of shackles attached to a plate with clipped corners, along its top margin, which further attach to the Lifting Sling coming down from the Crane Hook, unseeable out of frame above.

Give those shackles a look, and you immediately see that they're not centered, and instead are noticeably offset to the right.

Then look at the Hinge Boxes extending out of frame to the left, beneath.

And we've been looking right at it the whole time, all through this series of photographs of the Lift, and the Hinges are very much not on-center with the arm, but instead are clocked off to the side significantly, keeping the arm from sticking straight out away from the FSS when it finally comes in contact with it, and those hinges are by far the heaviest part of the Arm, and that offset weight is going to need to be accounted for during the lift, and...

Yep. That was all taken into account, and our Union Ironworkers are on it, and the whole thing, from the Spreader Bar on down, was biased, off-center, to counteract the off-center weighting of the Arm because of those clocked Hinges, and it's the little stuff like this, that never ceases to amaze me when looking at the very best, doing their job.

I've now drawn it to your attention, and you can see in the above image just exactly why a thing like this might be done, so now you can go back up to the very first photograph of our lift, Image 099, and look at both of those Spreader Bars with new eyes, and see things with complete clarity, and realize that the Bar closest to the Hinge was weight-biased to account for the clocking of the Hinges, while the Bar closest to the far end of the arm was not.

Little Stuff.

I never grow tired of picking out the little stuff in these photographs, and giving it the full and complete consideration which every last bit of it is so very worthy of, and every time I do, I find myself making more and more little discoveries about things, and I don't know about you, but for me, that is a very satisfying feeling when it sets in, and I never grow tired of it.

And now we find ourselves talking about the Hinges, and in this image we're getting the best look we're going to be getting, of the Connection Plates on those Hinges, so let's look at 'em.

The Connection Plates on both Upper and Lower Hinges are visible on the right side of the Arm, and most of the Left Connection Plate on the Lower Hinge is visible, but the Left Plate on the Upper Hinge is out of frame, and yeah, this is suboptimal, but it's the best we're going to be getting, so we'll go ahead and use it, and it's not like we're going to be designing our own Connection Plates anyway, we're just giving them a proper look, to see what's going on in that place where steel meets steel, a couple of hundred feet up in the air, up above all those ant-like people down there on the Pad Deck.

And all four of those Connection Plates had to be properly square and coplanar...

And that word, "coplanar", for whatever reasons, during my total 10 years out there working Launch Pads, seemed to always cause trouble with some of the engineering people, whom you would presume should know better, but they'd give me shit about it whenever I had to use it in the paperwork which I generated over the course of that ten years, claiming no such word existed, trying to shoot down my paper, using that as one of the bullets in their Box of Worthless Ammunition which they'd spray in our direction, every single time, in a Fusillade of Futility, attempting to wiggle out of having to pay for the results of their own inadequacy and undercooked engineering, and of course back in the 1980's you'd look for words in a goddamned ten-pound dictionary instead of clicking into the internet, and the ones who'd never done so, even though they were engineers... and oh yeah, I wasn't... and how do you get through the goddamned math program for engineering without crossing paths with "coplanar" somewhere along the line in Geometry 101?... and they would give me shit about it... and I never did figure that one out, and why just this one particular word would have been so goddamned troublesome...

But I digress... and the Hinges were not only independently clockable from each other, they also had far more play in their own individual mounting and rotation mechanisms than you would ever imagine, and... ok, something's gonna have to be done about that one, and in this image, you're getting one of the two best looks at what kept it all from just sort of flopping around up there, and the next image after this one will complete that "best look" and of course the implication there is that neither one of the images gives a complete look, and... oh well, we do the best we can with what we've got, right?

And in addition to the requirement for coplanarity, the whole schmutz had to remain rigidly plumb, square, and true, lest the bolt holes wind up in places you might not want them to, when the time came to actually bolt this fucking thing to the tower, and...

Yes, as a matter of fact, it really is one hell of a lot more complicated and difficult than you'd ever imagine, and never forget we're having to deal with all this bullshit up in the fucking air, and...

So they made a pair of fixtures, one being a simple-enough rectangular frame for Connection Plates alignment, and the other being a fairly complex arrangement of horizontal Tubes (which the drawing calls "Weldments") and more or less vertical Rods (which are threaded, and work like turnbuckles, which they in fact are, for fine positional adjustment) to keep it all rigidly in place, to ensure that those fucking Hinge Connection Plates would wind up staying exactly where they needed to be, and...

We've got exactly one drawing that shows it, and of course it shows it poorly...

But it's all we've got...

So... 79K24048 sheet M-351, which I've marked up some, in the hopes of improving its woefully-inadequate quality, but I'm probably not doing a good enough job of it, so... oh well.

And now that you've got an idea of what's going on with this stuff, you can go back and look at a marked-up version of Image 110, to see it in the real world, before it all got taken down after the Arm was hung.

The rest of the Arm pretty well speaks for itself in this image, so let's go ahead and look at the next frame in the series, ok?


We are now hands on, and shit has now gotten real.

The margin for error has now gone to zero, and we're now playing for keeps.

We're nearly 300 feet up in the air. It's about 60 feet long and it weighs more than a city bus. It's in free suspension and the wind is blowing up here, and it's your fingers in between a pair of cold unfeeling steel entities which will very soon be coming into direct contact with each other.

Can you handle it?

Probably not. But do not feel bad because of that, because hardly anybody else can handle it either.

Ivey Steel's Union Ironworkers are earning their money today.

In-frame,we're getting a really good look at the rest of the Weldments-and-Rods Positioning Fixture we were talking about just above this image, and, interestingly enough, the Rod closest to our vantage point, connecting to the Weldment on the near side of the Top Hinge Box, is conspicuous by its absence.

Except that it's not absent at all!

Yet again, structural steel has gotten us with a chance alignment wherein foreground and background objects mesh together in a Synergy of Bewilderment, and that goddamned Rod has managed to line itself up perfectly with the Weldment it's attached to on its bottom end, and... can you see it? It's there, trust me.

Go back to 79K24048 sheet M-351 to look for it, and, although it's displayed quite-poorly, it is there, complete with its own individual notation and arrow.

And here in our photograph, it manages to get displayed quite a bit worse than even M-351 manages to try and make it disappear. Yeesh!

Meanwhile, over on the tower, our gang of ironworkers is using the Upper and Lower GOX Arm Hinges Access Platforms to get ready to make the connection, and we've seen these platforms before, glancingly, so let's go ahead and give them the closer look they deserve, so as we can better understand this Lift, the GOX Arm, and the entire FSS/Orbiter System that this is all a part of.

And as background for this investigation into those platforms, I'll refer you back to Image 084 GOX Arm Strongback Lift 11 of 12, which we saw down near the bottom of Page 62, and in that photograph you can see the area where the Hinges are going to be bolted on to the Strongback by the noticeably-darker prime-coat only paint job, along with the rows of bolt holes in the flanges of the Strongback Columns. Then, look around, and... no Camera Platform sticking out off the side of the FSS at elevation 285'-0" or the small Stair I took to get up on it, and no Upper or Lower Gox Arm Hinges Access Platforms.

All of that stuff came later, and now it's later, so let's go.

The Camera Platform and the Stair are already accounted for, on this page, so here we go with the Upper and Lower GOX Arm Hinges Access Platforms, and they're surprisingly elaborate.

We'll start with the closest foreground in our photograph, over on the right-hand side, where we see one of Ivey's Union Ironworkers taking a momentary break while keeping an eye on the Crane Hook (out of frame, above and left), before shit starts going down for real. I do not know who this is, and for that I apologize, to you my readers, and to our ironworker and his family. They deserve better recognition than the pittance I have to offer, but I am unable to set things to rights with this one. Sigh.

He's standing on Upper Hinge Access Platform 'A' and you can see that labeled here on 79K24048 sheet S-105, along with where I was breathing down his neck from on the Camera Platform at 285'-0".

The GOX Arm Hinges don't show on that drawing, and I'm gonna add 'em in, in their final installed location, and Upper Hinge Access Platform 'B' doesn't show, either, so I'm gonna have to add that in too, and that way I can properly finish off with giving you complete information as to the overall layout of this whole little scene. I'm doing my goddamnedest to try and put you there, and I don't know of any other way to do it with any kind of useful-enough accuracy.

Here's the altered version of 79K24048 sheet S-105 with Platform 'B' and the Upper and Lower Hinges pasted in from a drawing that we're going to be looking at here in just a bit. It's not perfectly accurate, but it's good enough and we've already become well-accustomed to the fact that even the drawings themselves contain no end of sneaky (and some glaringly obvious) inaccuracies, so we'll be ok with my less-than-fully-stellar effort, ok?

And now that I've added Platform 'B' and the Hinges, you can clearly see there's very little room for maneuvering with the GOX Arm, and that Upper Hinge in particular is tight, with platforms on both sides of it.

