Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B Construction Photos

Page 62

Kai: Growing Up With Rockets (Original Scan)

Kai MacLaren.

Growing up with rockets.

Space Shuttle Mate-Demate Device. In the rocket engine of a Titan I ICBM. On the deck of the LARC, looking across at a pair of very-much active launch pads for Delta II. Standing on the centerline of the 15,000-foot runway at the Shuttle Landing Facility. Life in the shadows of the launch pads at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and the Kennedy Space Center, Florida.




Top Left: (Reduced)

And they held an open-house at the Kennedy Space Center, for those who worked there, for those with badges, and their families too.

And you pile in dad's VW van, and you roll on out there, and among the wonders on display, the Shuttle Landing Facility is open too. And it's a gigantic place, and it's a good thing you're driving 'cause you're never gonna make it walking, and over on one side at the far end of all those acres of grooved concrete, the Mate-Demate Device stands inscrutably.

And they won't give us access to walk right up underneath it, but that's ok, 'cause it's quite large, and you get a good view of it from right where you're standing.

It's big, but not overwhelmingly so, but golly is it ever a contraption!

They pull the 747 Carrier Aircraft, with the Space Shuttle riding atop its back (about which, more, on the next page of these photo-essays), underneath and into the slot in this thing (which does not really show in this photo at all, 'cause we're looking at it too much from the side), and then they attach that yellow sling affair (the closer end of which you can see being supported by a pair of quite-substantial lifting blocks attached to it, along with another pair of dark telescoping-tube assemblies in between them, the sight of which causes me to tell myself to try and remember to tell you later on somewhere about a couple of other, similar-looking, telescoping-tube assemblies which we furnished and installed, and which were a part of the LRU inside the PCR at B-Pad, and which the ironworkers hated, because they understood the inherent design flaws of the miserable things in a way that no NASA Engineer could ever be brought to comprehend, no matter how hard we all tried, and we tried mightily, to introduce this concept into the interior spaces of their thick bony skulls, and in the end, the fucked-up things did exactly what the ironworkers said they'd do, and it damn near got a couple of people killed, and it could have also destroyed a half-billion dollar payload if it had happened on the Wrong Day, but by pure dumb luck it didn't, and goddammit this narrative is yet again lurching off on a path of its own choosing, and I've got to once-again corral the fucking thing, and bring it back into line, and... shit).

Anyway, the yellow sling attaches to the Space Shuttle, and lifts it off of the plane or puts it down on top of the plane (which of course needs to do a little plane-dance rolling in and backing out of the thing for any of this to happen), thus enabling them to tootle around across the continent with their orbiter, without having to actually launch it to do so.

"Mate-Demate Device" is yet another fine example of the daffy names they insist on giving things out here, and although, yes, it does accurately describe what this thing is doing for a living quite well, it signally fails the tests of plain-speaking, common-usage, and just generally being simple and easy enough to deal with so as that it doesn't bring the conversation to a halt as you try to enunciate the damn thing, and this was yet another one that nobody ever seemed inclined to use an acronym for, and if you actually came out and said "MDD" nobody would have the faintest idea what you were talking about, and... gah.

But. Disregarding all of the above, the Mate-Demate Device was really cool, and the business of placing the Space Shuttle on top of a fucking 747(!) and flying off with it sitting up there....

Yeah. That's all just about as cool as shit, and to actually see the thing, flying by like that....

Yeah. That's all just about as cool as shit can ever get.

And Kai liked the Mate-Demate Device very much, and he liked the business of bolting a Space Shuttle to the top of a 747 very much, and he liked the business of flying off with it that way very much, and he liked the business of being gifted the grace of occasionally getting to see it fly by that way with his own eyes, the most of all.

Kai knew then and knows now, exactly how great these gifts and these graces really are.


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Oh the places you'll go!

Perhaps even inside of a rocket engine, one day you may go!

And so it is.

And so it was.

And so Kai MacLaren, visiting the Air Force Space Museum on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station with his dad, finds himself ever-so-happily sitting inside of the nozzle of an Aerojet LR87-3 Lox/Kerosene engine which powers the first stage of the Titan I rocket, which was then on display, but is no more.

Carpe diem Kai!

And so it was done.


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Kai MacLaren.

Standing on the LARC.

Considering the towers at adjacent Launch Complex 17.

The LARC's were used to drive around through rough country and all-terrain amphibiously on the Cape back when things were still falling out of the sky in pieces and setting the place on fire fairly often, back in the 50's and early 60's. I grew up immediately south of Patrick Air Force Base (the administrative center for the Cape) and would occasionally see these things come growling through the palmettos, spewing black diesel smoke, and then just keep right on going, down the beach and out into the ocean, on calm waveless days (which Florida is very well endowed with). As all-terrain vehicles go, nothing beats a LARC.

Launch Complex 17 was where Delta II rockets flew from, and at the time this picture was taken, was still very much an active facility, still actively launching rockets, and of course Kai liked that a lot.

There were two pads, each with its own Mobile Service Tower and from this point of view, you're seeing the tower at pad 17-A on the left, and 17-B on the right.

At the time, Delta II was America's workhorse rocket, and they flew them a lot, and they flew a lot of different kinds of payloads on them, both military and scientific.

GPS, low and high Earth orbit, lunar missions, Mars missions, Solar System missions, you name it.

Whenever time and circumstance permitted, Kai and I would make it our job to take the telescope(s) and/or scanner, and drive some place where we thought we might get a better view of this or that mission, and we watched them from a lot of different places, and we saw at least one spectacular failure (Delta 178), from the vantage point of the Islander Hut, which used to exist on the beach at the end of 3rd Street North in Cocoa Beach, Florida, which today is named Slater Way, in honor of Cocoa Beach home-town boy, Kelly Slater, 11-time world surfing champion, who used to run around as a little kid back in those days, while I drank beer and played pinball in the Hut with his dad Steve, and Kai would run around, best-friends, with Kelly's little brother Stevie. Yes indeed, them were the days! If you ever hear Kai use the word "standby" with a markedly-abrupt and so-understated-as-to-be-undetectable humorous tone, you're hearing something that has remained with us for a lifetime, that we heard come across the scanner while watching a Delta II (that came an inch from flying, but did not).


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The End.

Which enabled the next Beginning.

Kai stands on the centerline of the SLF Runway, with nearly three miles of carefully-laid concrete extending beyond the limits of sensible vision, behind him to the north.

Kai is looking back at his father, who is taking this picture, and over his father's shoulders, directly behind and above him in Kai's field of view, stood yet another marvel.

Which we shall be seeing on the next page of these photo essays.