I've derided the Hammerhead Crane itself often enough, but I will never deride the Hammerhead Crane's Operator, who is (not able to actually see any of this, remember) going to be threading a goddamned needle with the heavy end of something that's 60 feet long and weighs more than a fucking bus, in a blowing wind.

High stakes, high skill.

So now that we've kind of got a sense for all that, let's go to 79K24048 sheet S-123 (which is where I clipped out Platform 'B' and the Hinges from, to insert them in my altered copy of S-105) and get a pretty close look at it in plan view.

And of course, as with so much else we've found ourselves dealing with along the way, the bare drawing isn't going to be good enough, on its own, to really let you get the sense of things, so I'm going to mark it up some, to help you understand some of the nuances of what it's showing, and what that means for our Union Ironworkers and Crane Operator as they make this connection, attaching the GOX Arm to the FSS.

And even when it's marked up, as you see 79K24048 sheet S-123 here, it's still pretty goddamned hard to follow, and to really understand what's going on, we need to go back and click on Image 111 again and zoom in on it, and look really close at the Platform to see where it got trimmed off (our ironworker has his right foot literally hanging off the side where it got trimmed), and look really close at the Upper Hinge Box, to see how that Cover Plate sits on top of the Box Framing Steel, which is a weldment with its bottom side having the aspect of a Wide Flange over on the side of things where it's gonna hit the Platform if that hadn't been trimmed, and the top of the Box is going to be four inches above the top of the Platform Grating, but since the "web" of that Weldment is set back in, away from the Platform, some, the stupid thing will just fit in there, but...

None of this is going to be easy.

And on top of all that, I cheated a little, and looked ahead in the photographs, and the business of trimming that Platform Frame and Grating becomes much more clear in those upcoming photographs, so... you're gonna be alright with this one, I promise.

But it ain't gonna be easy, ok?

And now that we see how we're going to have to thread the heavy end of our 60 foot long bus which is dangling in free suspension, while we're hanging off the side of a skyscraper, into this ridiculously-close-fitting compound-notch while the wind is blowing, trusting somebody on the crane controls who can't even see any of it...

...yeah, nah, that'll be a hard pass, chief, how 'bout you get somebody else to do it?

And of course they did!

And just as one last little dollop of icing on this cake, let's return to our marked-up copy of S-123, and consider what's going on over there on the top-right (as we're looking at it in the drawing) corner of that Upper Hinge Box were it's coming into awfully-close quarters with the lower-right corner of Platform A.

We know the top of the Box is four inches higher than the grating on that Platform, and we know the "lower flange" part of the Box is down there somewhere very definitely below the level of that grating...

And my coloration of things where the lavender of the trimmed portion of the Platform overlaps the orange of that "lower flange", turns an ugly shade of off-red where they're overlapping, and ok, we trimmed the damn thing off, but what happens when we've got to put it back on?

S-123 tells us that's a ten-inch channel, sitting there on-edge, making up the far end of the perimeter of the Platform, and ok, they cleverly put a 2x2x¼" piece of angle iron in there to hold up the grating on the side where it runs near-parallel with the side of the Hinge Box, and that's not gonna hang down anywhere near far enough to get into that "flange", but the bottom end of that 10 inch channel out there on the tippy end of things, out where the Box and the Platform are closest to each other, is gonna be 1'-2" below the top of that Hinge Box, and...

And then you go to the far bottom-left corner of 79K24048 sheet S-125 and look at View M which is cut from S-123 out at the end of Platform A, looking directly at the side of that channel, and...

Well whatta ya know, they actually saw that shit coming ahead of time and clipped the channel so it would clear the "flange." Barely. Which is nice, I suppose, but still... this is very much not a "user friendly" place to be hanging by your tail off the side of a skyscraper trying to get all this shit to fit together, just so.

Moving farther away from the camera in our photograph, over on the left side, we've got an excellent look at the hinged end of the GOX Arm.

Both Hinge Boxes are in plain view, along with the Frame that ties them together and also ties them to the Arm.

All of the weight of that Arm, plus the Beanie Cap that we'd be putting out on the far end of it later is transfered through the Frame and then the Hinges in a way that rigidly keeps the Arm from falling off the tower (duh), while simultaneously allowing it to swing left and right through an originally-specified 73 degrees of horizontal rotation, and with the length and weight of the Arm being what they are, there's some pretty hefty forces being applied through that Frame and Hinges connection point.

And alas I have no drawings of any of this stuff, so I'm not going to be able to show you any of the details of it, and the precise mechanisms by which it worked.

But. Despite that signal lack of engineering documentation, we still have our photograph, and when we look at it, we see that the Arm is structurally tied to the Frame (which I've previously identified as the Pivot Frame) at its top and bottom corners where the Arm Truss meets it. In the middle, there's some handrail stuff tying in there too, but none of that provides any proper structural support, so we can ignore it.

The Frame itself is a simple rectangle, taller than it is wide, and is requisitely-sturdy, and it comprises a pair of vertical wide-flange columns tied together horizontally at top and bottom by specialty-shaped structural members which allow for a Bolt Circle to fit within their envelope, and on the Bottom Hinge, the lower horizontal member of the frame along with its Bolt Circle is plainly visible, and we are doubly-fortunate with this photograph because in order to do the Lift, Ivey had to remove the grating which you'd be walking upon as you entered the Arm, and with that grating not there, visibility is unimpeded, and... lucky us! It's nice to have something to walk on here, but when we're hanging the Arm on the tower, it's nicer to be able to get to what's underneath what you'd be walking on, so as you can affix things like the Weldments and Rods that hold the Hinges firmly in place, and to also be able to gain access to the guts of the the thing, if need be. So. No grating during the Lift, ok?

And that Bolt Circle ties the Pivot Frame directly to the Actuation Mechanism hidden within the Hinge Box itself, and oh boy was that thing ever a nightmare, and I've already mentioned that I personally wrote what came to be called the "Pitchfork Letter" and that Letter specifically addressed all of the fuckups we encountered when it came time to put the Hinges together and then attach them to the Arm via that Bolt Circle, and... just you wait! But not yet. Not now, ok? We'll get to it, but not just this minute.

So. We wish we could look inside that Hinge Box, but we cannot, so let's keep moving through our photograph, and see what's going on down on the Lower Hinge Access Platform.

And this one, thankfully, isn't nearly so complicated as the pair we just dealt with up at the Top Hinge.

Here it is, in a further-marked-up version of 79K24048 sheet S-105 with the locations of the two ironworkers who are visible in Image 111 down on the Lower Hinge Access Platform labeled, in addition to all the rest of the markups you've already seen.

The closest ironworker to us in the photograph is going at it with a sleever bar which he's pushed the pointy end of into one of the bolt holes on the Connection Plate with his right hand, applying additional force and also steadying himself via what looks like one of the hydraulic fittings on the Box with his left hand, and a sleever bar is equivalent to a crowbar in your world, but as with so very much else in ironworking, sleever bars come in a wide array of particulars, and they're not really crowbars at all, and there is much nuance with this stuff, and every individual ironworker seems to have his or her own very definite preferences with his or her tools, but... for you... it's a crowbar, ok?

If you must know, sleever bars fall into the same category as drift pins and bull pins, and the sense of all three is get the pointy end of your pin, or bar, down into the bottom hole of a pair of only partially aligned (and of course other places will do just fine if it's not bolt holes we're dealing with at the time) holes, and then, via some serious brute force applied with a beater (for the pins) or human hands (for the sleever bar), cause it to go all the way down into the the lower hole such that the two pieces of metal are forced to move transversely with respect to each other, and the two holes wind up in sufficient alignment to permit slipping a structural bolt through the aligned holes (generally adjacent to your persuader, but sometimes you have to remove it and use the holes you just aligned, and that can introduce... interestingness at times) so that a nut can be threaded on to the other end of the bolt, and the two pieces with the bolt holes in them can be properly torqued down into rock-solid contact like they're supposed to be.

For a sleever bar, think of the pair of properly-aligned holes, which a bolt can easily be passed through without damaging the threads, as a sleeve for the bolt, and you've got it. In the instance of our photograph, there are no bolt hole alignment concerns of any kind, and instead that sleever bar is exerting some nice crowbar leverage on the Hinge Box, as the GOX Arm continues to close in on its final location, fine-guidance controlled by strong and steady human hands as it does so.

What our other ironworker down on the Lower Platform is doing, I cannot say. He's barely visible, and... I dunno.

We learn how to build our Lower Hinge Access Platform on 79K24048 sheet S-126 where we get a good look at it in plan view, and on the next drawing in the series, 79K24048 sheet S-127, where the little ships-ladder of a stair takes us up just a bit more than three feet above the grating at FSS Level 260'-0" to get to the Platform.

Going up that stair, left shoulder brushing against the Strongback, you wound up with your feet on the Platform, and the Arm just above your head, because it was always retracted, folded back against the FSS, sitting on its Latchback and tied to the Hurricane Lock over on the south side, and the Lower Hinge Box was sitting right there at eye-level, but the place was still pretty cool to visit, 'cause there was ample room to get around the Hinge If you wanted to, and there was something about being under that Arm, but I really couldn't tell you exactly what, but I liked going there when I could, and of course the view was... as ever.

Ok. Next photograph, please.


Gonna take the alt/caption text right off the photograph and paste it in here, because it tells the tale and there's not a lot I can add to it as regards the very real drama of this moment.

"Image 112. At Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, the Upper Hinge Box of the freely-suspended GOX Arm is just about to enter the compound-notch formed by Upper Hinge Access Platforms A and B far above the surface of the Pad Deck and Flame Trench which are visible in the distance below it. The Lower Hinge Box is less constrained, but it too is a thing to be reckoned with, possessed of fiercely-unfeeling forces which must always be paid full and complete attention to. Things have become critical, and Ivey Steel's Union Ironworkers out of Local 808 are hands-on with it, and shall remain hands-on with it despite the very real and very severe risks associated with working an object weighing more than a city bus into and through a place where room for human hands introduced into it, controlling it, could easily disappear if it was to unexpectedly jostle or swing in the wind. Not all ironworkers have ten fingers, and the ones who don't even have two complete hands, or arms, are no longer ironworkers, so you will never meet them out on the job site. But you may rest assured that those people are out there, living their lives, following whatever dire and suddenly-unexpected turn of fortune left them in that condition. Nobody's stupid. Nobody wants to get hurt. But everybody wants to pull their weight in the gang and do their job. And once in a great while... Photo by James MacLaren.

I'm going to further explain things, but as to the import of the moment...

...no... ...there's nothing I can add to that end of it.

People are positioned at the wide-open edges of platforms, over 200 feet above the concrete beneath them, without handrails, without harnesses, without second chances, dealing, very much hands-on, with a coldly-unfeeling entity, possessed of well-hidden, nightmare, forces, which is in motion, and the lives of each member of the gang are well and truly in the hands of the other members of the gang, who they must entrust their lives to completely and unhesitatingly, and...

You're looking right at it...

...but you cannot imagine.

...you can never enter this world no matter how hard you might wish to try to.

Trying to gain a little understanding...

Trying to feel...

The grim and very-dark cloud of energy which surrounds this scene...

In which everyone is immersed...

And which every one of the people you see here are feeling...

For themselves...

Upon themselves...

As they go about the business of doing their jobs.

As the GOX Arm closes in with the tower.

There is so much going on in this frame, in so many different places, in so many different ways, that I'm not even sure where to begin.

Wish me luck, ok?

We worked, more or less, near-to-far with the last photograph, but with this one I'm going to reverse that, and work far-to-near. We need to step away from the enfolded intensity of the near field with this image, and shift our attention to the far field to do so, ok?

And as a tapestry or a carpet provides backdrop for the contents of a room, the Flame Trench and the Pad Deck provides a backdrop for the contents of this image.

Somehow, from this unworkable distance, the smoothness of those fire-blackened bricks lining the bottom of the Flame Trench comes through loud and clear. The way they had been worked by The Flames of Apollo. Near-melted. Become ceramic.

You're looking down on the fucking Ramp upon which I had been sufficiently purpose-minded and lucky, during time snatched from the cares and burdens of my job after-hours, to walk barefoot upon it.

It has nothing to say.

And really, nothing can be said about it, in return.

It simply... is.

Around it, an unknowable life attempts to make itself known, and fails miserably in the attempt.

As the attempts of those who would try to explain it all to others must also fail miserably.

There are cars. There are people. There is even a bit of greenery coming up through the seams in things, down there on that blackened post-volcanic Ramp.

These are all laughably-familiar reminders that we should have no trouble at all, understanding the matrix in which they are embedded.

But understanding fails to come, anyway.

True gut-feeling understanding of this place simply refuses to admit itself into the lives of those who did not inhabit this at-once warmly-familiar and coldly-outré off-planet scene.

And even, sometimes, those who did.

Partially hanging over the edge of the precipice, the big red Manitowoc crane continues about its business, getting the iron hung, out of harm's way, out from beneath the Lift.

Someone is standing on the running board at the side of the cab, eye-level, nearly brushing shoulders, with the crane's Operator. More life-and-death hanging in the balance with every push or pull of the levers inside that cab.

We're signaled to stop by invisible people up on the iron, and we do so, and the crane enters a temporary stasis which permits moments of conversation with whoever that is, standing there on the running board next to us.

Are they talking about work? Or beer? Or fistfights? Or women? Or football? Or fishing? Or politics? Or church? Or...

Those words were blown away on the north wind literal decades ago, and shall never return.

And the people who spoke them? And heard them?

That too has been carried off by the cold wind which was blowing this day, never to return.

Whole worlds.

Unenterable.

Behind the crane, the curved Rail Beam which groaningly carries the full weight of the RSS across the chasm of the Flame Trench is casting a hard shadow on the Fire Bricks of the Ramp. The windward side of the Pier which holds the Rail Beam up in the middle is mostly obscured by the Right Connection Plate of the Upper Hinge Box, but the hard shadow the Pier is also casting on the Fire Bricks of the Ramp betrays its presence as a very solid object which a fool had, in the not-so-distant past, kept attempting to avoid, switchbacking down the Ramp barefoot on a skateboard of all impossible things, nearly hospitalizing himself in the repeated attempts, and finally giving up on it, to the soft sounds whispered by a light late-afternoon breeze, with no other human anywhere to be seen or heard anywhere around, and this too is long-gone, blown away on the endless wind that never stops carrying things off, and it could never has possibly happened in the first place, and the whole thing is as become a fever dream, not remembered, not forgotten.

And not understood.

Ok. Enough already, MacLaren, what else is going on in this photograph?

And I gave that one some thought, realized just how deep the water I was thinking about jumping into really was, stepped back from the edge, and then decided I was just going to mark up Image 112 with labels identifying all the salient features visible on the towers within it, including the ones I haven't even gotten to yet. So ok. So here's Image 112, colored and labeled, identifying a bunch of this stuff. No, you don't know what a bunch of this stuff is. Same deal as with Image 108 where we were looking straight up from below. But yes, you, at some subsequent point in the narrative, will know what it all is. So ok. Give ya a little something to think about, waiting for me to get around to explaining the parts which to this point remain unexplained.

This photograph is more than I can deal with and I'm going to just keep moving with the story, and go to the next image in the sequence to keep telling it.


And how 'bout I just free-associate with it for a minute or three?

Those fucking aircraft bolts cost us forty grand, and it was beyond stupid, and NASA held our feet to the fire with it, as much out of goddamned meanness as anything else.

The guy on Upper Hinge Access Platform 'B' managed to keep his hand out of it, thank god, and you can see where the space between the Right Upper Hinge Connection Plate and the perimeter channel on the platform has gone to zero, and we sure the hell look like we're in direct contact, but maybe there's a thirty-second of clearance, but maybe not, and either way, had it been a finger, or a hand, it no longer would be, and the Lift would freeze in place while people scrambled, attempting to see to the maimed man's needs, who himself would be viewing the world around him through a prism of shock and pain, and there'd be blood and pulped flesh to clean up, and... but it didn't happen, and all is well despite my mind ever drifting towards nightmare scenarios of this sort.

The TTV guy on the walkie-talkie should be wearing his hardhat, but he's not, and we don't know why.

And peeking out from around behind the Strongback, he looks like he's looking directly at us, but he's not. He's zeroed in on that Right Lower Hinge Connection Plate, and all of his attention and focus is aimed at keeping the Crane Operator he's talking to on the straight and narrow with the still-freely-suspended GOX Arm, working to get it up against the Strongback, bolt-hole to bolt-hole, so as Union Ironworkers can pin that bitch in place, and start throwing bolts into those properly-aligned hole-sets, and get this sonofabitch tied to the tower.

The ironworker squinting up at things right next to him has his hands on the shorter of the two tag lines which have been attached to the Arm the whole time, the one on the back end of it attached to the Hinge end of things, the one that left the ground long ago as the Arm rose into the sky, and he's got it drawn up onto the Platform he's standing on, and he has single-wrapped it around the top handrail runner (go back to the previous image to see this, partially-blocked by the Lower Right Connection Plate, on the handrail runner), and he too is laser-focused, working that single-wrap rope as a set of brakes on the corner of the Lower Hinge Box, and he's a vital insurance policy, keeping that goddamned thing from suddenly lurching into motion toward the Strongback for no sensible reason (it happens, goddammit), catastrophically fucking everything up as it does so.

Additionally, with that tag line attached to the Lower Hinge Box (it's actually tied on near the end of the lowest Weldment of the Positioning Fixture, which itself is attached to the top side of the Lower Hinge Box, right there behind the Connection Plate, and you can see that clearly in this photograph), he also has the ability to fine-control the vertical plumbness of the Arm, by letting the Crane Operator come up on his Hook, ever so slightly, even as he holds his tag line tight, restraining vertical motion of the Hinge Box, which, of course, will be tipped slightly upward by the competing forces, permitting extraordinarily fine-grained and nuanced control of this aspect of the Box's orientation. And yes, every last bit of this was taken into account, and properly addressed, down on the ground when the Arm was initially being rigged for this Lift. These people are beyond good at this, and it is a joy to watch them do what they do so well.

Our guy on Upper Hinge Access Platform 'A' is now using his sleever bar, with it shoved in between a couple of stiffener plates behind the Upper Hinge Left Connection Plate, working it as a crowbar, working his side of the Upper Hinge Box.

The guy down on the ground holding the other tag line, the long one, the one attached to the far end of the Arm away from the Hinges, needs to be walking north along the east side of the Flame Trench slowly swinging the Arm around to the left, 'cause our Connection Plates, and our Strongbacks are not coplanar, and that lack of coplanarity's gotta go before anybody can do anything.

The Crane Operator might be able to help him by booming left a little, to bring the longitudinal axis of the Arm more into line with where it needs to be, but the Hook's on a Swivel, so there's only so much he can do with that one, above and beyond simply hitting the alignment square and true.

People on the ground are wondering to themselves, "Why is this so fucking slow? Why is this taking so long?"

People on the ground have no fucking idea what's actually going on up here. Except for a very few.

The fucking wind! The fucking wind won't stop blowing.

NO STEP

No shit.

High stakes, high skill. Fuckwits, losers, liars, and bullshit people of all stripe and color need not apply.

And about those aircraft bolts...

Far bottom right corner of the frame.

2 of 'em. Laying there on the grating, ready to go.

Instantly-recognizable out on the jobsite because of their weirdie 12-point flange heads.

These are the things that hold the wings on the airplanes you fly, and they're pretty hard-core, and they're strong as hell, but then again, the A325 high-strength structural bolts we built the whole tower with are also pretty hard-core, and they're strong as hell, too.

But NASA spec'd out goddamned aircraft bolts, and those things are eye-wateringly expensive, and we submitted paper on it, offering a credit against the contract if they'd let us use the same goddamned A325 bolts that everything else seemed to be doing so well with, staying held together with...

...and the answer came back...

Nope.

We called out aircraft bolts and you're going to furnish and install goddamned aircraft bolts.

And in casual conversations with the engineers who oversaw this end of things, every one of them agreed that A325 would be just fine, and none of them could actually tell us what the stupid aircraft bolts were doing, that an A325 high-strength structural bolt couldn't do in this instance, but for whatever mysterious reasons, the answer handed down from on high, from NASA management, was... nope. "Make it like the drawing shows, contractor scum." And so we did.

And if you wanna play devil's advocate and say, "Well maybe it's because the GOX Arm swings back and forth, every once in a while, and maybe it has something to do with that," (carefully and completely ignoring all the other stuff that swings back and forth every once in a while, and some of it's even heavier than the stupid GOX Arm) well go right ahead and say it, but just as soon as the devil's words have come out of your mouth, you have to stop and consider that the Arm was fastened directly to the Strongback, and any and all recurrently reversible rotational forces that the Arm induced, were going to be transferred right on through that fucking Strongback, and guess what the Strongback was being held on to the tower with?

Yep. A325 high-strength structural bolts. Just like everything else.

So no. It does not make a lick of sense, not on any grounds.

And they forced us to use 'em anyway.

I suspicion it was an undocumented holdover from the original Apollo engineering for all of the LUT Swing Arms (sure wish I had the drawings for that stuff, but so far, no luck with it), where the original engineering had been lost somehow (A LOT of that kind of thing happened along the way, and later on in this thing we're going to learn about my own personal experience with an event where NASA managed to lose a huge whack of engineering documentation, but not now, ok?), and they were reusing this stuff along with the incomplete documentation they had for it, and what they had on hand, told them to use goddamned aircraft bolts made out of fancy-ass steel, complete with the weirdie 12-point flange heads, but nowhere was any of the reasoning for that original decision to be found, and in an abundance of caution (and maybe an abundance of cheapskate refusal to allocate labor hours and money to redo the engineering calcs on this stuff), they simply hit it with "monkey see, monkey do" and obediently followed orders with it, and we wound up having to deal with the motherfuckers up on the tower, but really, I have no idea how it came to pass.

However, in their defense, those aircraft bolts were exceedingly... pretty.

They were shiny.

Looked like they belonged in some kind of very large and very precise machine somewhere... like... maybe... an airplane?

And they came packaged in individual little long boxes, made out of some kind of heavy construction paper stuff, off-green, dark, with a top that had full-height sides, so to take it off you slid it straight up off the long side of the box to reveal...

Some kind of white paper stuff which was wrapped around each bolt, hiding it from view, and you had to unwrap the fucking bolts, and even then you weren't quite done, 'cause they had also been coated in cosmoline, and the cosmoline on these particular bolts had been exposed to air for long enough to become rendered into pretty much pure wax, and wasn't that stuff just too much jolly fun to get out of the machine threads on those bolts, but at least they didn't make me do it, and the wax of the cosmoline kind of dulled-down the shine visually, but you could feel it in your hands anyway, and...

Why?

We're back in the early 1980's and these fucking bolts cost a hundred dollars a pop, and that's still a lot of money for one goddamned bolt, even now, but back then it was much worse, and that was just the bolt itself, no nut (those were an additional 25 bucks each, if memory serves), no washer (yep, pay extra for that, too), and oh yeah, the washers were special torque-indicating crush washers, which worked as a torque measuring device, and when the fat crush washer collapsed, you knew you had applied the requisite torque to the goddamned thing, and...

Holy fuck what a huge pain in the ass it all was, and you couldn't handle 'em like a normal A325 bolt because the over-fine machine threads wanted to cross-thread and bugger up every time, and everybody hated those miserable bolts, and yeah, I can see where I might want something like that to hold the wings on to my airplane, but up on a gigantic set of steel structures which were, everywhere else, held together perfectly fine and dandy using nothing more exotic than standard hot-dip galvanized A325 bolts?...

No. Nobody wanted 'em. Nobody needed 'em.

But by god that's what everybody got, to hold the stupid GOX Arm (and also the OAA, and we'll get to that later) on the goddamned tower.

Sigh.

Near foreground, on Upper Hinge Access Platform 'A', just to the right of where our ironworker is holding his sleever bar in his gloved hand, you can see where the Toeplate abruptly comes to a torched-off end, which marks the location of where this Platform got trimmed off to provide maneuvering room for the Upper Hinge Box as it was being worked into its ever-so-snug surroundings so they could bolt it to the tower. Refer back to our marked-up copy of 79K24048, sheet S-123, to refresh your memory on that one.

This constitutes an engineering fuckup, and well-illustrates one of the things you hear ironworkers say all the time about engineers, and that is, "They should all be made to wear a toolbelt and work out in the field for five years before they're ever allowed to pick up their first pencil and make a drawing."

And I could not agree with this sentiment, more.

On the drawing, this thing fit, and because it fit, whoever made the drawing saw no further problem with it, and rendered Platform 'A' as a single piece, not realizing there would be no way in hell real humans, working with real iron, out in the real world, would be able to get this bastard in there without some serious hard-interference issues. Engineers are notorious for not being able to see this kind of thing, and since they can't see it, and since they also can't doubt themselves ("Hey, I'm an engineer. I'm smart. Smarter than you by far, so it's not possible that I could be making a mistake here.), they plow steadfastly forward with their bullshit, and attempt to shove it up your ass, and when you cause them to understand that's not gonna happen, they don't like it, and they attempt to fight you on it, and... jeezus fuck, what the hell is wrong with people, anyway?

Sitting at the drawing table, the wind doesn't blow. There are no cranes or crane operators, and things just sort of magically come together without consideration of lines, and rigging, and clearance, and access, and bolts, and welding, and torches, and time, and money, and safety, and... all of the stuff that comes jumping out of the tall grass at you with bared fangs just as soon as you find yourself up on the iron.

And in the great scheme of this Great Project, it wasn't much, but it's illustrative.

Somebody, down on a shop floor somewhere, burned up time and money fabricating this platform the way it's shown on the drawing, as a single piece.

And then, up in the air, we see that a portion of that time and money had to be summarily thrown away in the torching of this platform, to remove the offending bullshit side of it that could never work as drawn, when time came to hang the GOX Arm, which, never forget, is the whole reason for this stupid platform's existence in the first place.

And this time, Rink and his crew were on that shit, saw the stupidity, saw the real-world-impossibility, and torched that bitch before the first lifting line was ever attached to the Arm, when it was still down on the ground somewhere.

But it doesn't always happen that way, and sometimes this kind of shit gets you, up in the air, and when it does...

That air grows thick with curse words...

And you can watch the money funneling in a mad circle as it disappears down the drain...

And the ignorantly-smug fuckwits down on the drawing tables give you a dismissive handwave and say, "Make it like the drawing shows"...

And ok...

Is that how you want to play the game?...

Because if it is...

You will have gotten me this time...

But you may take it to the bank that I will...

...next time...

...get YOU!

And the more ignorantly-smug the fuckwits at the drawing tables and desks turn out to be...

The more this applies...

And in my own time...

And in my own real world...

I managed to cause a few of them to stop...

And reconsider...

Waving that hand...

And saying those words...

The next time...

And wouldn't it have been so much easier...

If we had all set out to simply get it done...

In the most efficient and elegant and cost-effective way...

From the very beginning?

But the world is filled with losers and liars and very small people...

And in addition to everything else we have to do...

Every day of our lives...

We must also work hard to identify these people...

And root them out...

By whatever means we might find to do so...

Because once you've identified a snake...

You are at that point mandated to take on snakey ways when dealing with them, and them alone...

And bludgeon them right on out of your world...

And with luck...

The worlds of everyone else around them, too.

All of the above hate and discontent notwithstanding, there are Good People out there, and when you find one, and get to work with one, it is a signal pleasure to get to do so.

Which of course only serves to make me fight the Snakes harder, relentlessly bushwhacking through them with my sharpest machete, culling them, to get to a Better Place where the Good People are.


We are now metal-on-metal, but only just.

Following my taking the previous image on this page, I hot-footed it down off of the Camera Platform and ran across the grating to the far side of the FSS at Elevation 280'-0", and with the GOX Arm Latchback Strongback columns right at my back, I leaned out past the handrail as far as I dared, and grabbed this frame.

Someone else was there next to me, partially-visible in the extreme top left corner of this frame, being smarter about how far he thought it prudent to lean out for a better view, but alas I have no recollection whatsoever that he was even there at all, nevermind who he might have been. Memory is a fallible thing, and does not always keep everything we'd like it to keep, in storage for use later, sometimes many decades later, and I once again find myself apologizing for not being able to paint a better picture with words than the one I'm painting for you now.

We're now seeing things from the opposite side, and from here, the corner of the Lower Hinge Connection Plate, where it has finally just come in to contact with the Strongback, can be seen. Not well, but well enough. Just barely.

The two ironworkers on the Lower Hinge Access Platform continue with their work connecting, and while the one on the left appears to signaling to his buddy (bent over, looking down, clearly visible to him through the grating) on the Upper Hinge Access Platform with his left hand as he leans with his right arm back against the handrail, the one on the right has gotten the pointy end of his sleever bar through the far bottom-corner bolt hole in the Connection Plate, and has reached its matching bolt hole on the Strongback with it, and is now muscling the two holes into a better alignment, pinning the Lower Hinge Box in place at its Lower Right Corner, from where further adjustments and relocations must perforce pivot around toward a final alignment and bolt-up of the Arm.

This is pretty much the essence of ironworking, right here.

Making the connection.

In this instance, things are a bit larger, and a bit more dramatic, than usual, but this is it, right here.

Over, and over, and over, and over and over again.

Connection, after connection, after connection, after connection, after connection again.

Until there's nothing left to connect, and the structure is complete, and the other crafts can come in afterward, and finish off the building. Or the skyscraper. Or the Launch Pad.

By which time the ironworkers will be long gone, already working on the next job.

Connecting.

From my vantage point on the tower, leaned out as far as I could lean, we cannot quite see the faces of the two Strongback Columns which the Arm is being connected to. They're connected to the FSS at a slight angle. Remember? Go back to Page 62 where we hung the Strongback, if you've forgotten, and you can review how that thing is fastened to the tower, there.

But if you look close, up above the left-hand ironworker on the Lower Hinge Access Platform, the one with his outstretched hand silhouetted against the lighter shade of the Lower Hinge Box, above and a little left of that outstretched hand, you can see a down-pointing knife-blade of daylight, showing between Left Connection Plate on that Lower Hinge Box (which is in near-perfect parallel alignment with the camera's viewpoint), and the conduit-encrusted side of the Strongback, and this daylight is telling us that we have a ways to go, yet.

Get that first pair of holes pinned, don't worry about getting it perfect, and then work from there. Perfect is the sworn enemy of Good Enough, and seeks to destroy Good Enough at every opportunity, and in so doing, destroy itself, too.

And what you're seeing here is clearly Good Enough.

And that's how they do it.

From where we're standing, we get a pretty good look at how the Arm connects to its Pivot Frame. Nothing fancy there. Nothing unusual or out of the ordinary, just a square pipe-truss welded to a square frame. Simple.

And we're also getting a pretty good look at the south side, the "away" side of Upper Hinge Platform 'B', and if you look at the toeplate on it, you can instantly see the funny little step it had, created by that six-inch channel over on its right side that the grating is sitting on top of, taking you up six inches from where it ties to the perimeter Main Framing beam of the FSS. Why they chose to do that, I have not learned. Clearly, somebody or something needed that Platform up those six inches above where it tied to the tower, but who, or what, might have required that, I do not know.

What I do know is that it was fucking trip hazard, and coming off the main floor level of the FSS on to this thing, with a brilliantly-sunlit distant background as you see in our photograph glaring directly into your eyes, and the stupid Platform in shadow, you could very well miss that step visually, and...

Nobody ever went over the side... that I know of...

But it was just one of those goddamned things...

And you had to mind whenever you found yourself needing to go out there on it for some reason or other.

Somebody's got their float hung over there on the south side of the Strongback, where all those conduits come stubbing up from below, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't us, and it was probably the electricians, or maybe the pipefitters, but whoever it was, that thing wasn't quite in the way, and was therefore permitted to keep existing by the ironworkers. But it's pretty close. Right on the edge. Of being allowed to continue existing.

The shorter of the two taglines, the one that's being used to control the Lower Hinge Box, tied on its upper end to the Weldment Tube of the Positioning Fixture, and wrapped around the handrail behind our ironworkers, is especially well-displayed as we see it here. And you can easily see that if the Crane Operator gets up on it, even just a very little bit, that whole Hinge Box is going to want to tilt upward as the tag line holds it back, down where it's tied on. Depending on where our ironworker keeps the tag line lashed to the handrail, and whether or not the Operator booms the Crane left, the Box will also want to swing around just a little bit too, taking the Left Connection Plate closer to the surface of the Strongback Column as it does so, and that whole set of effects, as our ironworker works that line, easing up, tensioning, easing up, tensioning, watching things come into proper alignment as he works with the Crane Operator, will serve to get that Box right where they want it. Toss in the sleever bar, pinning the far-right bottom set of bolt holes, and all of a sudden, you can see how a thing that's over 60 feet long, weighing more than a goddamned bus, can be controlled with a surgeon's precision to get it dead-nuts exactly where it needs to be. And the fact that that tag line is tied to the Box where it is, as far down, and as far right, as they could get it while maintaining enough strength, and the first set of pinned holes is also the furthest down, and furthest right, is no coincidence, and again, the whole thing was worked out on the ground, before anybody touched any of it.

These people are good. They really are. I never got tired of watching it. It never quit being amazing.

Visible just above the Lower Hinge Box, beyond it, a rectangular-looking portion of open framework without any grating on it, for yet another platform, one which we have not yet talked about, is visible. But I don't want to talk about it right now. I'll talk about it later, ok?

Right now, let's finish getting this damn Arm hung on the tower, ok?

Let's move on to the next photograph in the series, ok?


And once again, I have moved so as I could get exactly what I wanted to get, from exactly the viewing angle that I needed to get it.

Bolts are now in place, but they're not torqued down. Not just yet.

And you can see them in there, as a pair of dark interruptions in the ever-so-thin sliver of daylight which is still showing between the Connection Plates on the Lower Hinge Box, and the faces of the Strongback Columns.

I had to get up on the Upper Latchback Access Platform, which by pure luck was located such that I could stoop over on it, hold my breath, and rock side-to-side until that thinnest-possible sliver of daylight showed itself, and then hit the shutter release. And then start breathing again.

Here it is, nice and labeled for you in plan view on 79K24048 sheet S-103, to let you see the layout of the whole thing with all the principle players color-coded.

And, by looking at things from exactly the right place, we can see that the Lower Hinge is tipped up a little, not quite perfectly flush with the faces of the Strongback Columns.

We can also see that the electricians (presumably) have come in and slapped a couple of pieces of unistrut (which is a trademarked name in similar manner as "kleenex" and "Q-tip" but nobody ever calls the stuff "strut channel") across the Flanges of the Strongback Column in between the Upper and Lower Hinge Boxes, and then attached six(!) vertical runs of conduit to the unistrut, and for the Lower Hinge Box, that far-right run of conduit is blocking view of the Flange itself, but it appears to be running near perfect in line with the face of that Flange (and I'm guessing somebody knew they'd best stay out of there, past that Flange face where things would be happening, but they wanted all the space they could get, so they crowded that thing over there by laying a straight-edge across the face of the Flange and simply pushing that piece of conduit up against it, but really, that's just a guess) which allows us to still see our thinnest sliver of daylight between the Lower Hinge Box and the Strongback, accurately ascertaining the Lower Box's exact orientation in so doing.

For the Upper Hinge Box, it's not as bad with the conduit, because that rightmost piece of conduit got trimmed off (and of course if it's going to carry wires going to the GOX Arm, which is a very reasonable assumption, the GOX Arm has to first be there, and until that happens, there's no sense in attempting to finish with the conduit, so they just stub it off and wait till the Arm's hung, and can then go back and finish with it).

This lets us see the lighter thin line of the near edge of the Strongback Column Flange between the right-hand two ropes holding up that float, as it extends upward beyond the top margin of the photograph, and as it does so, it passes behind both Connection Plates of the Upper Hinge Box, with the far (Left) Connection Plate on that Box visible as the lower of the two from this vantage point, loud and clear, with a solid vertical inch of blazing-bright daylight in between itself and the Strongback, with that daylight interrupted above by the darkness of the channel framing on Upper Hinge Access Platform 'A' beyond, and then for the near (Right) Connection Plate, we can just barely see the lighter bottom edge of it, extending out of frame to the top, and instead of daylight, it's a narrow line of darkness that's telling us that it too is not in contact with the Strongback. As it stands, we don't have enough information to tell if the Upper Box is tipped upward or downward, but we do have enough information to see that the Box is closer to the Strongback on its Right side, which means it's rotated with respect to the Strongback just a little bit, and...

That's all a bit much, and I can see where some of you are going to maybe not be able to follow my well-braided description of all that, so here's a marked-up copy of Image 115 with all the main players identified, so as you might be better-able to follow along with all of these weird-ass alignments and the stories they tell as individuals and as a group, too.

Clearly, the Hinge Boxes are slightly misaligned, and the Rods on the Positioning Fixture will need to be worked turnbuckle-style to bring things into the state of coplanarity they'll need to be brought into, in order for the GOX Arm to be finish-attached, all nice and torqued down in its final and permanent working location on the FSS.

Either that, or throw bolts through as many already well-enough lined-up sets of holes as you can (and the odds of that being enough bolts are pretty damn good, actually), then simply remove the stupid Positioning Fixture and let the loose bolts act like individual drift pins, and then start torquing it all down, adding more bolts as you go while the Boxes groan bit by bit into proper position until the last of the holes are in sufficient alignment with bolts thrown through them, and just keep right on torquing, brute-forcing both Boxes in to their irrevocablely-permanent positions up against the hard-ass steel of the Strongback and be done with it, then and there. Which is probably what they did, but I do not know that for a fact, 'cause I wasn't looking over their shoulders when they did it.

And that's going to be a slow and tedious process to either work those Fixture Rods or just brute-force the sonofabitch by torquing the bolts, or maybe some combination of the two. And this whole misalignment thing also lets you see the surprising amount of play in the Hinge System on the GOX Arm, and no, I do not know exactly why they made it that way. To my eyes, it looks like they were giving us too much adjustment capability with bolting the Hinges to the tower, but there's probably a story in there, probably going all the way back to Apollo Days, long-lost to us now, and perhaps already equally long-lost in the early 1980's when we were hanging the Arm, and whatever the hell was going on with this, you can rest assured that it's not because of sloppy manufacturing and assembly (but wait! that's coming too, but not here, not yet), but instead they had a reason, and they designed the Swing Arm accordingly.

As for the three people we're seeing here, the two on the right are Union Ironworkers, and one of them has got his head between the Strongback Columns, directly underneath the Lower Hinge Box, guillotine-style, and...

This guy is putting himself directly in the line of fire on this one.

If something was to happen with the still-freely-suspended GOX Arm, or just one of the Hinge Boxes, or even just some part of any of that, even just a bolt falling down from ten feet above him and managing to find his face before he can get out of the way...

He's going to pay a significant penalty at a bare minimum, and his life just might be forfeit, then and there.

So it's pretty serious business, ok?

We're playing for keeps up here, ok?

Here's a 12-minute vid from Practical Engineering called Why Things Fall Off Cranes, introducing us to the bare-bones-basics of how things can go wrong with suspended loads, but trust me on this one, it's waaay more complicated, and the ways things can go wrong are waaaaaaaay more numerous, and devious, than the vid talks about, but for those of you who are unfamiliar with the hands-on ins-and-outs of this stuff, it's a start.

The attach bolts for the Arm are placed through their holes with the heads inside the Strongback, so who knows what, exactly, is going on here, but whatever it is, it requires a pair of eyeballs (and eventually hands) to sort it out, and... we're underway.

And what about our TT&V guy? What about him?

He shows up in several of these photographs, and every time he does, up on the Lower Hinge Access Platform, he's around the corner behind the Strongback, peeking around from the back side just barely far enough to be able to see things, and no farther than that, perfectly positioned to instantly turn and jump down off the Access Platform onto the main flooring level at 260'-0" and run like hell around to the other side of the FSS if need be, and I'm beginning to think he's hiding from it.

It's all well and good to see and become familiar with pictures, or diagrams, or O&M manuals of stuff like this, but when you're actually within arm's reach of it, it changes, and it changes drastically.

Fear enters the discussion in a way that cannot be ignored.

Ancient circuits in the old reptile part of your brain, buried way up in there, up in your amygdala, begin firing whether you want them to or not.

That old circuitry is there for a reason, and it's well-gifted for near-instantaneously sizing things up, and when it sees something it harbors serious doubts about, it kicks into gear, like it or not.

And yes, when you're already over 200 feet up in the goddamned air, and you find yourself dealing with something that's longer than your house and weighs more than a bus and it's just sort of dangling there, right in front of you, or maybe even directly above you, and it's moving around, and...

Your amygdala very reasonably says "Fuck that noise," and wants to take you out of there, and it primes your system to do so, right now if need be, and...

You find yourself hiding from it, peeking around from behind the biggest sturdiest object at hand...

And with bolts thrown through matched hole-sets, and the Crane Operator continuing to maneuver the GOX Arm, that goddamned Arm and Strongback are making noises.

And it's not like you've ever heard these particular noises before, and therefore understand them on a gut level, because nobody's ever hung a GOX Arm on the FSS, using the Hammerhead Crane that you're directing via walkie-talkie, at Pad B before, so it's all very unfamiliar and none of it conveys any kind of usefully-familiar information.

And some of those noises are unexpectedly sudden, sharp, and loud, and others just groan and chatter and half-sing metallically for longer than you'd like, and you can't see where they're coming from, and it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up as you find yourself involuntarily looking around for what's slowly failing, and if it's not the kind of thing you do on a regular basis as an ironworker, it's all just about as scary as fuck, and along with the noises you can feel this thing through the soles of your boots, and the amount of intermittently-sensible motion and vibration you can feel is deeply unsettling, and...

I guess you need to be there in circumstances like this...

Because it's different.

So our TT&V guy has a job to do, and he's signed on for it, and he's up there doing it...

But that doesn't mean his amygdala isn't going off like a fireworks display...

And it's different up here, ok?

And even after you've been doing it for years, it stays different, even after you become familiar with it, ok?

So don't let these pictures fool you into thinking you understand what's going on here, because you don't.


And now we've finally come to the point with things, where not much else is going to happen visually, which means we've come to the last photograph in our sequence that shows you How The GOX Arm Was Hung.

For all intents and purposes visually, the GOX Arm is hung.

Which is not to say we've come to the end of the narrative, but we're getting there.

In this image, we see that the Bottom Hinge Box is pretty much snug up against the Strongback without any daylight showing through in there, although the bright silvery surface of that conduit over there could cause you to question it, if you didn't know the whole story with that thing.

But we also see that they've removed those two bolts that were serving as make-do drift pins, and now, instead of the bolts, there's a broad-head bull pin in there, pinning the Lower Hinge Box in place while the Arm continues to be maneuvered into its final location so they can bolt the goddamned thing to the tower and be done with it, for once and for all.

But it's gonna be a while yet before that can happen, and at this point I decided I'd gotten enough up here photographically, and departed the scene, headed back down to the Pad Deck, and took the actual "last frame" in this series, which you've already seen, Image 109, before departing for my desk in the Ivey field trailer and returning to my normal duties.

Why the bolts came out and the bull pin went in, I do not know, but it might have had to do with just how much force they found themselves having to apply, working the Arm into place, and maybe the QC guy in the weirdly-patterned two-pocket cowboy-shirt with the ridiculous snaps instead of buttons, down on the grating of the 260'-0" level looking at it through the Strongback Columns from behind the Main Framing Pipe Diagonal on the FSS, hiding from it back there, griped about possibly damaging those fucked-up aircraft bolts, and rather than waste time disputing some nitwit, the ironworkers shrugged their shoulders, removed the bolts, and just beat that bull pin in there while watching the QC guy out of the corners of their eyes, waiting to see if he was going then start griping about damaging the fucked-up iron or not. Who knows? Bolts gone, pin's in, fuckit, whatever.

Also in this frame (and the one above it too), we're getting a really good look at that tag line attached to the lower Positioning Frame Weldment, and we can see that now, once the Arm got pinned, our ironworker who was working it has let go and moved on to other tasks, and the line has gone slack, although it's still wrapped around the handrail runner behind the post.

And up where it's attached to the Weldment, we can see that the line is purpose-built with a choker loop in the end that was formed by splicing the end of the line back on itself, and just behind that loop, it's covered with some kind of black tape or a tightly-fitting sleeve or something to prevent chafing, and that makes this length of rope a dedicated tool instead of just some random piece of one-inch nylon rope you might find laying around. More little stuff. It's always little stuff, right?

In addition to the bull pin, our left-hand ironworker has his sleever bar through the bottom bolt-hole on the Right Connection Plate. Looking closely at the photograph, that looks wrong somehow, 'cause the hole is way too close to the bottom edge of the Connection Plate to be in the right place, but then, when you look even closer, you see that's not the bottom edge of the Connection Plate at all, just about even with the bottom side of the darkness which is the sleever bar, but instead, it's that goddamned piece of unistrut welded across the Strongback Column Flanges, mimicking a false bottom edge to that Connection Plate, and... godDAMN does steel ever have a relentlessly nasty habit of lining up in ways to mislead and deceive your unbelieving eyes! Gah.

The guy with the sleever bar is eye-on his buddy, who's looking around on the other side of the Box, at the Left Connection Plate, and he's giving hand-signals to the one with the sleever bar, telling him where and how much to push the Lower Hinge Box around, using his bar, to put that Left Connection Plate right where it needs to be, to line up the bolt-holes over on that side of the Hinge Box.

On the walkie-talkie, our TT&V guy has come farther out of hiding, but his body language, and in particular the location of his left hand on the conduit, and his left foot still behind the Strongback keep right on telegraphing his desire to continue taking cover, wanting very much to save his own skin by staying as far out of harm's way as he possibly can, while still managing to do his job.

Up above, with the Upper Hinge Box...

Nope. Not yet.

Still clearly not in contact with the Strongback, and still (not quite as clearly, but you can tell) rotated around, with the Left Connection Plate farther away from the Strongback Column Flange than the Right Connection Plate, and that rotation is going to need to be canceled out somehow, via finesse, via brute force, via whatever it takes, before this work is finally done, and the Arm is finally connected.

And now that we've come to the end of the line visually, it's time for me to tell you what happened after the Arm was hung.

And godDAMN do I ever wish I had a copy of that Pitchfork Letter, but alas I do not, and we're going to be forced into relying solely on an old man's ever-so-fallible memories, so... be aware of that, ok?

And to tell you the story of what happened after the Arm was hung, we have to back up all the way to a time well before any lifting gear was attached to the Arm, and the Arm itself was in pieces, out on the concrete, completely off of and away from, the body of the Pad itself.

Old Apollo equipment, reworked, rebuilt, reused.

Which was all done up in the Florida Panhandle if memory serves, at a place called... I think... VerVal, and yeah, I think that's a pretty weird name, too.

And following such refurb and rework as was done, it got shipped down to the Pad.

In pieces.

Ok, fine. It's in pieces. Makes it easier to ship, right? We'll put the pieces back together. Hell, we're assembling the whole goddamned Launch Pad from pieces, so one Swing Arm, all by itself, shouldn't present any kind of problem that we weren't already well-positioned to deal with, right?

Hinge Boxes.

Two of 'em.

One Upper, and one Lower.

In pieces.

And what lived inside the Hinge Boxes was also in pieces.

Loose components, and lots of 'em.

Which we were going to have to put together per such plans, specifications, drawings, and diagrams as were furnished to us by NASA with the Arm.

Remember, it wasn't our Arm.

It was NASA's Arm.

GFE.

It's all over the drawings when you start looking for it.

Government Furnished Equipment.

So ok, so they furnished it to us.

Ok, fine.

Whatever.

Well...

You know how sometimes not every arm of an octopus might know exactly what every other arm of the octopus is doing?...

And maybe one of the arms of the octopus hands something over to one of the other arms of the octopus...

And the arm that got something handed to it thinks that the arm that handed it over knew what it was doing?...

...but maybe it didn't?...

...or at least not completely... like... not all the way?...

... and inside the Hinge Box was the actuation mechanism that swung the arm to and fro, and it was pretty fucking substantial.

On page 2, our Space Shuttle Gaseous Oxygen Vent System document tells us that the Arm gets swung around by hydraulic cylinders that deliver a whacking big 268,000 foot-pounds of torque, and those of you who might already be familiar with "foot-pounds of torque" from your own automotive experience or maybe other kinds of "normal" experience, all just gave a low whistle when you read that number, and most of you are questioning the accuracy of that number, and for everybody else who's not familiar with "foot-pounds of torque"...

...holy shit but that's a LOT of force.

With one percent of a force that size, you will go right through things as if they weren't even there.

And with one hundred percent of a force that size...

...well... as I just said... that's a lot of force.

So.

The innards of the Hinge Box, the things that generated and controlled that force...

Were in and of themselves...

...pretty fucking substantial.

And the guts of the whole deal was a hydraulic cylinder attached to...

...the Pork Chop!

And no, I'm not making this shit up, that's exactly what everybody called it.

The Pork Chop.

And the Pork Chop was a thick plate of steel, strong steel, machined steel, shiny, no paint job, having the form of a circle, but with a sort of "ear" off of one side of it, where one side of the "ear" kind of rounded off and the edge of it aimed directly back toward the center of the circle where it blended into the perimeter of the circle with another round-off, but the other side of the "ear" rounded off and headed back toward the perimeter of the circle at a pretty shallow angle, where it too blended in, and the overall effect of the shape of this thing was to make it look like...

..a Pork Chop!

And I don't recall the Pork Chop as being a full yard across in size, but it might have been. And even if it wasn't, it wasn't missing by all that much. And I dunno, it might have been bigger, too. I'm an old man. My memory of some of this crap isn't as clear as it needs to be. The sun got in my eye. I didn't have my tape-measure that day. The dog ate my homework. So sue me. And regardless of any of that, our Pork Chop was a pretty hefty piece of shiny machined steel, ok?

All well and good.

And the center of the Pork Chop had a hole for a short shaft on a bearing, and in a ring around that hole, evenly spaced, was a series of much smaller holes for a bolt circle, and in the "ear" was another hole, which also took a short shaft on a bearing, and you're familiar with this particular "bolt circle" because you've already seen the motherfucker, back in Image 111 where the bolts are showing through the Pivot Frame which they attach the Pork Chop to, which of course pivots the whole goddamned Arm back and forth (with 268,000 foot-pounds of torque, for god's sake) as it swings out and then swings back in, away from the External Tank when the Space Shuttle is sitting there on its MLP next to the FSS. And oh yeah, look close at those bolts in Image 111, and... yep. Fucking aircraft bolts there, too.

The whole GOX Arm was built like some kind of weird-ass combination of an airplane and a battle tank, and... it was just about a weird motherfucker.

And the hydraulic cylinder is attached to the Pork Chop's "ear" inside of the Hinge Box, and the shaft in the center of the Pork Chop kept the Pork Chop firmly in place as it rotated, and the Pivot Frame connected via the circle of bolts to the Pork Chop through a sealed opening in the Hinge Box cover plate...

And this is what made it all go.

Two Hinge Boxes, two cylinders, two Pork Chops, easy peasy pushmepullyou.

Cylinder push, Pork Chop turn, Pivot Frame turn, how hard can it be to understand something as brain-dead simple as this?

Well...

As it turns out...

It might have been easy to understand...

But it was also easy to...

...fuck up.

And what might have been going on in their minds back in the early 1960's when they originally designed this stuff for Project Apollo is not for me to know...

But whatever it was, it caused them to design this thing so that it could very easily, and very simply, be put together with the Pork Chop "face up" or "face down" and face-up and face-down are opposite hand from each other with this thing, and yes, it really does make a difference...

And the rest of the innards of that goddamned Hinge Box, including the hydraulic cylinders was also purpose-designed and built so as it could attach, and function, with the Pork Chop either way...

Up or down...

...and...

...none of it was matchmarked.

We received this motherfucker as GFE from NASA, in pieces, and the dirty bastards did not bother to mark any of it "up" or "down"...

And when Rink started in with dispositioning this crap right after it arrived at the Pad, he immediately noticed that the Pork Chop along with its cylinder could be assembled in either one of two different ways...

...and...

That kind of stopped him right there.

And at that point the head scratching began, but unfortunately the receipt of answers to our questions did not.

NASA, of course, wasn't even there.

NASA's representatives, were.

And I forget who it was, but a part of my brain is handing me "PRC" which of course is the "PRC" part of PRC/BRPH who did 79K24048, and we already know just how fucked up 79K24048 was, so... yeah, that would all fit together pretty well...

But I could not swear to it in a court of law, ok?

But whoever it was, they weren't much help.

And, as all such stories go, this one started out with causal questions asked of cognizant engineering people, and...

Nope.

Can't help you.

And beneath the Blazing Florida Sun, on more than one occasion, the Pork Chop was scrutinized from every imaginable angle (and remember, this thing was heavy, and it was awkward, and it was shiny so you could not handle it roughly lest you fucked up that machined surface on the goddamned thing, and turning it over, and turning it around, using gear to do so was quite laborious and time-consuming, and it was looked at, closely, by Rink, by Dick Walls, by Wade Ivey, by multiple ironworkers, by other casual and not-so-casual passers-by, and even by me, and nobody could find anything remotely resembling a matchmark, which could be matched (duh) with similar (or any other) matchmarks (none existed anywhere, remember?) on the rest of the hardware it attached to, and...

There was a single, very thin and very shallow straight line incised on it near its perimeter at a perfectly anonymous location, having no evenly-divisible rotational relationship with any of the (very few) salient features on the Pork Chop which you might use to navigate yourself by, going around the perimeter of the Pork Chop (we checked), and it was less than a full inch long, and it looked nothing whatsoever like the sort of thing machinists will make by giving a chisel a good whack with a hammer, incising a nice straight line the width of the chisel point at some place, with a very well-defined linear deepest-point center, which gets formed by the v-shaped edges of the tip of the chisel.

Machinists also tend to further engrave identifying features in the immediate vicinity of such matchmarks with things like capital letters, or numbers, or... you know... stuff that somebody can read, and then consult the assembly instructions to see how it all fits in together, the one and only way it's supposed to.

Our "line" looked a lot more like some kind of blemish on the damn thing than it did any kind of purpose-made locational guide, and on top of that, it lined up with nothing that might attach to the Pork Chop, or be lined up with the Pork Chop in any way, following installation

And the documentation that came with the Arm was exceedingly pathetic and didn't really amount to much more than a glorified receipt with the separate items which we received listed, but nothing more than that, so...

Whattayagonnado?

And the first drips of paper began trickling across the surface of my desk and from there falling into the system, as it became clear that we weren't going to be getting any properly-defensible answers to The Great Mystery of the Pork Chop.

And the work on the Arm came to a halt, and time began to get burned as the work from that point on failed to proceed, and time is money, and when you start burning money, people's heads start turning.

Weeks go by...

And finally...

People on the NASA side of the house, people in charge of budgetary things, realized they had no choice in this matter except to cough it up, and foot the bill to have VerVal's (or whatever their name was) lead engineer for this thing come down to the Cape and put him up in a motel, and give him a rental car so he could get to work and back from wherever the hell he wound up staying, so as he could oversee the proper and correct assembly of the fucking Hinge Boxes, so that we could then bolt 'em on to the Arm, and then hang the sonofabitch on the tower.

Enter Jack Hawkins. Or at least that's what I remember the name as, but, once again, I'm not only an old man now, but even back then I was astoundingly piss-poor with names, so... keep that in mind here, ok?

And Jack Hawkins was straight out of Central Casting.

From a very bad movie.

Older guy. Mid 60's I'm guessing, but that too could be off.

Lean build, tall.

With a full head of shoulder-length wavy near-white hair and a slow-motion way about him when he moved.

And he always dressed from head to toe in solid black.

Black button-down long-sleeve shirts, black pants, and black shoes, (no hat, thankfully, as he seemed quite proud of his hair for some reason and kept it on full display at all times, and out away from the body of the Pad, nobody seemed to take exception to his concomitant distaste for a hardhat, too) none of which attire was especially fancy, which made it work well enough for work, but which nonetheless made him look like...

And people occasionally called him "Johnny Cash" and I'll let you research that one for yourself, and yes, it was quite apt, but no, Jack Hawkins evidenced zero musical proclivities or talent, and exactly why he chose to attire himself this way on every occasion will just have to remain one of those little Mysteries of Life and that's that.

And he was the man when it came to the GOX Arm.

And he was also, we came very quickly to learn...

An idiot.

And I've already mentioned how the ironworkers never grew tired of saying about engineers in general that they should all have to wear a toolbelt and work in the field for five years before they were ever allowed to pick up their first pencil and start making drawings of stuff, and...

We're pretty sure that nobody ever made Jack do any such thing in any of his past lives.

And let us further say that he was not any kind of hands-on guy.

Jack stayed clean all day long at work by not touching things.

Neither tools nor workpieces did he show any proper signs of ever having touched on a regular basis, much less any kind of workman's familiarity with any of it.

That sort of thing was for other people, and he was happy to let their hands get dirty, but never his own.

And you may think me unpleasantly judgmental about this stuff, but experience shows that people who don't get dirt on their hands now and again approach, understand, and interact with, tools and equipment, in a very different and very much less intuitive way than those who do.

And this we got out of Jack from the very outset, and from then on, without exception.

Sigh.

And Jack's slow languid mannerisms chewed up time at a prodigious rate, and although I for sure as hell wasn't out there with him the whole time, I was out there with him long enough, and...

He was quite entertaining to watch, puzzling over his own equipment as a man who had never seen such things before in his life might, so long as you didn't mind the god-awful waste of time involved in doing so.

And soon enough, it became clear that he didn't really know which way the goddamned Pork Chop was supposed to go, face-up, or face-down, and we all grew deeply-suspicious of where he was going to take us with this thing, but we were also fully-aware that he was the responsible party, so...

Have at it, baby.

And if memory serves, he finally latched on to that one and only line on the Pork Chop, decided that it really was a matchmark, and then further decided on what it was to be matched-up with (there being nothing at all there, remember, but... ok), and he finally issued instructions on how to do it, and we were double-damn-sure to GTSOP (Get That Shit On Paper), and thereupon, while Rink kept evidencing these frighteningly-sly half smiles every once in a while, we assembled the Hinge Boxes, and assembled the Arm, and the whole works was taken up to the Pad Deck and placed over there on its support stands in front of the MLP Utilities Interface Platform, which is where you see it sitting in the first photograph up at the very top of this page, with a gang of ironworkers attaching the Lifting Sling to it.

And it was during this time that I was becoming more and more involved with the Tear Out and Refurbishment of the UT and the MST down the road at Titan III/IV complex 41, which meant that I was becoming less and less involved with the daily activities at Pad B, and as a result, we are, from now on, going to be dealing with larger and larger gaps in my own personal narrative about Pad B, 'cause...

...I wasn't there.

And yeah, I was there the day we hung the Arm, 'cause we've got the photographs to prove it, right?

But after that...

And I do not recall just how long after that...

But it was recounted to me by one of our ironworkers...

That following all of the endless inspections, component tests, electrical and mechanical hookups, and installation of all the rest of this very-complicated and involved system which made the GOX Arm go...

And kind of like I did with the OMBUU, I'm just going to give you a taste of how very-complicated and involved that system is, by simply giving you links to several more of the drawings (but certainly not all of them), without further comment.

79K24048 sheet M-350.

79K24048 sheet M-202.

79K24048 sheet M-203.

79K24048 sheet M-204.

79K24048 sheet M-205.

79K24048 sheet M-207.

79K24048 sheet M-213.

79K24048 sheet M-353.

79K24048 sheet M-354.

Came the day for the very first functional test of the Arm's ability to swing.

And they hit the button, and put it into motion...

And Son. Of. A. BITCH! but that fucking GOX Arm...

SWUNG THE WRONG WAY!

Backwards, in fact.

Because the Pork Chop was installed UPSIDE DOWN!

And oh boy, wasn't that just too much fun to believe!

And my only regret is that I was not there on site to see it with my own eyes.

Pshit!

And by god it wasn't like they could just swap the hoses and wires around, or change the labels on the buttons of the Control Console and make-do with things that way...

And the fucking Pork Chop was reverse-installed, like it or not and...

Down came the GOX Arm, off of the FSS, back down to the ground, where the Hinge Boxes had to be removed, and the Pork Chop taken out of 'em, and put back in right way up...

And the GOX Arm got put back up on the tower a second time...

And this time the miserable fucking thing worked...

And I missed being an in-person witness to every last bit of this, because I was down the road battling newer and more ferocious dragons at Pad 41...

But Ivey had me...

Write a letter...

Which detailed every goddamned minute of lost-time labor, material, equipment, and overhead expense along with the precise reasons for the loss of every one of those minutes, including the naming of names...

And it was written with feeling...

And as I mentioned way back up near the very top of this vastly-overlong page, Wade and Dick and John looked at each other, and looked back at me, and said...

"Send it."

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

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